Chapter Twenty-Eight
Alyssa
Ilet them have it. The moment, the tears, the pile of brothers holding each other together on the floor of a dead god’s throne room. I stood back with magic still crackling at my fingertips and I watched, and I let them have it.
They needed this. Dean with his face buried in Damon’s shoulder, holding on like he was trying to make up for months of distance in a single embrace.
Maddox pressed against them from the side, tears streaming down his face, not even trying to hold them back.
Ryder, who always had something to say, saying nothing at all.
And Tank, who wasn’t one of the original brothers but had become one anyway, his massive arms wrapped around the whole mess of them like he could physically hold them together through sheer size and stubbornness.
And Damon. At the centre of it, crying freely for the first time since the nightmare had taken hold. The only voice in his head was his own, and the sound he made when that truth finally settled in was something I’d carry with me for the rest of my life.
I could feel it through the bond. All of it.
Relief and grief and joy so fierce it burned, tangled together into something that didn’t have a name.
The thread that connected me to Damon was thin but growing stronger with every heartbeat, pulsing with a shadowy magic that was dark but clean.
Like the difference between rot and rich soil.
I wanted to go to them. Every instinct I had was screaming to cross the distance and put my arms around Damon and tell him he was safe, he was free, he was ours.
But this wasn’t my moment. This was theirs.
Those men who had grown up together, fought together, survived together, and had spent months watching their brother be eaten alive by something they couldn’t fight. They needed to hold him before I did.
So I waited. And I watched. And I let the magic at my fingertips slowly fade, because it wasn’t needed anymore.
When they finally pulled apart, it was slow. Reluctant. Dean was the last to let go, his hand lingering on Damon’s shoulder like he needed the physical proof that his brother was still there. Still himself.
Damon wiped his face with the back of his hand. His eyes were red but clear. So clear. I hadn’t realised how clouded they’d always been until I saw them without the fog.
I glanced across the room to where Rhidian was silently standing against the wall, giving the brothers their space.
He would always be on the outside of our group, and even though it hurt to know that, there was nothing I could do to change it.
Rhidian had a place in the world, it just wasn’t here with us.
He was watching Damon with an expression that made something in my chest ache. When Damon’s gaze found his, Rhidian just nodded. Once. A promise kept. I said I’d be here when you woke up.
The throne room had started to change around us.
The shadow veins that had spread across the floor during the bite were glowing steadily now, deep and dark, shot through with points of light like stars.
The throne itself was darker, the roots and crystal woven through with what was clearly Damon’s magic.
It was awakened now and the whole chamber felt different.
Alive in a way it hadn’t been since Nymeria had dissolved.
Like a heart that had stopped beating and was now, slowly, starting again.
And I could feel it pulling at me.
Not the way it had pulled at Damon. That had been shadow reaching for shadow, a court reaching out for what I could already tell was its king.
This was something else. A warmth rising through the stone beneath my feet, pressing against the soles of my boots, seeping into my bones.
The same sensation I’d felt when Nymeria’s magic had settled onto my shoulders in the chamber.
Only now it wasn’t settling. It was asking.
“Something’s happening,” I said.
Tank was at my side immediately. “What kind of something?”
“The good kind. I think.” I looked down at my hands. My fingertips were glowing. Faintly, barely visible, but there. A soft white light pulsing beneath my skin in time with my heartbeat. “The court. It’s not finished. Damon was only half of it.”
“And you’re the other half,” Tank said. Not a question.
“Light and shadow,” Damon said quietly from across the room. He was looking at me with those newly clear eyes, and I could see that he felt it too. The incompleteness. The court half-claimed, half-waiting. “You were always supposed to be our light.”
Fizzle hadn’t moved from his perch near the ceiling.
He’d been silent through the entire transformation, through the nightmare’s expulsion, through the brothers holding each other and crying in a dead god’s throne room.
I’d almost forgotten that he was here. But now his head turned toward me, those enormous owl eyes unblinking, and I caught something in them I’d never seen before.
Anticipation.
“Well?” he said. Clipped. Impatient. Perfectly Fizzle. “Are you going to stand there glowing, or are you going to do something about it?”
“I don’t know how,” I admitted.
“I had thought you would have the brains to work this out for yourself.”
There he was. The Fizzle I knew. The one who pushed instead of comforted. The one who’d trained me and scolded me. He’d believed in me since the very beginning, even if he’d done it while refusing to coddle me. Somehow, his irritation was more reassuring than any encouragement could have been.
I turned back to the throne. Nymeria’s throne, shot through with Damon’s shadow. Waiting. The whole room was holding its breath, and the magic was pressing against my skin like a tide trying to come in.
All I had to do was stop holding it back.
That was the realisation. I’d been bracing against it since the moment Nymeria had dissolved.
The weight of the realm settling on my shoulders, and my instinct had been to resist it.
To hold it at arm’s length. To manage it the way I managed everything else.
With control. Through sheer force of will.
But that was the lesson I kept learning and kept forgetting. My magic had never responded to force. It never had. Every breakthrough I’d ever had, every moment of real power, had come when I’d stopped fighting and started trusting.
I had to learn how to trust myself. To trust this court and the magic that was as much a part of me as it was a part of it.
So I closed my eyes and just let go.
The magic didn’t crash into me. It rose.
Up through the stone, through my boots, through my legs and my spine and my chest. A warmth that was different from the Spring magic I shared with Tank, different from the raw power I’d wielded in battle.
This was older. Deeper. The magic of the realm itself, the same power Nymeria had poured her entire existence into, now finding its way to the vessel she’d created to hold it.
Light bloomed behind my eyelids. Not the flickering, shifting light that Nymeria had been. Something steadier. Something that belonged to me.
I could feel the realm. Not just this room, not just the Fifth Court, but all of it.
The Spring forests with their endless green.
The Summer meadows baking in golden heat.
The Autumn woodlands burning red and amber.
The Winter mountains locked in ice. And beneath it all, running through it like roots through soil, the Fifth Court.
A Court of Light and Shadow. The beginning of everything.
The foundation on which Nymeria had created her world.
When I opened my eyes, the chamber had changed.
The dead gold veins were alive again, but they weren’t golden anymore.
They were white. Pure, bright, steady light that wove through the stone alongside Damon’s shadow, the two of them intertwined like vines growing together.
Light and dark. Me and him. Two halves of the same court, and the wholeness of it sang through the stone like a chord finally finding its resolution.
“Alyssa.” Maddox’s voice. Hushed. Awed.
I looked down at my hands. Light moved beneath my skin, visible through my veins, pulsing with my heartbeat. Not on the surface. Inside me. Part of me. It made my marks from the other Courts glitter and glow. The court wasn’t just accepting me. It was becoming me, and I was becoming it.
Then the throne shifted.
I heard it before I saw it. A grinding of stone, a crack of crystal, the deep groan of roots pulling free from ancient earth.
The throne that had been Nymeria’s was remaking itself.
The roots thickened and split, the crystal fractured and reformed, and the stone reshaped under invisible hands.
Where one seat had stood, the structure expanded outward, growing, branching, becoming something new.
Thrones grew from the earth.
Arranged in a crescent around a central seat that stood taller than the rest, wreathed in intertwined light and shadow.
The central throne was mine. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.
And the ones surrounding it were theirs.
A throne for each court. The ones we’d claimed and the ones still waiting.
Each one was different. The one to the far left was pale stone wrapped in flowering vines that bloomed as I watched, tiny white blossoms unfurling in real time.
Spring. Tank’s. Beside it, a throne of warm amber crystal that radiated heat like a banked fire.
Summer. Maddox’s. On the far right, a throne of deep shadow that moved and breathed like a living thing, shot through with those same starlike points of light. Damon’s.
The fifth throne stood directly to the left of my own. Made of dark wood and burnished copper, with leaves carved into every surface. Leaves that shifted between green and gold and red as I looked at them, cycling through an endless autumn.