Chapter 23 Astraea
Astraea
I didn’t want to harm the beautiful blue dragon, but when it kept carrying Auster, darting with him to avoid my attempts to knock him off, frustration turned me ruthless.
Gathering a bigger force of light, I projected it toward the dragon instead. It slammed into its side, and the dragon roared its pain, knocked violently off course, which threw Auster off its back.
I didn’t waste a breath, diving after him, and when I touched him, I pulled us both through the void.
When the shadows dispersed and our feet felt ground, I summoned enough magick to clash with Auster’s lightning. My attack was quick, pushing distance between us.
We both let go, panting to catch our breath, but the air was thick with our heartache and tension.
Auster surveyed the wreckage around him with loathing plastered on his face. I’d brought us to the destruction of his castle, but the devastation didn’t end here. His entire province had suffered because of him.
“Why did you bring us here?”
“To remind you of all you’ve done. You’ve made a ruin of your lands and an enemy of me.” Auster’s rage climbed to frightening heights over the accusation I threw and those brown eyes speared me with it.
“You are the cause!” He spat.
I shook my head, despising the pity I felt for him after all he’d done.
“I am your blame. But every path you took toward your own spiral of madness was your choice.”
“You think yourself so mighty and pure when even the gods who created you see your failure to your duty. You were to be a beacon of hope, an example of perfect order, for the people. Instead, you became a symbol of corruption. A rebellious leader with a poisonous influence that had to be stopped.”
“I pity you, Auster Nova. To be so alone and power hungry that you ruined everything you could have had.”
“You made me this way!”
“More blame. You don’t even realize your deflection is a double-edged blade. Killing yourself as much as you tried to kill me.”
“Enough of your judgmental words. I can hardly stand to look at you.”
Auster’s blue lightning broke across his fingers, and I formed a wall of light to deflect his first attack.
Then we unleashed our centuries-worth of anguish.
We attacked using the shards of our ages long friendship.
The love we once harbored for each other turned into knives to bleed each other dry.
I needed the turmoil of him out of my bones, drained from my blood, once and for all.
I didn’t want to emerge from this battle unscathed when in some ways he was right, and I did blame myself for what he became.
With every collision of our magick, I mourned him.
Perhaps if I’d been honest sooner, tried to explain in another way why I chose Nyte, but it didn’t mean I abandoned Auster, things could have turned out differently.
I never wanted to choose between them. I didn’t want to believe Auster would make me choose.
Tears swam in my eyes, but my movements never faltered.
We staggered over the debris of the Nova castle while the night darkened and thunder boomed across the sky with every strike of our power.
As if the world were mourning with us. Two lifelong friends turned enemies and only one could emerge from this fight.
I wasn’t giving up my second life to the one who took my first.
We were a devastating dance of storm and starlight, and our magick was the song building toward a desolate, tragic ending.
As we edged closer to each other, Auster was faltering.
From the beginning of our fight he wasn’t as strong as he should have been, and I could see the panic in his eyes as he wondered why his magick wasn’t conjuring as strong as I’d expected.
But his will to survive drove his reckless madness, and his next strike hit my shoulder, sending me sprawling. The strike itself wouldn’t have been enough to wound me except the ground was a deadly plane as well. Something impaled my side and I cried out.
Auster marched toward me, pulling a knife with a blade of dried crimson blood free. It had to be Nyte’s, and Auster was more than capable of killing me again.
I scrambled to my feet. Adrenaline drove me to grip the wood lodged in me and pull without thinking. The pain threatened my consciousness, but I blinked the darkness away, stumbling over broken stone and wood to gain distance. Time.
Lightsdeath was a pacing white wolf inside me, but I wouldn’t let it out. Not yet. This fight meant too much for me to not be aware of what I was doing. After all we’d been through, I needed every memory from our beginning to our end.
“We could have had everything, been everything,” Auster said, clinging to his hatred.
“Your jealousy ruined us,” I said through a pained breath, clutching my bleeding side.
“I was jealous, yes. How could I not be? I, not he, was perfect for you. You stood to gain everything: love, a powerful bond, and a long reign over Solanis while I lost everything.”
“You were a High Celestial with power over your own province, which I could never take away. You could have found love with someone else. Power drove you to madness.”
“Not power itself. The fact you handed it, on a damn silver platter, to the one who had terrorized our land after you spread your legs for him,” he seethed.
Those words seeped into me like poison and I lashed out. The flare of light from my palm slammed into his chest while he was caught unawares and he went flying back. His wings unglamoured to catch him in time, sparing him from injury like that I’d sustained from a tumble to the ground.
Auster retaliated with two fingers pointing toward me, and strokes of blue lightning surged toward me. The attack was so weak that I barely used any of my own magick to smother it. Auster stood there in fury and confusion, glancing down at his hands.
“Something wrong?” I taunted.
His jaw locked and he summoned lightning over both palms. He couldn’t hold it for long and it faded out.
“What is happening…?” he muttered to himself.
“The nightmares didn’t go away, I see. You’ve been taking that sleeping tonic every night, haven’t you?”
Confusion deepened the furrow of his brow. A breathy laugh broke from my lips.
I said, “I didn’t think it would work. Or at least I thought you would surely start to feel it before it could truly affect you.”
“What are you talking about?” he snapped.
I relished the triumph that straightened my spine.
“The nebulora I added to your sleeping tonic. I tested it first at the wedding feast you forced me to attend in the castle, putting drops in your wine to see if you would detect the taste. You didn’t.
So I met with your courtesan and bribed her to add it to your sleeping tonic ever since. It’s been slowly numbing your power.”
When that revelation sank in, it was like every display of fury he’d shown before was nothing compared to what snapped his resolve completely now.
Auster’s roar of outrage and disbelief rattled through me, and lightning exploded from him.
I managed to form a shield of defense before it hit me, but it shot far and wide. Hitting distant buildings to crumble his once prosperous land further and striking the heavens to break a violent rainstorm.
His power snuffed out all at once and I released mine. Auster couldn’t summon his lightning again; that explosion of violent anguish was the last of his reserves, but he wasn’t giving up. Not even close.
The rain started to drown us, and he pulled his mighty sword free.
The way he marched for me, his hair unbound with wet strands clinging around his wild eyes, was truly frightening.
In all the times I’d faced him in combat, I had still seen the man I once knew and loved beneath all the resentment and hatred; now he was gone.
Simply a hollow vessel of all his transgressions and pain, and I was his one true target to blame.
I didn’t have a sword, and I only tracked his purple blade with sharp focus to avoid its path. He was so fast it took everything I had, and I would have been lighter on my feet were it not for the uneven ground.
Auster expended himself with powerful throws of agony through his blade, but when they sliced nothing but air, that pain backfired.
His face of pure rage slowly started to fall to defeat and misery.
That’s when I gripped the handle of my dagger at my thigh, gritting my teeth since it was hardly adequate to meet his blade, but our steel cried against one another anyway.
It distracted him, drawing his eyes to the waved stormstone blade, and his attention was stolen by the memory of gifting it to me so long ago.
I had to take my opening. This had to end here.
My magick engulfed his sword, turning it to stardust, and when I lunged forward our wide stares locked on each other.
Time slowed to a crawl.
Auster’s stunned and terrified face tore me apart. But even as tears flooded my vision, I gritted my teeth, twisting the waved dagger in his heart. He choked, blood spilling from his mouth, and we both crashed to our knees.
“You were my best friend,” I croaked.
His breaths staggered, and I tuned into each one toward his last. The final threads of attachment to him in my soul split during the countdown.
Auster raised a shaky hand, and my first tear spilled to merge with the rain rolling down my face.
“You were my everything,” he said.
My heart didn’t get the chance to fracture when a pain so all-consuming pierced my stomach. I looked down as Auster’s hold on the small dagger slipped and so did my grip on the handle protruding from his chest.
He fell, glass eyes held on the sky as his chest deflated for the last time. A ringing filled my ears and my shaky hands hovered over the small blade that wouldn’t have been fatal … it wouldn’t have been so damning … had it not been for Nyte’s blood on it.
It wasn’t pierced through my heart but panic overcame me that it could still kill me truly.
I found the will to pull the knife out. It was small, but that didn’t matter. The wound hurt far worse than the bigger object that had pierced my side. It slipped from my trembling hand.
A dragon roared with a higher pitch conveying pain. I barely managed to flick my sight up as it came in and out of focus, but at the flash of blue falling from the sky, horror shook me.
The blue dragon landed and wailed again; the intensity of it hit me in a gust of wind from her breath. She came so close, sniffing at Auster’s body with smaller cries rattling from her. Her head nudged him, but he was lifeless.
For some reason, she’d chosen Auster as her rider. I couldn’t understand why this small, delicate dragon would want to bond with someone so wicked. Though perhaps she saw, felt, that he wasn’t always so.
Discovering he couldn’t be saved, she lifted her head and those beautiful blue eyes targeted me. It was then I heard a wonderful name.
Edasich.
My awe quickly turned to fear when she reared up, rattling and crying, preparing to attack me in her heartbreak.
Just as she wailed louder like a declaration before her strike, I plunged deep within myself, summoning an unexplainable voice to speak to her.
“No.” It was a single word with the weight of absolute dominance. I didn’t know how I had this ability to command dragons, but shit, I was grateful for it right now.
Edasich backed away a few steps, her instinct for vengeance subsiding under my command.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
I didn’t just drown in sorrow for her loss but mine as well.
Auster had been a pivotal part of my life; in reflection we had more tender, joyous memories than cruel.
For the man he was, I mourned for him. Curling into myself while my body was wracked with sobs, wishing things could have been different.
In part I blamed the gods, my creators, for what Auster became. Their influence in his mind was nothing but a poison of resentment and superiority. And for that I wasn’t finished with Auster. I would carry his name until I ended the gods once and for all.
Rising on shaky legs, I didn’t look back at the blue dragon curling around Auster’s body as I shuffled away. My next step slipped on a piece of sodden wood and I crumpled.
I have to get up.
There was only one face, one name, that I pictured endlessly in my thoughts.
Nyte had come for me. Had he been real?
Believing he was gave me the strength to rise.
He’d come back to me.
My wings splayed, ready to take me to the skies, but my consciousness was slipping.
I had to make it back to him.
My wings carried me, but more strenuous than the ache of moving my body was fighting against my mind shutting down.
I was so tired. My hand clamped tightly over the wound Auster inflicted, and all that kept my wings beating hard was my panic that I could be dying.
As soon as Nyte’s blood reached my heart … my death would be permanent this time.
I’d slain my monster and still he won. Determined to drag me to hell right behind him.
The clouds were thick and wet, still shedding their sorrow to the land with hard rainfall.
My body was so heavy. So terribly heavy.
Nyte. Nyte. Nyte.
My eternal night.
He was all around me. I was all around him. I drifted through the endless night and brilliant stars. Then I was falling through it.