Chapter Seventy
ELYSSARA
Kael stares at me, fierce and unflinching, waiting for me to continue.
Silver threads coil through his irises—a raging ocean cut with lightning. Alive, electric, charged.
“They’re different,” I murmur, lifting my hand to cup his stubbled cheek, never breaking his gaze.
He doesn’t say anything, but his shadows dance under my palm as if responding to my touch.
“They’re not just blue… they’re streaked with metallic silver,” I exhale.
Kael’s head snaps to Morrathys, realization striking him.
“Silver?” he asks.
Morrathys inclines his head. “A gift.”
But Kael doesn’t speak, he waits, confused.
“You’ve learned the value of life, my son. That living is more than not dying—it is loving, fighting for purpose beyond ourselves, sacrifice for the greater good,” the God of Death announces.
Kael doesn’t flinch under the praise, he only stands like a warrior. A force of fucking nature.
“Death’s Heir,” Morrathys proclaims. “The Endbringer.”
Endbringer.
It feels like Kael captured in a single word—beautiful, terrible, termination made flesh. His victims’ end. My end. The Endbringer.
We all suck in sharp breaths, and I hear Ronyn mutter about only getting zarethite weapons.
But Kael drops into a low bow, accepting the gift with the grace of a born king.
“I will not forsake your gift.”
“I know, my son. Right this world, and then,” Morrathys starts moving backwards as he cleaves another thin rip through the air, “return my brothers and sisters to me. I’ll be waiting for them in the Between.”
Then, he steps through the rip, folding time, space and reality.
For a heartbeat, I do nothing but breathe.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
For a fleeting moment, it feels like it's over.
Like I can breathe for the first time since I rescued Ronyn from The Tannery.
We did it. I whisper down the tether like I’m too afraid to say it.
We did it, my love. Kael replies immediately, as if he’s been waiting for me to speak since the moment I shoved a blade through my mother’s heart.
I can hear all the questions he doesn’t ask but so desperately wants to: Do you understand why I had to do it? Do you forgive me? Do you still love me?
I’ve spent too many years hating what I didn’t understand.
I’ve spent a lifetime swimming in the waters of gray morality, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that moral absolutism is a lie.
He made me kill my mother.
But he did it to honor her last wishes, to save Aevryn, to allow me to live with her love in my heart.
And that? That, I understand.
I understand. I forgive you. I love you. I send my words down the tether while I hold his gaze, molten silver whirling in captivating spirals through his ocean irises.
He closes his eyes, as if my words offer him the absolution he’s been craving.
But the brief moment doesn’t save us from reality.
A horn blares.
The sound shatters everything.
Boots thunder above us. The stairwell fills with the metallic roar of armor and shouted orders. Dust rains from the ceiling as the doors burst open.
Caelorian soldiers flood the chamber—rows upon rows of steel and snarling faces.
We’ve already drawn our weapons, angled them at their throats.
But Kael only strides to the abandoned zarethite sword left on the prayer chamber’s floor—unable to travel to the echo-plane with Maldrak.
He draws the god metal sword already strapped to his back, and bends lazily to pick up his father’s sword.
The god metal sword that was always meant to be his.
When he stands, he’s wrath incarnate, swords dripping from his hands like they’re an extension of him. A god made flesh. Dark swords glinting in the flickering light.
Seeing him with two swords again knocks something loose inside me—reverence, awe, hunger. The god metal answers to him, bends for him, belongs to him. He wears the swords like a promise and a threat, twin extensions of a destiny written in blood.
His ocean-silver eyes stare down the men—his victims. Because they’re already dead, even as they still stand here.
Shadows curl along the blades’ edges like smoke remembering its master.
The soldiers hesitate at the threshold, caught between fear and duty, as if Kael’s reputation precedes him.
Because he’s always been the Endbringer.
I take one step forward, voice low enough to make the stone listen.
“You’ll bow in the presence of a king,” I taunt, prowling towards them like a beast on the hunt.
“You’re in his castle now.”
And I let Starlight flood my veins.
Through the slit of their helmets, I see their eyes blow wide.
They don’t move—ever the warriors, but I can feel the way they want to.
The way they want to cower.
Then, they make a lethal mistake.
They look at Kael.
Shadows whip at his fingers, molten silver splintering through like lightning shattering a gloomy sky.
And the Caelorians falter.
They stumble back.
One step.
Two.
Kael stalks forward, so close he can taste their fear.
And he laughs. A bitter, cruel thing that sets them on edge.
“Knowing you’ll face wrath is expected in war,” he drawls, dragging his gaze along the lengths of his god metal blades with unnerving calm.
Like they’re home in his hands.
“But now? Wrath wears my face.”
And they fucking know it.