Chapter 30
TERRAN
For the second time since arriving in Aethralis, I climbed the stairs to the Temple, built to house the Aetherian Gate. Though Kael was accustomed to being here, having served on the Council which regulated entry into Elydor from The Crooked Key on the other side, I was most certainly not.
It was a symbol of death, and hate, and the beginning of an instability that had lasted since the first human came to our realm.
Even before Mother had died, there was much disagreement about who, if anyone, should be allowed entry.
My father fought Galfrid every step of the way, exacerbated when the Aetherian king carved out land for what became the Kingdom of Estmere for the humans too.
And now, we were betraying him to reopen the portal to the human world once again.
“You’ve been quiet today.”
Lyra.
She hung back, presumably, to speak to me.
Since the Thalassari queen and her king had arrived, Lyra and I had been mostly separated.
Meetings and hushed conversations, a meal during which I said little and now, as dusk fell, the reason we were all assembled.
Two of the three most powerful Elydorians, a princess and two princes…
a delegation that had everyone who wasn’t previously aware of what was about to happen speculating.
Or so Kael had told me.
“There is much to distract me.”
I’d not stopped thinking of her for even a moment these past days. But giving into temptation—reaching for her, touching her, getting close to her—would serve only to make it more difficult when we parted.
“Much that does not,” she said as the others disappeared into the Temple. “Including me.”
“This is hardly the time to discuss… us.”
As I expected, my words angered her. Though it would have been difficult to tell before, I understood the nuances of Lyra’s expressions even as most would have thought her features unchanged.
“Of course,” she said, taking a step away from me, toward the others.
Grabbing her wrist, cursing myself for doing so, I stopped her.
“You lied to me. From the start.”
She didn’t attempt to pull away, though I did resist the order to tug her closer.
“I never lied,” she began, but I stopped her.
“Half-truths are lies still,” I clarified. “At least, in Gyoria. Here—”
“I thought we agreed that maligning each other’s clans would further neither of our causes?”
I wanted to kiss her. Make love to her.
Make Lyra mine, fully and completely. The ancient words I’d spoken to her, more than once, weren’t given lightly. But there was still much between us making such a thing impossible.
“You stand before me and claim no mistruths between us?”
Deny it. Go ahead, Lyra. Deny it and push us even further apart.
“I could not tell you.”
Could not. It was marginally better than denying she’d lied.
“You thought me dense enough not to suspect?”
She did pull her wrist away then.
“Perhaps you two,” Kael called to us from the Temple’s entrance where the others had disappeared, “might continue your conversation after we open the Gate to the human world?”
He said it with so much sarcasm in his voice that Lyra smiled. I nearly did as well but remembered that the woman beside me had come to Gyoria and stolen my heart under false pretenses. So instead, I followed Kael inside.
With the sun setting outside the Temple, it was awash in a glow that seemed to underpin the weight of this moment. Kael and I spoke at length about what was about to happen: the repercussions of allowing the Stone to be used in this way, without our father’s permission… against his will.
But I’d not look back.
Having been introduced to Nerys and Rowan, as we made our way toward the Gate, I watched them interact. All three couples—my brother and Mev, along with the two Thalassari and human couples, the queen with her partner and their escorts—appeared very much in love.
And then there was Lyra and I, at opposite ends of the chamber.
King Galfrid stood before the Gate, every inch the king he had always been, his silver hair gleaming as the last rays of sun filtered through the high-arched windows of the Temple.
The carved runes pulsed faintly, as though stirred from centuries of slumber, and the chamber seemed to hold its breath.
“Bring them forth,” Galfrid commanded.
At his word, the relics were carried forward one by one.
The Tidal Pearl, shimmering with a light that rolled like waves across its surface, placed reverently into a shallow basin that hadn’t been there earlier.
The Wind Crystal, catching even the smallest draft of air, spun with a soft hum as though recognizing the Temple’s vaulted heights.
I closed my hand over the Stone of Mor’Vallis, its weight far heavier than the leather pouch that concealed it. For days, it had whispered to me… but now, in this place, it was utterly silent.
A murmur swept through the gathered delegation. Kael caught my eye beside me and nodded. I took the Stone from its pouch, said a silent apology to the king who had raised us, though not the one who currently ruled Gyoria, and stepped forward.
Reaching Galfrid, about to take Kael’s label of “traitor to Gyoria” a large leap forward in branding myself the same, I handed it over.
Taking it, the Aetherian King Galfrid lifted his hands.
“By the blood of kings and queens, with the artifacts of each clan and the memory of the first sealing, I call balance once more. Let the Gate be opened, that Elydor and the world of humans might be joined.”
The relics answered first. Light sparking from crystal to pearl, pearl to stone, threads of energy weaving a lattice that climbed the arch of the Gate itself. The runes ignited, one after the other, until the ancient doorway blazed with firelight.
My breath caught, though not with awe. The wrongness in my chest grew.
The human, Sir Rowan watched me. He knew something the rest of us did not. What I felt but could not put into words. Something was… amiss.
The chamber filled with light, and then with sound, an unearthly keening, as if the Gate itself cried out against being forced awake, the glow faltered. Stuttered. Sparks leaped from the runes and seared across the floor, scattering the delegation into panicked shouts.
“Hold!” Galfrid roared, straining to keep his hands raised, though the backlash drove him nearly to his knees. “Hold!”
But the Gate would not.
The lattice collapsed in a shiver of sparks, the relics dimmed and silence slammed into the chamber. The door to the human world remained shut, its arch of runes now nothing more than cold marble.
Galfrid lowered his hands, his breath ragged. “It should have worked.”
His eyes swept the assembly, searching for answers.
But none were offered.
I had only questions, but was not the only one. Everyone began to speak at once, asking Galfrid what he had done differently this time. He insisted the ritual was exactly the same. But then his gaze rested on me.
“Your father offered an imitation when he returned the stolen Wind Crystal to Aetheria.”
Anger coursed through me at the unveiled accusation, but Kael moved before I could respond. He stood at my side, his hand on my wrist, steadying it.
“My brother did not bring an imitation Stone. I can verify that it is the real one.”
Galfrid’s eyes softened, though slightly. “He fooled you once.”
While it was true our father had sent Kael on a mission to return the Crystal with a fake, my brother not knowing it at the time, his accusation resonated as another insult.
“You malign us both—”
This time, it was Lyra who interrupted.
“I was with him,” she said on the other side of me. “When he retried it. That is the real Stone.”
Yet there was a time we were not together.
I could have swapped the real one for a fake before reuniting with Lyra on the coast. She knew it, and took the chance I had not. That alone should have abated at least some of my anger—toward her, toward Galfrid—but it did not.
“I betray my own father,” I ground out, “to be accused of treachery?”
The Aetherian king’s shoulders sagged. “I should not have done so.”
My eyes widened in surprise. My father would never admit wrongdoing.
Ever.
“I could see her,” he said to his daughter. “I could see her, and nearly touch her, so sure I was that it would work precisely as it had done before.”
Her.
His queen. Mevlida’s mother.
When I thought of her in the past, I had never let myself feel sorry. She had been taken from the king just as our mother had been.
Nay. Not just the same.
Father’s actions were deliberate. More brutal in their intentions, and with the queen enceinte.
“What could have happened?” Marek, the sea captain, asked.
None had any answers.
One by one, we stepped forward. I took the Stone. Queen Nerys took the Pearl. But Galfrid hung back, clearly as devastated as his daughter, who was now in tears in my brother’s arms.
It had not worked.
The Aetherian Gate and portal to the human world remained closed.