Chapter 58 Aylah #2
Aylah stood, retrieved a candle, and walked to the nearby door that had been guarded by the soldier during their absence.
When she grabbed the doorknob, she hesitated.
Since returning, she had spent her nights sleeping on that couch, refusing any finer accommodations.
After a lifetime spent hanging in chains, those goose-feather cushions were more than adequate.
You don’t have to do this , she told herself. She could return to that couch, curl into the blankets, and sleep away her guilt. Easy, cowardly thoughts.
Aylah pushed the door open and stepped inside.
In a room stripped of any shelves, bed, or decorations dwelt the captured queen, Isabelle Dior. Her mouth was gagged, and her hands and feet expertly bound behind her back. She dwelt in total darkness and squinted at the light of the candles that seeped from the open door.
“Hello, Isabelle.”
Aylah set her candle down on a small bedside table that had been moved when she was creating the prison and then sat on her knees before it.
She observed the bound woman in the candlelight.
Isabelle returned that careful study with surprisingly fierce resolve.
The days of imprisonment had not cowed her in the slightest. Even now, she tested the bonds.
“You’re fierce, aren’t you?” Aylah said, remembering when she had captured the woman in her tent.
Even with surprise on her side, there had been the briefest moment, when golden light sparked from her eyes and crackled like lightning around her hands as she lurched from her bed, when Aylah had feared her efforts doomed.
A solid blow to the temple had knocked Isabelle unconscious, preventing the release of her power. Power that she should not have.
“The mighty warrior queen of Doremy,” Aylah continued. “You probably thought yourself destined for greatness. But this world does not reward greatness. It murders it.”
Isabelle’s glare was cold enough to freeze the swiftest river. Aylah was briefly tempted to remove her gag. Memories of golden lightning banished the temptation. Her silence would have to be enough.
“I do not suppose you know who I am,” Aylah said, shifting closer. “But we are bound to one another, connected by blood.”
There was no hiding the connection. Isabelle’s face strikingly resembled Aylah’s, with the same jaw, the same high cheekbones, and the same broad nose.
The only difference was in her hair and eyes.
Whereas Aylah’s were the stark black of her brethren, Isabelle’s were the golden hue of stolen radiance, now tainted by humanity.
“My blood,” she continued. “Stolen from me by the cruel masters of Castle Kanth. My siblings… we cannot bear or sire children. We have tried. But you… I suspect you were still in the womb when your parents partook of my blood. You were conceived by those already drunk with radiance, but then stolen away before the balance built within you at birth could be tipped askew. A rare child.”
Aylah slid closer on the cold floor as Isabelle’s eyes widened.
“ My child,” Aylah whispered. “If viewed in a certain way. You have inherited my beauty, my grace, and my command of the lesser.”
There was no stopping the horrid guilt that stabbed her like a cruel assassin in the spine. No longer willing to hide from it, nor pretend it false, Aylah confessed to this captive stranger.
“When you were raised a bastard, I was held in chains,” she said.
“I could not be there to watch you grow. I could not be mother to you, the first child of my blood, for my imprisonment was the very reason for your blessing. But I wish, so much I wish, that I could have been. I would have told you of the gifts you possessed, of the power of radiance, and all the wonders you are capable of.”
She dragged her fingernails across the stone hard enough for one to crack.
“I would have kept you from becoming a tool for my brothers’ games,” she seethed.
“I would have slaughtered the vile royalty of Castle Kanth so you never needed to wage your war. I would have taught you, embraced you, loved you, and ensured a throne awaited you without claims of godhood to act as your crutch. By your own strength and grace, you would have ruled. Not as a puppet of Faron, or Sariel, or the goddess, Leliel. Your own strength. Your own might.”
The possibilities of a different life flashed through Aylah’s mind, aching and cruel. If only she had not been imprisoned. If only her brothers had found her sooner, before Isabelle had become a woman grown. She put her hands on the sides of Isabelle’s face and let Isabelle see her tears.
“I would have given you all these things and more, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. You aren’t of my flesh. You aren’t of my loins. Your radiance, it was not gifted. It was stolen. You are birthed of a crime. In that, you are blameless, but that changes not the truth of your being.”
Aylah stood, and she felt her insides tremble and grow cold.
“You are not my daughter,” she said. “I am sorry. You are not, no matter how much I wish it to be. Which means the choice is not a choice at all. You will die. Please, know you are not sacrificed out of hatred, nor in vain.”
Aylah blew out the candle, blanketing them both in total darkness.
“I hold no faith of my own,” she whispered, and wiped away her tears. “But I hold faith in my brother. It will be enough. It must. And against that hope, your death is but a single ripple amid an ocean.”
Isabelle screamed something into her gag, but Aylah held no desire to hear it.
She exited the room, shut the door, and pressed her back against it.
More screams, angry, hurtful, and accusatory.
Muffled as they were, they were enough to strike Aylah like wicked little barbs.
She endured them as she must, and clung to the promised future for strength.
“A brand-new world,” she whispered, and looked to the nearby window, but there were no stars to see, only a great, empty chasm of nothing.