Chapter Thirty-Two #3
“Honey, we never had them. Mother told you. It’s funny what you’ll ignore when your mind has already decided. Belief and reality are so rarely the same thing. That’s the thing about belief though: it’s built on such limited perception,” Marin croons cryptically.
Her eyes bore into Elyssara’s, piercing and unflinching. The kind of look that conveys more than mere words.
It sounds less like a taunt, and more like a message.
Elyssara studies her.
But her stare is broken by two dozen soldiers descending on the vaults with gleaming silver shields. The ones from the entrance that buzz with the presence of something other.
They fan out, surrounding the room in a wall of armored Caelorian soldiers.
And then they part.
Splitting through the center of the soldiers is Maireth, her wolf mask still perfectly placed, onyx gowns still falling in a perfect spill.
Magic flares at Elyssara’s fingertips, washing the room in a golden light.
She grits her teeth, dropping into a low fighting stance, and the only sound is Kael’s heavy breathing escaping through his teeth.
A small, pursed smile lifts up Maireth’s lips.
“Your heart bleeds for the Outsiders,” Maireth says, repeating Elyssara’s earlier words.
“I hoped it would. You see, we have new weapons of Aether ready to launch on the Outside that will level the entire population beyond these walls at the first sign of your magic, Elyssara. So, I’d lower your hands. ”
She wouldn’t.
“You’re bluffing,” Elyssara snaps, and she raises her hands to strike, Lightborne magic hammering at the gates of her control.
She notices a movement.
Almost imperceptible.
But real.
Marin.
Her eyes widen just slightly from behind Maireth. And for the first time, Elyssara thinks she might sense fear. Desperation. Something human. But before she can press, ask another question, push a little further for a reaction—
“I have no need nor desire to bluff. Bluffing is for weak men who believe it will lead to control. I prefer to control outright—absolute dominion. See the difference?” Maireth says it like a prayer.
Like a creed. Like the only truth worth living by.
The words land with the terrible certainty of something she believes more deeply than love. More deeply than mercy. Than anything.
Kael’s wrath is barely leashed.
Elyssara can feel the force of it building behind the wall of the tether.
He snarls, a starved beast waiting to gorge.
“Tell me what you want,” Elyssara hisses, dropping lower still in her crouch.
“I’d like you to scurry off to claim your throne from Thalmyr while your lover stays with me,” she states, cold and indifferent.
There it is—the real shape of the trap. The rules of the game.
But Elyssara’s mind reels.
Take the throne from Maireth’s ally? What in the Stars?
“And why the fuck would I do that?” Elyssara growls, her words pure animal.
Maireth’s mouth tips up in a small smile.
A victor’s smile. “Because I need you to break the spell on the dragons, Elyssara. And because staying will mean both of you will rot here—that doesn’t help me.
That’s the thing with Starbounds; they are the making and breaking of each other.
Especially easy to command when I have one in my possession,” she states coolly.
Simple. Efficient. Sadistic.
A tactic.
A strategy to command her.
To weaken her.
To take Zerynthia.
And Dravara.
To claim the dragons.
Total world rule.
She said it: absolute dominion.
“Where are Dravara’s Orbs? Where is our history?” Elyssara demands, her voice echoing through the vaults like a warning worth repeating.
Kael steps forward, a killer in motion. “I will string you up by the ankles until the truth falls out of you by fucking gravity,” he threatens, the words growling from his lips in a low rumble.
But Maireth doesn’t react. Just absorbs the threat like a woman beyond such things. Like a woman who has built an empire where threats cannot reach.
She simply gives a small nod, and without hesitation, her soldiers press closer, moving in on Kael, threading between Elyssara and her Starbound so only Maireth, Marin, and Elyssara remain outside of their encroaching wall.
“No!” Elyssara screams, her voice a wrenching cry from the depths of her.
But Kael doesn’t notice. Doesn’t wait. Shadows woven with silver crackle at his fingertips. He lashes out toward the closest guard, magic snapping like fatal whips. But the soldier holds up the shields, bracing at the force of Kael’s magic.
Onyx-silver shadows collide with the shield and—
It absorbs the force.
Blue light flares on impact.
And that’s when she knows—she’s seen this before.
In Thornewood.
This is not just a shield.
This is Aether.
The soldiers press in, closing in on Kael, swords rasping from their scabbards as they approach.
But Kael only smiles. Wicked and menacing. The look of a man born to violence, raised on brutality.
“I am the Endbringer,” he whispers to himself, but the words ricochet off every surface, drenching the vault.
Even the soldiers hear the prophecy in it.
They tighten formation anyway.
Brave men.
Dead men.
They hold their ground, but no one misses the falter. The slight misstep. The fraction of a heartbeat of hesitation.
And then he lunges.
“Take him down!” Marin commands, unsheathing a blade from the high split in her dress.
But the Decay leads, hunting life and ending it.
It slips through the narrow seams between their shields like smoke with intent, like shadow given teeth.
One soldier jerks as it latches to his throat, his scream cutting off as black creeps beneath his skin.
Another stumbles when Kael’s silver-laced shadows strike his knee, forcing him down hard enough that bone cracks against stone.
But still they come. Because the shields hold. Not fully. Not enough to stop Kael entirely. But enough to blunt the force of him. Enough to slow the thing that should be impossible to survive.
Blue Aether flares at every point of impact, bright and violent, turning the vault into a storm of obsidian shadow and electric light.
Elyssara’s pulse becomes a drumbeat in her throat.
Too many.
There are too many.
Kael tears through the first line with a violence so absolute it feels god-made. A sword is ripped from one soldier’s hand and driven clean through another’s chest. His shadows snap out, silver threaded through black, and a third man drops screaming as rot devours the flesh beneath his armor.
But for every man Kael takes, two more step forward.
“Kael!” Elyssara screams.
She moves before she can think better of it, lunging toward the wall of soldiers closing around him, divine fury rising in her blood. Golden light flares at her fingertips—
“Don’t.”
Maireth’s voice slices through the vault. Cold. Certain. Not a threat—a promise.
Elyssara freezes.
The queen does not raise her voice.
She does not need to.
“The new Aether weapons are primed along the walls of the Outside,” Maireth says, her wolf mask gleaming in the chaos. “At the first surge of your Lightborne magic, they will fire.”
The world seems to tilt.
Elyssara’s hands tremble with contained power.
“You’re lying,” she spits, though the words come thinner than she wants. “You would never hurt your own people.”
But Elyssara knows she would. Has seen her brutality first hand.
Maireth’s head tilts by a fraction.
“I’ve wanted the filth from the Outside gone for years. What better way to do so than by blaming the future Queen of Dravara.” Her voice remains smooth. “The people would demand war, and of course I’d oblige.”
Blue light crackles faintly along the soldiers’ shields as if to prove her point.
“I know the kind of creature you are, Elyssara,” Maireth continues. “You would burn yourself alive before you let the Outside fall because of your choice.”
Her gaze sharpens.
“And my instincts are always correct.”
Rage claws at Elyssara’s ribs hard enough to split bone.
Kael roars as another soldier drives a blade into his side. Not deep enough to kill. Deep enough to enrage.
The sound breaks her open.
She cannot use her magic.
She cannot leave him.
She cannot do nothing.
So she grabs the fallen sword from the nearest corpse and throws herself into the melee.
Soldiers spin on her.
Steel collides.
Pain bursts up her arm as she catches a strike. She twists, driving her blade into the soft seam beneath a soldier’s breastplate, his shield held out to block Kael. Hot blood spills over her hand and it feels like home.
Another man slams into her from the side.
She stumbles.
Her shoulder clips the stone wall hard enough to blur her vision.
Kael’s eyes dart to her between strikes, depthless and terrible.
The Decay surges in response to her pain, like beneath the rot, he still exists somewhere. Still sees her. Not as a body to cull, but as her. As his.
It erupts from him in a wave, swallowing three soldiers at once. They collapse choking, clawing at their own throats as the rot races under their skin.
For one wild heartbeat, Elyssara thinks he might break through them.
Then one of the shields turns.
Not toward Kael.
Toward her.
A pulse of blue-white force detonates from its center.
Pain slams through Elyssara’s ribs like a battering ram.
The world vanishes.
Then returns in pieces.
Stone against her spine.
Blood in her mouth.
Sound distorted, distant, like she’s underwater.
She looks down.
Red blooms across the rust silk at her side.
No.
No, no, no—
Kael sees it.
And he breaks.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
But with the kind of finality that feels like the sky tearing in two.
He turns with a violence so pure it stills the room.
One soldier loses his head.
Another is thrown so hard into the wall his body folds wrong on impact.
Kael’s chest heaves, veins black as pitch, eyes nothing but endless obsidian.
“Touch her again,” he says, voice low enough to be more terrifying than a scream, “and death will feel like mercy.”
For one heartbeat, the room believes him more than it believes in survival.
Even the soldiers hesitate.
Even Marin stills.
But Maireth does not.
“Take him,” she says.