64. Elorie
Elorie
Callum’s cheeks pale. His fingers fall from Hazel’s face. But she doesn’t flinch. Her magic doesn’t lash out as his drifts away. Something even more terrifying takes the place of the rage.
Defeat.
Utter loss that sends a shock wave of pain through the realm. Her grief is something we’ve all felt, but to see it embodied in the pale drain of her cheeks offers a different perspective. What swarmed us in physical form was Hazel’s magic, but it was not her. It was the pain tearing her in two.
All around, Fae gasp for air, including Wilder.
Atlas erected a shield to protect us, but ribbons of shadow found their way through the cracks of flame. Dark teeth latched on, searching for something to drain.
Wilder’s palm flattens on the ground as he catches his breath.
Then, slowly, he lifts his head to his armies, to the decimation before us.
He’s slow to stand, which Atlas seems to note out of the corner of his eye.
But he doesn’t offer Wilder help for the same reason I haven’t asked my mate how he is feeling when his magic is mostly drained.
Wilder’s people are dead or dying on the beach. They’re fighting through the fading wisps of shadowy death that Hazel unleashed. He can’t risk them seeing their king struggling—not now.
Malachi might have fallen, but a steady hum whispers on the wind, and I fear in the pit of my bones this is not over.
Wilder holds out a hand, his palm clammy as I place mine in it, and he helps me stand. Silence takes hold, and then a hum from a far-off place begins.
A feminine voice sings words I cannot understand. The chorus of a song I’ve heard before. The first time was on the beach with my father when I was but a child. Then again, as I wandered through the prison.
I know this song. I know this voice.
My mother.
Before us, the orb lifts from Malachi’s motionless hand. Blood drips from the glassy surface as it begins to float.
“Do you hear that?” I ask when the song gets louder.
I expect Wilder to say no, but he nods.
“She’s the one who led us to the void.” I look up at him. “She’s the one who led us here.”
Without my mother’s words, Malachi’s would have meant nothing.
If we hadn’t found the void, we would not have sought him out.
Now, as blood drips from the orb and a crescent moon appears on its glassy surface, I consider the fact that she wielded it once.
That she might have had another reason for sending us on this mission.
“What did she have us do?”
Wilder shakes his head as a beam of light streams from the necklace. Her song grows louder in the night, somehow echoing against the sky. She’s not here, but her song is around us. It’s within us. She’s everywhere, sending her lullaby on the breeze.
She calls for something.
We suspected, walking in, that this was a trap. But was it Malachi’s making or hers?
The orb pauses, looming as it hangs chest level before us. Static pricks the back of my neck, but it isn’t Wilder’s magic causing it. Aether shifts—it gathers. A bolt slices through the night, splitting through the orb with such intensity that I have to look away.
When I turn back, the orb is no longer floating. It hangs around the neck of a male with shiny black hair and light-umber skin.
But those eyes…
My gaze moves to Wilder, who hasn’t taken his attention off the male in front of us. Two golden gazes fix on each other. They’re the same, but different. Wilder’s crackle. They spark. This other male has gold eyes, but they swirl. Molten waves that crest and fall.
The male steps forward, dressed in simple leather pants and a shirt that is open in the front. No runes mark his skin, but where shadow should be in the lines of his carved muscle, he glows. My gaze lifts, and he grins at me.
The orb beams blue like it did before the void touched it. The male toys with the necklace, embers sparking.
“You wield my power.” Wilder’s gaze narrows.
“Do I?” The male’s head tilts. “Or do you wield mine?”
His grin stretches his gold-dusted cheeks. Everything about him glimmers, and yet, there is a darkness that surrounds him.
“Davorian.” Wilder’s voice is nearly a whisper, and my heart plummets at the mention of the god’s name.
God of aether.
God of endings.
Davorian’s liquid-gold eyes swirl, and my heartbeat quickens. There’s something strangely familiar about him. As if we’ve met before. He takes a step forward, and the pull of his aether draws my blood to the edge of my veins like it’s aching to be closer to him.
Davorian’s gaze sets on me; an intimate smile stretches his cheeks. “I’ve searched every constellation for you.”
He takes a step forward, and I take a step back, closer to Wilder.
“I don’t know why you would.”
Davorian pauses, glancing between me and Wilder, his liquid-gold eyes churning. When he meets my gaze again, recognition settles.
A slow smile grows. “You will soon. I promise. Just like I promised that I would find you again, my mate.”
“Mate?” My throat tightens, and Wilder’s hand tenses on my back. “I’m not your mate.”
“Not in this form, no. But we are both settling in bodies not of ourselves right now, it seems.”
My head shakes. It won’t stop shaking. “You’re wrong. This is my body, and I’m not yours.”
Through all that has been uncertain in recent months, this I’m sure of. I know it in my bones—in Wilder’s touch. He is mine, and I am his.
So why does my blood pull in this other direction? Like when I was bound to both Wilder and Malachi, but different.
“Don’t worry, we will put you back together.” Davorian steps forward again, and Wilder shifts between us.
Davorian’s smile slips as his gaze darts to Wilder.
“Do not forget your magic is a gift I have given, and one that I can take away. Although that may not be necessary in your current state. Either way, you will not stand between me and a shard of what is mine, even if your magic—my magic—convinces you otherwise.”
Davorian reaches forward, intensifying the magnetic pull that draws me to him, while simultaneously seeming to push Wilder back.
But I refuse the pull, clasping my hand in Wilder’s, latching to him with every bit of celestial magic I can muster.
A flicker of starlight resists him, and Davorian drops his hand.
“Ah.” He smiles. “There you are.”
“I’m not whoever you think I am.”
Davorian closes his eyes, breathing deep. He tilts his head back, and the breeze quickens. He stands like that for a moment, as my mother’s song stirs in the breeze, and I wonder what he’s hearing within it. His eyebrows pinch, as if he understands what I cannot.
“I see.” His eyes open to mine. “She only told you what was necessary. No wonder you’re confused.”
“Who?”
“Voilene.” His eyebrows pinch as he quirks his head, like he’s hearing something else. “Or I suppose she took a Fae name for your sake. Idunn.”
My eyes widen, and I take a step back, gripping Wilder’s hand tighter. Idunn can’t be Voilene—that would make her one of the gods. And me—
What would that make me?
“Idunn is not a god. She’s a Fae. My mother.”
“Not quite.” Davorian twists the orb, pulling me toward him again, but I resist. “You are right in that she gave you life, but she did not birth you. Not in the sense that humans and Fae create beings. She can’t.”
Atlas tries to rush Davorian from behind, but he doesn’t even make it a step. Davorian holds out a hand, sending a rope of aether around Atlas’s throat.
“Let him go.” I take a step forward as he starts to choke. “I will only listen if you leave my friends unharmed.”
“Anything for you, my starlight.” Davorian releases Atlas, and Greer runs to his side to offer him support as he chokes for air.
There are only a few Fae left on the beach now, Lochlan included, and they haven’t moved. I try to reach for Wilder through the thread, but it’s dark, so I keep my focus on Davorian, hoping I can talk my way out of this.
“You said Voilene is not my mother.” I keep Davorian’s attention on me so he doesn’t hurt anyone else. “If that’s true, then what am I to her?”
“You are a piece of her.” Davorian’s eyes gleam.
“My Voilene was always so curious. So creative. It’s what got her in trouble with the unspeakable gods in the first place.
She grew one realm and could not leave well enough alone, even after they warned her.
So she danced through the galaxies and painted a new place—a new collection of creatures.
They balked, but they did not mind until she grew bored and tried something new.
One drop of magic was all it took for them to turn on her. ”
Davorian’s magic trembles, and his fingers clench. “They cursed my mate to the stars, tainted my gift to her that ensured she would never be without me.”
He holds up the orb. Flecks of gold swim in the cerulean waves.
“When she wore this, I could speak with her no matter where she went. I could find her in any realm—any galaxy. But she got lost along the way, and when she fell into a realm that had magic like her own, she became confused by the very thing she created. So she wandered in the body of that Fae for many years, rambling endlessly but not able to tell me where she was.”
Davorian pinches the bridge of his nose, listening to the wind again. To Idunn’s song on it.
“A Fae being cannot contain my star goddess’s magic,” he continues.
“And it seems your realm did not appreciate what was bursting out of her, so they trapped her someplace dark. Someplace quiet. They buried my mate where I could not reach her at all. Our connection was lost for many years among the stars.”
Because she was locked in the prison.
The Fae trapped Idunn—Voilene—in the prison because of her magic, and within those walls, she clearly could no longer speak with Davorian.
Davorian’s eyes flash to me, and I swear he heard that thought.
“How long ago did this happen?”
He tilts his head, his face pinching. “Moments. Millenia. It is all the same to me.”