44. Chapter 44
Afair woman paced the room.
She wore a floor length gown made of a strange, shimmering fabric that sighed along the stone floors as she moved. Despite the striking garment, its hem was dirty to her knees, coated in a layer of grime. She wrung her hands, twisting her long, delicate fingers.
Nearby, a tall man leaned against the wall next to an ornate, arched window that stretched from floor to ceiling.
He wore heavy armour made of an unfamiliar, iridescent metal, glinting silver in the beams of light that stretched into the room through the arch.
His arms were folded tightly across his chest, jaw set in a grim line.
Shadows seemed to haunt his strikingly silver eyes.
His onyx skin gleamed with sweat, dusted with a combination of grime and blood that suggested recent battle.
Countless emotions seemed to fight for purchase on his face - grim determination, regret, stubborn self-assuredness - but love outshone them all.
He watched the woman with an intensity that was hungry and wanting. His eyes drank her in as she paced, snagging on the motion as she tucked a tendril of chestnut coloured hair behind a curved ear.
“Mea anima,” he murmured, and it sounded like a plea.
She halted, green eyes meeting silver, her expression a startling combination of love and despair.
"Tell me again," she said. She didn’t mean the endearment.
The fae warrior sighed heavily, as though it pained him.
“The Gods came to me. They offered me a deal. End this calamity — for now. Vaeloria would be protected. The war ended. In exchange..."
He sighed again, as though gathering himself. She waited, silent. Expectant.
"In exchange, instead of erasing our world, this calamity — The Shattering, they called it — would come to pass again.
And again. A cyclical, apocalyptic reset when we inevitably pushed the world past its breaking point in pursuit of our own selfishness.
But not for eons, Etara. We will have time, a lifetime, multiple lifetimes, to repair what has been broken, with Vaelora and the fae leading the path forward. "
"And what other sacrifices did you make on behalf of Vaeloria?" she asked, the words little more than a whisper.
For a moment he just stared at her, grief carving deep lines in his face. Then, voice breaking, he spoke.
“They demanded a sacrifice. I had no choice.”
“And so you condemned Velithor — my home, its people — to death.” Her voice was quiet, but it shook with anger.
He stiffened, muscles straining against his neck.
Something like regret rippled over his features.
“For that, I am sorry. I did not choose Velithor — the Gods themselves determined which realm would be erased.
It was a terrible, but necessary sacrifice.
For the good of the many. For the future of our people. "
"The future of your people," she corrected.
"Our people," he insisted, voice tight. "You are my wife. We rule together."
She covered her mouth with a hand, shaking her head as she looked away.
He loosed his arms, crossing the room until he stood before her. He loomed over her, a full head taller than her, and a veritable storm as his frustration bled into anger.
"What would you have had me do?" He hissed. The fire that burned in the hearth behind him roared suddenly, its flames leaping to twice their original height. "Do you think I wanted this? The Velari are - were - fae. I've no desire for their demise."
"And if it had been another realm to be swallowed by the Gods?
" she challenged, uncowed. "Would that have been more palatable?
If the gods had agreed to end the humans, the Seers, the Shifters?
Tell me, Roan, which of our peoples would you have sacrificed willingly for the fae's continued superiority? "
His silver eyes flashed. Outside, waterfalls roared alongside unruly winds, sending waves crashing to the rocks below. "I suspect few would mourn if the obsidian planes had been consumed."
She shook her head, huffing a bitter laugh. When she looked up, her eyes were heavy with sadness.
"Listen to yourself. Infighting between our peoples, the violence, overdrawing on the source... that's what led us here in the first place. You know this."
"There was no other way," he insisted. "You know that as well as I do — we've been working for more than a year to convince our peoples to come together.
Old animosities run deep. The fae are too proud, the humans too individualistic, the Seers too fatalistic, and the Shifters—" he bit back his words, grinding his teeth.
She stepped forward, closing the distance between them as she slowly raised her hands to either side of his face. His eyes fluttered closed at the contact, his jaw relaxing, as though her touch instantly calmed the tension in his body.
When she spoke, it was soft, almost gentle.
"You have damned our children, our children's children. For endless generations, the potential of The Shattering will loom over our ancestors like a sword held over their necks, threatening to fall at any moment. You have simply made our war someone else’s.”
He flinched as though she’d struck him, but when he opened his eyes, they burned like liquid metal.
"It is done. I ended it. For us. For you."
Tears lined her eyes as she whispered, "I never asked that of you. I never would have."
But he had done it anyway. It lay there, thick and unspoken between them.
"So I'm to be reviled for loving you too much to live even one day without you?" he asked.
She shook her head, at a loss for words.
“Have I ruined us, then?” he asked, his voice raw. “Sentenced you to a loveless eternity at my side?“
“I don’t know how to stop loving you. Easier to stop breathing,” she said.
He winced, as though that, too, was painful in some way.
"Can you forgive me?”
She smiled at him sadly. “I don’t know.”
Etara slipped out of bed, leaving Roan lying naked in their silken sheets. She shrugged on a shawl, wrapping it tightly around herself, padding on bare feet across the stone floors and out onto the balcony.
Lit only by the starlight, she closed her eyes, breathing in the crisp, night air.
Despite the soothing rushing of the nearby falls and the quiet rush of the ocean waves as the tide crashed against the rocks below, she wrapped her arms tightly across her middle, as though attempting to hold the broken pieces of herself together.
Her eyes fluttered open, lined with silver that glinted in the moonlight.
In the distance, far out into the mists that lay atop the ocean were the only remnants of her homeland.
Velithor had been demolished, ruptured by the Gods’ vengeful bargain.
Only jagged slabs of ice remained now, as though frozen in time as they floated eerily through the thick fog that seemed to have wrapped itself around the realm’s watery grave.
Soon enough, Velithor and the Velari fae themselves would become nothing more than myth and legend, Etara knew.
Lost to living memory. The vindictive Gods had seen fit to ensure that enough time would pass between cycles of The Shattering that those exposed to it would likely be taken completely unawares.
Tears slipped down her cheeks, falling to the smooth stone beneath her feet.
It didn't matter that the calamity to come wouldn't affect her children, or her children's children — knowing that her descendants would some day face the same breaking of the world they had narrowly avoided ate away at her soul, every day, another piece crumbling into mist on the winds.
Roan had made his choice, and she had been complicit in it.
In her mind, she heard the deafening crack of the Gods’ spear of power piercing the realm with finality, the screams rising around her.
She tasted the metallic tang of blood, thick on the air and the clashing of steel as the final battle roared around her.
She flinched, gripping the balcony’s edge.
Her eyes fell to her hands, her gaze snagging on a missing chunk of marble, carved from the balustrade of the balcony during the battle.
A scar left behind as evidence of their hard fought war with the Hollowborne.
She touched the jagged stone almost reverently, running her fair fingers along the gap.
Water beaded on the rock, mist from the falls sinking into the stone, as though the dry rock drank it in, holding it tight.
The ancient words of the Velari seemed to whisper to her on the winds of the evening.
Water has memory.
She blinked, another tear slipping down her cheek. And then, a thought began to crystallize.
She sensed his approach, but did not allow her focus to break. Golden threads of magic wound around her fingers like a lace glove, reaching to envelop the stone that sat on the desk before her in a golden web.
"You work late, mea anima,” he murmured, burying his nose in her hair with a deep inhale. She hummed in reply, a sweet shiver running through her at his touch. She felt his mouth curve into a smile against the shell of her ear.
He stiffened gradually, the warmth of his desire eclipsed by confusion. No texts lay on the table before her, no parchment and quill... only the stone, rough hewn, as though it had been torn from its original place.
He pulled back slightly, a crease forming between his dark eyebrows.
“What is this? This looks as though it was torn from the causeway. What are you doing?” he asked.
“What I can,” she spoke softly, but her tone was determined.
“You're imbuing it,” he observed. “But… with what memory?”
She turned to face him then, her jaw set. “My own.”
His expression darkened as the change came over him. He drew himself up, straightening to his full height. “You seek to create a memory of the events that led to The Shattering. To what end?”