Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
Alyssa
Two weeks later, the world was still learning how to be new.
I felt it in the mornings, mostly. That strange hour just before dawn when the realm settled into something quiet and I could feel the individual heartbeats of every living thing in Nymeria without being overwhelmed by the chorus.
The forest breathing. The rivers running.
The creatures stirring in their dens. Feeling the slow waking of a world was a sensation I doubted I’d ever grow used to.
It was the beginning of the noise that I was still learning to push into the background.
We were all trying to remember what a world at peace felt like. What life was supposed to be like without constantly fearing that someone was about to take it away.
It wasn’t easy. But then peace never was. We just liked to tell ourselves it was because the lies made the war feel survivable.
The prophecy had been fulfilled in blood and sacrifice and the unmaking of a god-child whose pain I carried like a second heartbeat behind my ribs.
It might be taking the Summer Court longer to accept it, but there truly were no more kings and queens in Nymeria anymore.
I had never been part of the Spring line.
Rhidian had given his life on the battlefield and the Autumn heir had sacrificed themselves to stop Arik from stealing their magic.
Every drop of royal blood had soaked into the depths of Nymeria.
The old ways were coming to an end, and we were left with a realm of traumatised people and more to rebuild that felt possible.
My mates were not rulers of territories.
They were my anchors. The five threads that kept me tethered to my own humanity when the vastness of what I had become threatened to wash it away.
Without them, I would have lost myself in the first week.
There were some days when I still thought it would happen, but then one of them was there to remind me why I kept fighting to live.
They kept me whole. In small ways and large ones.
In the warmth of Maddox’s hand on my back when grief that was not mine washed through me without warning.
In the cold clarity of Dean’s voice cutting through the noise when the realm pressed in from all sides and I could not find my own thoughts.
In Ryder’s refusal to treat me like anything other than the woman they’d once followed home to a garage in an old warehouse.
In Damon’s shadows, which curled around my ankles in the quiet hours, a wordless reminder that darkness was not the enemy.
And then there was Tank. Always Tank. The steady presence at my side, the hand that found mine in the night when the dreams came, when Arik’s centuries of loneliness pressed against the inside of my skull and I forgot for a moment which pain was his and which was mine.
He never asked what I was feeling. He just held on.
The way he had held on in the formless dark when we were both lost and the only thing that existed was the bond between us.
The Summer Court was the problem we had not solved.
Rhidian’s mother had held the court through the war, claiming authority she had no right to.
No magic. No marks. No legitimacy beyond the stubbornness of a woman who had spent her life adjacent to power and was not about to relinquish the illusion of it.
She called herself regent. She issued decrees.
She refused every diplomatic overture we sent and barred her borders to even the ordinary fae who were beginning to flow freely between the other courts.
It couldn’t last. We all knew it. She was a dam built across a river with no foundation, and the water was already finding its way around her.
People were leaving. Not in a flood, not yet, but in a steady trickle that grew wider with each passing month.
Summer Court fae crossing into Spring or Autumn, drawn by the promise of something different.
Something that did not require them to bow to a woman whose only claim to power was that her husband had once been a king.
They never mated. She never received any marks of her own. She was just to stubborn to back down.
Maddox felt it most. The Summer magic responded to him now, the fire that Rhidian had passed through death burning steadily in his veins, and through that connection he could feel the people of Summer the way I could feel the realm.
Their frustration. Their exhaustion. Their growing awareness that the world had changed around them yet their court had not.
“She’ll come around,” Maddox said one evening, standing at the window of the room we shared, his eyes distant in the way they got when the Summer bond was pulling at him. “Or she won’t. Either way, her people are already choosing.”
“But if she doesn’t?”
He turned from the window. The fire danced in his eyes, warm and steady. “Then she’ll die an old woman in an empty court, and her people will already be safe at home in the new places they find across Nymeria.”
I would not take the Summer Court through blood and sacrifice.
Not after what it had cost to unite the rest. If Rhidian’s mother wanted to sit on a throne with no subjects and issue decrees to empty halls, that was her choice.
The people of Summer would find their way to us in their own time. I had faith in that. I had to.
We’d all known it was going to happen but it still stung. Rhidian had held on longer than he wanted to because he could see the strain behind my eyes. But as I grew stronger, as my mind settled, I could see the way his gaze always seemed to find the horizon when he got lost in his thoughts.
There was no ceremony. No grand farewell.
Rhidian found me in the garden that had grown where the battlefield had been, the green thick and lush over soil that remembered blood but had chosen to grow anyway.
Fizzle was on my shoulder, dozing in the afternoon sun, his small body warm against my neck.
“I’m leaving,” Rhidian said.
I looked at him. Tall and steady, the childhood friend who had saved me so many times.
He carried himself with the quiet grace of a man who had died and been granted a second chance that I had no doubt was more than deserved.
No crown. No magic. No responsibilities beyond the ones he chose.
Just a man with a restless heart and a horizon he yearned to explore.
“The sea?” I asked.
“The sea.” He turned to the window and stared out at the horizon with a soft smile on his face and it was the most at peace that I’d ever seen him. “I’ve heard if you sail to the place where the sea meets the sky, you can fall off the edge of the realm into an ocean where universes are born.”
We stood together in the garden for a while.
The silence between us was comfortable in a way it had not always been.
There had been a time when every moment with Rhidian carried the weight of what he felt for me and what I could not feel for him.
But that weight had dissolved somewhere between his death and his resurrection, replaced by something cleaner.
Gratitude. Respect. The particular tenderness that existed between two people who had been through the worst of it together and come out the other side as something better than what they had been.
“Maddox,” I said.
Rhidian nodded. “I spoke with him this morning. We’re good.” A pause. “Better than good. He’s carrying the Summer fire the way it was meant to be carried. I’m glad it’s him.”
“And Damon?”
Something complicated crossed his face. “I owe that man my life. Literally. I’m not sure how you repay that.”
“You don’t,” I said. “You just live it.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled, and it was the kind of smile that said goodbye when you couldn’t bear to say it aloud.
“Take care of them,” he said.
“Take care of yourself.”
Then he simply just walked away, without looking back. It didn’t hurt the way it would have before. It felt like the end of a chapter that had needed ending, but even now I knew it wasn’t the end of our story. This wouldn’t be the last time I saw Rhidian.
Fizzle opened one eye. Watched Rhidian’s retreating figure. Then closed the eye again.
“He’ll be fine,” Fizzle said.
“I know.”
“He was always too restless for courts and politics. The sea suits him better.”
I reached up and scratched the feathers behind his ear.
He leaned into it with a reluctance that was entirely performative.
An ancient guardian of Nymeria, older than the courts themselves, pretending to be a grumpy little creature perched on my shoulder because staying close was his version of love.
I’d figured that out months ago but never said it aloud because naming it would ruin it.
“You’re still insufferable,” I told him.
“And you’re still stating the obvious. We make a wonderful pair.”
I stood in that garden for a moment, letting myself drown in the pain, then I pushed it aside, straightened my shoulders and headed back to the palace.
I’d been practicing for weeks now and I was finally starting to find some peace.
It came in short bursts but each one was a fraction longer than the last and I wasn’t losing hope of getting some sort of normalcy back.
My mates were arguing about dinner when I came inside.
The sound hit me before the smell did, five distinct voices overlapping in a way that was so thoroughly, gloriously ordinary that I stopped in the doorway and just listened.
“The onions are burning,” Maddox pointed out.
I remembered a time back in my loft when he’d taken over making food for them all, clearly being the only one who could properly cook in the group. Stepping back while Ryder took over clearly wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be.
“They’re caramelising,” Ryder argued playfully, but you could hear the hint of audacity in his tone.
“Are you sure they’re supposed to be black?
” Dean asked seriously? He’d softened since his magic had settled.
The winter magic had found a balance in him and the parts he’d always tried to close off, had thawed as the bonds we’d created gave him all the reassurance he could ever need that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Of course it was Dean to sense my arrival first, almost like he knew I was thinking of him. He reached out a hand for me and I didn’t hesitate to take it. As he pulled me close, wrapping me in his arms and lightly kissing my cheek, I felt the bond between us purr.
“That’s the fond. It’s a technique.”
“It’s charcoal.”
“Tank, tell Dean that fond is a legitimate cooking technique.”
Tank’s voice, calm and measured from somewhere deeper in the kitchen. “I’m not getting involved.”
“You’re already involved. You’re holding the spatula.”
“I’m holding the spatula because Damon gave it to me and walked away.”
Damon’s laugh came soft and surprisingly calm considering we were only a day away from the next full moon.
His first full moon. The others were already planning something to celebrate and it was exactly what we all needed.
A moment that wasn’t centred around fighting.
One that felt almost like coming full circle.
Their pack finally becoming complete. Damon finally having contact with the wolf who could reassure him there was no trace of a nightmare inside his head.
I wasn’t proud of the amount of times I’d checked while he slept fitfully at my side. Sleep didn’t come easy for him. It was the quiet moments that frightened him the most. But soon, he’d have the wolf to fill the spaces, to tell him it was all going to be okay.
This was what we’d been fighting for. The simple moments together, with none of the worries of war hanging over us.
We might still have issues to resolve, a world to somehow rebuild, but right now none of that mattered.
All that mattered was how we were going to get Ryder to accept that he’d burnt the onions and finally let someone else make something we could actually eat.
Everything else could wait until tomorrow.
A tomorrow we didn’t have to worry about. A tomorrow filled with potential rather than grief.
So I closed my eyes and for a moment, let my senses reach out and feel for the new rhythm Nymeria was falling into.
The realm breathed. I breathed with it.
And for now at least, the world was quiet.