95. THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE #2
The queen stared back at her. The queen who was a witch.
A witch who had abandoned The Neveshir Isles, knowing she had little time left to live.
But she didn’t die, she survived. She told her story to Silas at the tournament’s dinner, how she lived in hiding as a human queen—an effortless act, given there wasn’t a magical inkling about her.
She possessed no ethereal, other-worldly essence, other than her natural beauty.
So why was Torin reacting this way over her? Why had her eyes changed?
“She killed my beloved,” the queen said, her voice shaky, but not frail. “I vowed to avenge him—to have her feel my wrath. But I-I didn’t know I could kill her.”
I stole a glance at Torin, then to Niall and Karios, but none of their expressions told me anything more than what I already knew.
“Forgive me,” Corinne continued. “I know I left the isles when I shouldn’t have, but I needed to see the rest of the world before my death.
” She looked down at the crown in her hands.
“I planned to return, but I got shipwrecked in the human lands, and the prince found me. I fell in love, and I . . . lived. I thought about death every day, waiting for it to claim my life when I least expected it, but it never did. And when I had my son, the power within me finally surfaced.”
Torin shook her head. “All this time, you’ve been alive?”
Corinne nodded. “Despite the odds.”
The witch goddess took in a shaky breath, then her voice dipped lower. “You should have stayed in the human realm. This is not what fate destined for you.”
“I foresaw it. I saw Skadi, vulnerable in the arms of a Dionach, and an entity poised to kill her, but unable to. And I could not stay in Belthria. Not after what she’d done.
Not when the very reason our kind fled our homeworld was here, threatening everything this world holds dear.
I thought . . . I thought that maybe, if I was able to just help in some way—weaken her, or distract her .
. .” She squeezed her crown, her knuckles whitening.
“At the very least, I wanted her to feel what I felt when she took Broderick’s life from me. ”
Tears fell from Torin’s eyes. “And in doing what you did, you have claimed her place in eternity.”
Corinne’s brows pinched in a hopeless way, the kind of expression that embodied grief and relief, victory and regret, all in one. “Is that what happened?”
“You ascended . . . as your blood allowed you to.”
Corinne lifted her eyes to the witch goddess and tilted her head. “My blood?”
When Torin hesitated to answer, I stepped forward. “What is this, Torin? Who is the queen to you?”
“She is . . . blood of my blood,” the witch goddess finally said, pausing long enough to let the statement sink in, before drifting off on a memory.
“I had a daughter on Skotos, at the start of the war Skadi waged on me and my kind. After her birth, I hid her with a matron witch, one whom I trusted, because I did not trust that Skadi wouldn’t try to take her from me and use her as leverage if she ever found out I had a daughter.
“When we arrived here, I didn’t bother to assume the role of her mother again, nor did I tell her who she was to me.
My fears were a bit irrational back then, and I didn’t want to put her in danger.
So the matron raised her as her own, taking my secret with her into death.
And since then, I have watched all the daughters that have come from my own—many generations, each one carrying out their life on the isles.
“Then came Corinne. Beautiful. Intelligent. Daring. But powerless. She was the first of my bloodline with stifled powers, and it nearly broke me to watch as she fell into depression over it.” She wiped away a tear, stepping closer to Corinne.
“When you stole that boat and escaped the isles for a glimpse at the outside world, I let you go. I couldn’t keep you locked away and watch you sink further into darkness.
And when you passed beyond the wards, I committed you to memory and told myself I was better off not knowing the ending.
In my mind, you died peacefully, having seen what was beyond, and hopefully having made a few memories of your own.
But it seems that death had no part in your story after all. ”
Corinne pushed to her feet. “I’m a descendant of yours?”
“Yes, my dear,” Torin answered.
“And . . . this strange power that’s now coursing through me . . .”
“That is because you are changed . . . goddess.”
“Goddess . . .” She weighed the word on her tongue, and by the looks of it, she didn’t like the taste. Her swirling blue eyes found Torin’s once more. “I didn’t know I would . . . change.”
Torin hung her head. “No, and that is my fault. You never knew who you truly were.”
Corinne nodded, though it was full of sadness. “I gained one thing, only to lose everything else . . . So that is the price to be paid for vengeance.” She let the crown roll out of her grip and clatter to the hardened ground.
A painful sense of reality fell over the space. Where there had once been a fae, a witch, and a human, there were now three new gods, and none of us knew how to react.
“It seems your secrets have caused more damage than you’d like to admit,” Karios said.
Torin turned back to him, seething with contempt. “None of this should have happened,” she said, reminding him that he had also, for lack of a better term, fucked up.
“So, what of her, then?” I waved my arm at the former human queen. “If she’s a goddess now, too, where is your concern in that? Niall is a threat to this world, but she isn’t?”
Torin whipped her head to me. “He’s from this world, therefore his essence is tied to it.
Power that comes from another world will corrupt it.
It will re-write who he is, and will call to him and pull at his soul until he answers.
Corinne was born a witch with my blood. She poses no threat by rising to the title that one of her ancestors held. ”
“Origins?” I half laughed. “You’re going to argue that origins dictate how power manifests?”
“Yes, because origins mean everything. I don’t expect you to understand divine law—”
“Except I am a goddess now—need I remind you. If I don’t understand it at this moment, I certainly shall.”
Torin ground her teeth, remembering she was now staring at an equal, not a lesser being.
“Power that is directly imbued by a god is just as good as blood,” I said.
“But he was a fae when that power was given to him. It presented one way when he was simply that. Now that he is a god, there is no telling what he will be capable of. That power was not meant for a fae, nor a fae turned god.”
“And I was a human,” I argued. “How is that not the same thing? Tell me, now that I’m a goddess, will my power present differently?”
“It already has,” Torin said, jerking her chin to my mate.
She was right. My power had changed. It had created, as well as destroyed.
As if he could sense the dread that was building inside me, Niall reached up and cupped the side of my cheek.
I placed my hand atop his. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, but I’m so thankful that I didn’t lose you.”
“I know,” he said, his thumb rubbing smooth lines along my cheek as he took me in. “So am I.”
“How do you feel?”
“Fine, besides the insurmountable strength.” He glanced at Karios. “That’s normal, right?”
Karios gave him a slight—albeit, wary—smile. “Yes. That is normal.”
“What, exactly, is he the god of?” I asked the god-king.
He pointed at Niall’s hand. “Show us, so that we may see.”
Niall raised his palm. He had once shown me wisps of his shadowfire in the forest of Elandrew during what was supposed to have been my archery lesson. His power had never scared me then.
What he showed us now sent a chill down my spine.
Darkness spilled from his palm like inky velvet, as black as the void between stars. Niall didn’t seem fazed by it, though, as he brought his hand closer to his face to admire the strange power. The darkness danced across his skin while he turned his hand over and back again.
I was in awe of its composition, and also keenly aware that it felt like a force that could swallow up the world if he let it. I’d never seen anything like it. The black matter that Lyceius had wielded was far different from this. This was something else entirely. This was—
“Pure darkness,” Torin said from where she stood, watching like an anxious deer ready to bolt. “The shadowfire was just a facet of it.”
Niall stared at his power, mesmerized. “There has never been a god of darkness on Gaia.”
Karios watched as the substance weaved itself between Niall’s fingers and twined around his wrist and forearm.
“No. There has not. This world has never had a master of darkness because there has never been a need for one. Here, there are cycles of day and night, light and dark, because I made it so. They are balanced by time, with light claiming dominance.”
Niall began to withdraw his power back into himself, but I stopped him.
“Wait.” I held my finger out, and the darkness sank down against Niall’s palm like a cat on its haunches, ready to strike. Then, it recognized me and reached up, curling around the end of my finger. It felt like liquid night—solid and cool to the touch.
My light rose to the surface, humming with authority as it presented itself as a twinkling light at my fingertip. Niall’s power gently caressed it, before retreating back to its safe place against his skin, and vanishing.