Chapter Twenty-Five #3
“It’s my decision.” Damon’s voice was steady.
Certain. The voice of the oldest brother who had been putting himself between his family and harm since long before the nightmare took him.
“Rhidian died because of what Arik is putting this realm through. For something I was a part of, even if I wasn’t given a choice to be.
Let me bring him back. Let me do this one good thing with the curse I’ve been carrying.
” He looked back at me, and there was no plea in his eyes.
Just quiet, unshakeable resolve. “Let this be my choice, Alyssa.”
I looked at him. I looked at the empty space in my heart where Rhidian had been since I was a child. My friend. My constant. The man who’d loved me first and most faithfully and who I could never love back the way he deserved.
And I thought about golden light. Magic coating his body as they cast him into the sea. Would it even be possible.
I turned to Nymeria. The tears were running down my face and I didn’t bother wiping them away.
“Bring back Rhidian.”
Nymeria looked at Damon for a long moment, and something passed between them.
The god who had inadvertently created the nightmare that had destroyed his life, and the man choosing grace instead of freedom.
She slowly, painfully, stood from her throne and walked toward us.
Only stopping when she was barely a step away.
She reached out one flickering hand and touched Damon’s face, and where her fingers met his skin, light bloomed.
“You were always stronger than what lived inside you,” she said softly.
Then she turned to me, and she smiled. Tired and sad and proud all at once.
“You are everything I hoped you would be, Alyssandra. And so much more than I deserved.”
Those were her last words.
The form began to unravel. Not violently, not dramatically.
Gently. Like a tapestry coming undone thread by thread.
The elements separated. Light and shadow, fire and ice, growth and decay.
They flowed outward from the throne in rivers of pure magic.
Down through the roots of the court, down through the stone and earth, through rivers and mountains and forests.
I could feel it. The magic spreading through the entire realm like a final exhalation, and at the very end of that breath, a thread of golden light reaching out through the deep places of the world, down to dark water, down to where a body lay suspended in a golden stasis.
The golden light found him. Connected. Pulled.
The chamber dimmed. The throne sat empty, and the walls were just walls once more. The silence that settled was the silence of something finished.
She was gone.
I stood in the quiet, feeling the realm resettle around me like a mantle dropping onto my shoulders. Heavier than anything I’d ever carried, wider than anything I’d ever imagined. And then, before I could begin to process what that weight meant, light erupted from the floor.
Golden light. Familiar light. It pooled in the centre of the chamber, and within it, something was forming. Not the shifting elemental chaos of a god. Something solid.
A body. A man. Gasping, choking, alive. Drenched in seawater and golden magic, hands clutching at stone like he was afraid the ground would disappear beneath him.
Rhidian.
He looked up, and his eyes were wild with confusion and terror and the raw, animal shock of someone dragged back from whatever lay beyond death.
He saw the chamber. He saw us. He saw the empty throne and the fading light and he seemed to understand, instinctively, that something enormous had just happened.
“What...” His voice was ruined, hoarse, like he’d been screaming for months in whatever place the dead go. His eyes found Maddox and widened. Then found me. Then swept the room, cataloguing, trying to make sense of the impossible.
Maddox was already moving. He crossed the chamber in three strides and dropped to his knees beside Rhidian, and the sound he made.
Relief and grief tangled together into something that didn’t have a name.
It echoed off the walls of a dead god’s chamber and I felt it through the bond like sunlight breaking through clouds.
“You’re alive,” Maddox said, and his hands were on Rhidian’s shoulders like he needed to prove it to himself. “You’re alive.”
Rhidian stared at him. At Maddox’s hands. At the faint golden glow still clinging to his own skin. “How...”
“Damon,” I said. “Damon brought you back.”
Rhidian’s gaze found Damon, and something complicated moved across his face. This was the man whose body still housed the nightmare. The man Rhidian had only known as an enemy in chains. And he’d given up his own salvation to bring back a dead man he barely knew.
Then Rhidian flinched. His hand went to his chest, pressing flat against his sternum, and I saw the exact moment he registered the absence. The warmth that should have been there. The power. The Summer magic that had been his bloodline’s burden for generations.
He looked at Maddox, and understanding dawned.
“The magic,” Rhidian said slowly. “Tell me it passed to you.”
Maddox flinched like he’d been struck. The guilt crashed back in. I could feel it through the bond, a wave of it so thick it nearly knocked me sideways. “Rhidian, I... when you died, the mark, it... I didn’t ask for it, I swear, I...”
“Good.”
The word stopped Maddox cold.
Rhidian’s hand dropped from his chest, and the expression on his face wasn’t grief or anger or loss. It was something that took me a moment to place because it was so unexpected in this chamber full of tears and resurrection and the death of a god.
Relief.
“I never wanted it,” Rhidian said quietly.
His voice was still rough, still raw, but steady.
“The Summer crown was my bloodline, my duty, my entire life. Everything I did, every choice I made, was shaped by that magic and what it demanded of me.” He looked down at his empty hands, hands that had once held the power of an entire court, and he flexed his fingers like he was feeling their lightness for the first time.
“I didn’t know who I was really supposed to be.
” He almost laughed. “Now I get to find out.”
Maddox was staring at him. The guilt was still there, I could feel it through the bond, but something else was cracking through. Something fragile and tentative and desperately hopeful.
“You’re not angry?” Maddox whispered.
“I’m grateful.” Rhidian gripped Maddox’s arm, and his eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might have been the last of the golden light fading from his skin. “You didn’t steal something from me, Maddox. You freed me from it.”
Maddox’s face crumpled. Not into grief this time.
Into something that looked like the first deep breath after weeks of drowning.
The guilt that had been carved into every line of his body since the Ice Falls didn’t vanish.
I knew it wouldn’t, not completely, not yet.
But the worst of it, the belief that he’d taken something precious from a man who’d died protecting us, that cracked and began to slowly drain away.
Behind them, Dean was watching Damon. He’d spent this entire journey unable to face him in chains, unable to reconcile the Damon he knew with the thing the nightmare had made.
And now Damon had stood in front of a dying god and made the most selfless choice any of them had ever witnessed, and Dean was looking at his brother like he was seeing him clearly for the first time since the nightmare took hold.
Ryder was quiet. No quip, no deflection, no humour to break the tension. He stood with his arms at his sides and his jaw tight, and the silence from him was louder than any joke could have been.
Tank hadn’t moved. But his eyes were on Damon too, and I knew that look. The long view, the steady assessment, the quiet recognition of exactly what kind of man was standing in those chains.
But Damon still stood apart from all of them, and on his face was something I hadn’t seen before.
Peace.
Not happiness. Not relief. But the quiet, hard-won peace of a man who had been trapped inside his own body and had just proved, in the only way that mattered, that the nightmare had never touched who he really was.
The chamber was dim now. The golden veins in the floor had gone dark. The throne sat empty, and the walls had stopped breathing, and where a god had been, there was only absence.
But the absence didn’t feel empty. It felt like potential. Like the space after an exhale, waiting for the next breath.
Nymeria was gone. And the realm she’d built was settling onto my shoulders with a weight I couldn’t yet comprehend.
But I wasn’t holding it alone.
I looked at my mates. At Tank, steady and sure at my back.
At Dean, watching his brother with new eyes.
At Ryder, silent for once, his jaw tight with emotion he couldn’t joke away.
At Maddox, kneeling on the floor, learning how to breathe again.
At Damon in his chains, standing in quiet, hard-won peace.
And then there was Rhidian. Alive. Gasping on the floor of a dead god’s chamber, blinking golden light from his eyes, trying to make sense of a world that was now going to be completely different because he was a fae without magic inside of it.
The old world was ending. The courts, the crowns, the ancient lines of power that had divided this realm for centuries. All of it was coming undone.
And something new was about to begin.
But first, we still had Arik to deal with. Because if I could feel the change in the world that Nymeria’s absence had created, so would he. And if he was going to make his final stand to try and claim it all, he had to do it now.