Chapter Fifty-One
The safest path is seldom brave
For silence, too, becomes a grave
Lara of the Evening Star had long ago learned that the easiest way to survive the hungers of kings, queens, and gods was never to belong to any of them.
That lesson has served her well.
It has made her difficult to persuade, impossible to own, and rich enough that she never has to bow unless it amuses her.
It has also made her useful to the powerful, which is a far more profitable thing than being loved by them.
Kings came and went. Dynasties rose, distorted truth, and turned themselves to ash.
The clever survived by staying just outside the reach of all of it.
Close enough to profit. Far enough to escape the collapse when it came.
Lara has done more than survive.
She has endured.
She has watched realms devour themselves with the same old appetites dressed in different silks: greed masquerading as vision, conquest masquerading as order, cruelty masquerading as necessity.
Men, especially, were fond of insisting their violence meant something grand.
Queens were not so different. Gods, when they were allowed too close to mortal affairs, were often the worst of all.
That is why she prefers transaction to loyalty. Coin is honest. Coin does not claim to love you while tightening a noose around your throat. A coin is a coin, and no one can dispute that.
Elarion Castle rises before her in sheets of pale limestone and impossible light, each tower catching the dying gold of dusk and reflecting it back in blinding brilliance.
It’s beautiful in the way venom is beautiful—gleaming, precise, and designed to kill long before its victim understands the danger.
Nymeris has always excelled at that particular kind of elegance.
At least, since Nyrielle claimed its throne.
Lara passes through its gates without slowing. Guards step aside immediately. No one is foolish enough to challenge a guest personally summoned by the Queen of Nymeris.
A queen who used to be a goddess.
Used to be.
Irritation flickers, then she buries it.
Because the truth of Nyrielle unsettles the natural order in ways Lara does not care to examine too closely.
Gods are one thing when banished, distant, fragmented into story and prayer.
Gods sitting on mortal thrones, cloaked in silk and governance and the language of empire, are something else entirely.
More dangerous. More entitled. More unpredictable.
Mortals worship power too easily, and gods were never meant to discover how useful that made them.
A servant opens the doors to the courtyard before Lara reaches them. She enters without announcement, because titles have always interested other people more than they interest her.
Nyrielle—Queen Ilyra, as the realms know her now—sits at the quaint dining table, the bubbling rush of a waterfall cascading behind her.
Soft moonlight spills across the marble floor in silver ribbons, catching in the pale gold of her hair and turning her into something almost holy at first glance. Almost.
Lara knows better than most what holiness looks like. And this was not that. This was a woman who understood the power of appearing holy.
“I hope the information you’ve gathered warrants the delay in your return,” Ilyra says without turning, the whimsical lilt to her voice that has always grated on Lara thick on her tongue.
Lara’s mouth tilts. “They know who you are. What you’ve done. What you’re planning. The dragons remain bound. King Kael of Zerynthia has been taken by Maireth as planned.” Lara’s words are monotone. Bored, almost.
That earns her a glance over a bare shoulder, one touched with faint amusement and no warmth at all.
“Lovely.”
Nyrielle does not ask about the threvenar. Does not ask if there is an antidote. Either she’s certain they don’t have one, or she no longer cares.
So, Lara does not offer anything on the topic. Omission or intention, she’s not yet sure.
“Though, it’s a shame. I did enjoy having them here,” Nyrielle comments, looking away wistfully. “Especially the General. So pretty to look at.”
Lara grunts a response, stepping closer to the table where Nyrielle picks at fruit on a platter. “And your plans for my next assignment?”
Nyrielle turns fully then, her face smooth and luminous and wrong in the way all stolen things were wrong.
Her beauty is not the sort that invites affection.
It compels attention. It demands witness.
The air itself seems to bend around her, light catching where it should not, shadow yielding where it ought to linger.
Too much power sits beneath her skin. It is not natural or balanced or deserved or earned. It is stolen from the pantheon.
Lara has seen that kind of excess before. It never ends well.
“You’ll open a Gateway for our army within the hour,” Nyrielle says.
“Maireth set her armies in motion as predicted. The woman has the stomach for war but not the patience,” she laughs.
“Maireth will strike Virellin by the moon’s peak—my Shades have confirmed as much.
Caeloria will do the dirty work. We’ll step in with Skyfire, blades, and divine magic to clean up what they miss, and to take down all remaining threats in one fell swoop. ”
She sucks honey off her finger, a too-sweet smile lifting the corners of her mouth.
Lara says nothing. She does not need to. Queens tend to continue speaking when silence fails to kneel for them.
Save Elyssara. She does seem to listen. At least for a while before her emotions surge. A weakness she needs to master.
“They will let The Barrier fall in the hopes they can preserve the number of dragons. In the hopes they will free them. Thalmyr will make his final attempt at absolution, and Elyssara will do exactly what all self-righteous girls do when handed a kingdom in ruins,” Nyrielle continues.
“First, she will mistake inheritance for destiny. Then, she will try to save everyone, and that will be her undoing.”
Lara sucks in a long breath, bored by the self-importance of a woman who’s hidden behind her wards for years.
“And my next assignment?” Lara prompts again, amethyst eyes pinning Nyrielle in place so she cannot wiggle out of the question. In truth, Lara is only interested in securing her next payment, not for the laborious games of kings and queens.
Nyrielle smiles then, slow and thin and ancient in all the wrong ways.
“I want you to cast the Memory Orbs to an echo-plane. Irrecoverable.”
The word settles across the courtyard with more weight than it should carry. Lara remains still, but her attention sharpens.
Nyrielle shoves the platter of fruit away, revealing maps of the realms that are spread beneath it, and marked with troop lines, plans, and projected points of impact.
Their origins are undeniable: Teddy. The strategies he built for the army he would unknowingly face.
Her chest squeezes, and she resents the emotion—whatever it is.
Unsure why feeling is present in the face of strategy at all.
She shoves it down, far beneath the surface of what she’ll ever let see the light of day.
Nyrielle places one pale hand on the coast of Dravara as if she means to claim not merely its land, but the entire idea of it.
“The gods were weak,” she says. “Bound by sentiment. By balance. By duty. They thought mortals were important. Significant. Worth protecting. All while their own equals crumbled before them.” She half-lilts, half-spits the words, something personal wedging its way in, like the tip of a needle under a nail.
“They let gods suffer for the sake of principles they were too vain to question. They called it responsibility.” Her gaze lifted to Lara’s. “I call it ignorance to maintain the illusion of peace. And worse… submission to a lesser species.”
There it is. Not grief or trauma or even vengeance. Superiority. The kind born when one is overlooked for too long. Ignored. Used.
“You do realize,” Lara says lazily, “that most tyrants believe they are correcting something.”
“Most tyrants are mortal,” Nyrielle scoffs indignantly.
That is not an answer. It is a confession.
The courtyard seems quieter after that. Even Nyrielle’s posture changes, just slightly, the shift so small another woman might have missed it. But Lara does not miss things. Not glances. Not silences. Not the exact moment a person reveals the shape of the cage they’ve mistaken for a throne.
Nyrielle’s gaze drifts skyward.
“When this is over, the realms will be remade properly,” she says, decisive. Definitive. “No fractured loyalties. No competing crowns. No gods to weaken the design. Only one order. One will.”
Lara huffs a low laugh.
“If you say so.”
There is no world more dangerous than one built entirely around a single person’s certainty.
Nyrielle ignores that. “I’ll show you to the Orbs before we depart for Virellin. We cannot expect obedience from Dravara’s people if they know their history. Better to wipe it from existence. Remove any risk of an uprising or rejection.”
A statement, not a request.
Lara’s mouth curves again, but this time there is less amusement in it.
“And if I don’t?”
At that, Nyrielle turns.
For a moment the air itself seems to recoil, as though the stolen power in her shifts closer to the surface. It is not a threat exactly. Not overtly. Gods do not need overt threats. Their certainty has always done the work for them.
“You will,” Nyrielle sings. “You have too much sense not to.”
She makes it sound like a compliment. A condescending one.
Lara’s lip fights the urge to lift into a sneer.
You have too much sense not to.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Lara holds her gaze, unblinking. Then, because curiosity has always been stronger in her than obedience, she asks, “Tell me something, Nyrielle. When all of this is done, when the realms are quiet and kneeling and arranged to your liking, what then?”
Nyrielle’s expression changes. It is not triumph that moves across her face. It is hunger.
“Then,” she says, “I will never be powerless again.”
And there it is. The wound beneath the empire. She is not looking for justice or restoration. Not even something as basic as greed. She is looking for fear. Fear sharpened into dominion, dressed in prophecy and strategy and inevitability until even its bearer mistakes it for something sacred.
Lara says nothing after that. Because there are moments when words do not clarify a person. They only waste time after truth has already arrived.
Nyrielle turns back to the sky, dismissing Lara without the courtesy of making it formal.
Lara inclines her head just enough to mock etiquette, then turns on her heel.
Something that feels very close to doubt follows her in silence until the doors close behind her and the corridor swallows the moon’s light.
The Marrow would have opinions about this.
Caev would tell her this is fucking stupid. An assignment from a madwoman is akin to walking willingly into the pyre. She can practically imagine the bored drawl of her voice.
Daphinia would listen to the conviction in Nyrielle’s words. She’d hear them completely, and believe the strength of them rather than the merit. “She sounds certain,” she’d say.
Lara’s stride does not falter.
She drags a hand through her hair, and mutters under her breath, “So do lambs on their way to the slaughter.”
Fucking Stars.
As Lara crosses through the Castle, one sentence from Nyrielle’s speech keeps needling at her, refusing to settle.
Then I will never be powerless again.
It is not the ambition that twists her gut. Not even the arrogance. It’s the fear. And, as if the realms delight in timing their cruelty, another voice rises beside it in her mind. Younger. Sharper. Furious in a way that only the wounded ever truly are.
You made me choose, Lara… and it looks like you belong to the highest bidder.
Seren.
Lara’s jaw tightens. Annoying girl. Stupid girl.
Dangerous girl. Her fingers curl once at her sides.
She had dismissed the words when they were spoken, because that was easier than examining why they struck home with such irritating precision.
But now, walking through a palace built on stolen order and listening to the echoes of a goddess too frightened to live without control, Lara finds that she cannot set them aside so easily.
Children. That was the truly inconvenient part of all this.
Lara has spent years avoiding attachments precisely because they invite weakness, and weakness in women is always the first thing men—or queens, or gods—reach to exploit. She has never wanted daughters. Never wanted the ache of caring what sort of world they inherited.
And yet Seren arrived in her life with all the elegance of a blade to the ribs and lodged there with deeply unwelcome persistence.
If Nyrielle wins, the world will become the kind of place Lara has always endured and never believed could be altered. If Nyrielle wins, girls like Seren will not survive it whole. That thought irritates her more than it should. Which, of course, makes it real.
Lara descends the castle steps beneath a darkening sky, the night breeze lifting the braids from her shoulders. Somewhere far beyond Nymeris, armies are moving. Kings are making peace with death. Girls are stepping into war with more courage than this world deserves.
Lara of the Evening Star has never believed in sides.
But for the first time in a very long while, neutrality feels suspiciously close to cowardice.