Chapter Seventy-One
ELYSSARA
I’m falling.
Tumbling through the sky, free-falling through worlds. Time. Sound. Space. Light. Reality.
All I see is an endless expanse of night sky with a spattering of Stars.
I’m falling, floating through a void, a horizon-less expanse of dark and light, neither here nor there.
Where am I?
I can feel something—someone—brushing at the edges of my mind, trying desperately to find me. But I can’t reach, I can’t find my way to them.
A spark erupts around me, bright and blinding.
The void begins to change, expanding and transforming around me into a scene.
I’m no longer falling—I’m watching.
The scene comes to life before my eyes.
A young woman—barefoot, hair like mine—runs through a darkened forest. She carries a young child in her arms. The child’s wild russet hair whips in the wind, sticking to the tears on the child’s cheek.
The woman wears a beautiful gown, smeared with dirt and blood, ripped and tattered.
Her eyes dart behind her, her breath panicked and shallow. She’s being hunted.
She stumbles, tripping on the forest floor.
She crashes to the ground, holding her child to her chest, and whispers, “Lesara, run. You must run.” She sets the child down with urgency and frantically takes off her silver marriage cuff, shoving it into the child’s hands.
“He won’t stop hunting us. The monarchy has fallen—we are a threat to his reign as long as we live.
You must disappear. Take this,” she wraps her hands around the child's, cupping the cuff between them. “Keep it. You’ll know when to use it.”
A chill runs through me. The cuff looks like—
“Now, run! Do not look back, Lesara!”
Lesara. My mother. This is my mother.
My mother looks into the eyes of her own mother, tears running like a stream down her swollen cheeks, but she nods and tucks the cuff into the folds of her dress, lifts her skirts, and runs through the forest without glancing back.
My mother was a Dravari princess. Which makes me—
The vision shifts.
A great stone chamber unfurls around me—walls carved from black rock veined with silver, lit by the glow of a floating ring of symbols suspended in the air like a constellation.
At its center stands a man cloaked in royal violet and ash-gray—Thalmyr.
I’d know his face anywhere. The villain of Virellin.
Younger than I expected. And devastatingly handsome.
But power coils around him like smoke. Hungry. Possessive. Twisting his handsome features into something grotesque.
In front of him, a woman kneels.
She glows—not with magic, but divinity. Skin kissed with sunlight. Hair like soft golden threads. And eyes that hold the sorrow of Stars.
“Nyrielle, say your vows,” he commands, his voice a honeyed facade that I immediately detect as subterfuge. Nyrielle. Goddess of Light and Wonder.
She looks at Thalmyr with devotion and adoration in her eyes.
I gasp in recognition. She loves him.
Her voice trembles as she speaks, though it’s strong enough to shake the walls. “I give it freely—my blood, my vow, my heart. Let it bind us,” she says with purpose and intent.
She reaches for his hand, slicing her palm and offering it up. Her golden blood spills like liquid sunlight into his.
He smiles that sickening smile I’ve seen hundreds of times from the forgotten side of The Lightborne Barrier in Virellin.
And I know—deep in my gut—that it’s not love. For him, it’s strategy.
He steps back, eyes dark with purpose. He looks behind him to a cloaked figure, gesturing for them to move forward, “Do it, Daphinia.” Her arms raise, and the ring of floating symbols ignites, glowing red.
A circle of ancient runes carves itself into the stone floor, pulsing with forbidden power—chains of shadow coil around the air.
“No,” Nyrielle whispers, realization dawning too late. “No, Thalmyr—what are you doing?”
“You gave me your heart, goddess,” he says coldly. “And now I sever yours from the realm, along with all the other so-called gods I’ve never bowed to.”
She screams. Her form fractures—splintering into light and sound and agony. A shockwave blasts outward, and I see a vision—the gods, all of them, bound in place by the force of the ritual. Frozen mid-motion. Screaming in silence.
They’re torn from the skies. Ripped from the rivers. Wrenched from the forests.
Nine of the gods and goddesses are thrown to the floor of the stone chamber. Frozen, incapacitated by whatever spell Thalmyr has them under.
But in their final suspended moments—before their bodies are dragged into oblivion, before their voices are swallowed by the void—they act.
Not with words. Not with war. But with memory. With will. With magic.
Their essences, fractured and fading, pulse outward—nine divine threads of light seeking sanctuary in the physical world. They reach for what they can: sacred places, sacred objects, sacred bloodlines. The oldest stones. The roots of ancient trees. The blades of fallen Stars.
The relics. They reach for the relics.
Beautiful golden light is cast around the chamber like a spider’s web of divine magic.
Thalmyr turns to the cloaked figure—Daphinia—again, urging her to act.
But the gods and goddesses of this world don’t relent. They continue weaving their magic, infusing it into the physical world—their final sacred rebellion.
They don’t leave weapons. They leave keys.
Keys to awakening.
Keys to reclaiming what was stolen.
Keys to what comes next.
Daphinia slices through Thalmyr’s palm, blood pooling in his hand.
He takes three long strides to the center of the circle of runes and allows a single drop of blood to fall from his hand.
The blood lands on the chamber floor, and within a single heartbeat, the gods are cast out—flung into a prison between realms. Trapped.
Whatever Thalmyr did—this spell—exiled the gods from our lands, leaving us to our wars, our suffering, our slow unraveling beneath power-hungry hands. A godless realm.
Thalmyr. He just stands there. Breathing heavy. Smiling.
A basin behind him begins to glow—fed by the tether he carved between realms. Their essence flows through it like leashed light, channeled from exile to empire.
I’m panting. Unable to center myself amongst the visions. I clutch my chest as if my hands can relieve the pressure there.
But before I can even take another breath, the vision fractures.
Light rips apart and reforms as stone walls emerge once more, but this time the chamber is not vast and ceremonial like before—it’s jagged, damp, and ancient. Hidden. It feels buried beneath years of dust and blood.
Dark iron torches flicker with green flame.
An altar sits at the center of the room, and around it, chalked in crimson sigils and carved bone, is a summoning circle.
A man kneels at its heart.
He’s older, cloaked in royal navy trimmed with silver, a faint crown glinting in his golden brown hair. He looks familiar—his profile stern and shadowed, strong and noble.
Kael.
No... not Kael.
This is his father.
King Aurius.
I watch as he reaches into a small iron bowl and paints three lines of blood across the stone. His voice trembles as he chants, not with fear, but desperation.
“God of Endings. Guardian of the Final Gate. Morrathys, hear me. I do not summon you to command, only to beg. Spare my people. Break your curse. Return balance to Zerynthia.”
The shadows swell.
A second man steps into the circle, silent until now. He bears Aurius’s face—sharper, crueler. A brother.
They exchange no words, only a knowing look.
Then the circle ignites.
The runes flare green and black, and the altar shakes with power. A shape unfurls in the shadows. Ancient and beautiful—terribly so.
Morrathys. The tenth god.
Skin like moonlight, smooth and pale, stretched over a frame too tall, too still. Hair as dark as a raven’s wing falls around his shoulders, and his eyes—gods, his eyes—are fathomless pools of night.
He does not walk—he descends. Graceful and slow.
“I am not yours to summon,” Morrathys grits out, voice like breaking stone. “But I have watched. And I have listened. And now I have come.”
He steps into the circle. The torches snuff out.
The room holds its breath.
Aurius stands to speak again—but he is not given the chance.
The second man moves.
Steel flashes.
A blade pierces Aurius’s side.
The King gasps, stumbling forward, gripping the altar for support. “Brother...” he rasps.
Then, louder—broken and bitter, “Maldrak...”
I freeze.
Maldrak.
Maldrak is Kael’s uncle.
The usurper. The man who exiled Kael and stole his throne.
The moment Aurius collapses, Maldrak steps into his place. His hands still slick with royal blood, he raises them over the altar.
“I offer blood to bind,” he says, calm and cruel. “Not for mercy. Not for balance. But for dominion.”
Chains of smoke whip from the altar, wrapping around Morrathys like tendrils of iron.
He struggles—shrieks—and the walls of the chamber splinter with the force of his resistance. But he’s already caught in the snare of the ritual. Bound by the ancient law that governs even gods.
Maldrak places his hand to the altar, and the spell seals with a flash of green flame.
The torches relight. And Morrathys goes still.
Not dead.
Enslaved.
I watch in horror as Maldrak carves a symbol into the altar with the point of his blade—a twisted, jagged ‘M’.
The Mark of Morrathys. Of death.
Then he presses the blade to his forearm and slices it open. With his blood, he brands the first soldier standing behind him—marking him with that same symbol.
The man collapses, writhing.
Then... rises.
His eyes are empty. Obedient. Leashed.
Behind Maldrak, dozens more soldiers await.
One by one, he brands them.
Each time, Morrathys’s bound essence surges through the mark, latching onto the soldier, turning them into something else—not dead, not living, not free.
An army of revenants.
Not loyal by oath.
Loyal by brand.
My stomach turns. My vision spins. I can’t breathe.
The last thing I see before the vision begins to crack is Aurius’s crown, stained with blood, resting on the altar like a warning.
And Maldrak’s eyes.
Looking toward the throne not as a burden... but a birthright.
As the chains finish binding Morrathys in shadow-light, Maldrak doesn’t even look back at what he’s done. Instead, he turns to his soldiers—those branded with the Mark of Morrathys, eyes void of will—and says coldly, “Take him to the Temple of Endings. Seal it. No one opens it unless I command it.”
And just like that, the God of Death vanishes from the world—not exiled to some distant realm like the others, but buried right here in Zerynthia. Slumbering. Waiting.
The scene before me fades, and I am falling through the night sky again.
I let myself fall this time. The visions race through me, crashing through my mind as I drift through starlight.
My mother. The marriage cuff. Thalmyr. Aurius. Maldrak. The blood spell. Nyrielle. Morrathys. The Mark.
My chest rises too fast. Falls too hard.
Nothing is as it seems.
The air around me rumbles, sending a ripple through my body.
I gasp at the sudden jolt.
The crown releases me.
I collapse to my knees, heaving, body trembling.
I look up, and Kael’s eyes meet mine from across The Grove.
Suddenly, I’m not sure which part of the vision scares me more—what’s been done, who I am, or what I’m destined to do.
The air thins. The Grove tilts.
I drop to the ground, limbs shaking.
My chest burns bright, searing pain dragging across my skin. Points of the Eye of Lireal carving into my skin, branding, claiming, permanent.
And then—darkness swallows me whole.