CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
My hands dropped, my peer sliding past him, back into the counsel room where Elva was still locked in sunlight that should’ve blinded her.
“I needed something that was my own,” I said. “I picked it when I was six. That’s as creative as I could get.” He turned too, studying her with me. “Is she okay?”
Easing me further into the hall, his voice lowered. “She’s lucky to have you, you know.”
I smiled at him, a real one this time, but the look on his face promised it wouldn’t last as he gently guided me into the shadow of an alcove.
I moved quickly, fingers catching at his armored arm. “Fritz, what happened?”
Wrinkles deepened across his forehead as his hand scraped the stubble along his jaw. “Verena—”
My eyes widened. It was never Verena. Always Ms. Vale. Cold, clipped, a wall I couldn’t breach.
“I’m afraid,” his voice cracked low, “my best has proven not good enough.”
My stomach plummeted. “What does that mean?”
“Hush.” He peered around the alcove wall before sinking back.
“It means the princess’s fate has been decided.
” Shoulders sagged, heavy even beneath the crush of steel.
Armor or not, he looked broken. With a hand to my shoulder, his eyes pleaded.
“You need to get her out and away from here as quickly and as quietly as you can.”
I pulled back, frowning. “I can’t…how am I supposed to do that?”
Where the hel would I even take her? Luamis was a kingdom of glass walls, and Elva was royalty.
Hiding her would be like dragging the sun from the sky.
Fritz straightened instantly, spine taut, hands clasped behind his back in polished obedience as he whispered, “There’s someone further south. Loyal to the cause. They’ll hide her. Hide you both.”
“I don’t understand,” I rasped, fighting the throb building at the back of my skull.
“I’ll arrange what I can.” He halted us outside the empty Hall, scanning the corridor like every shadow might betray him. “But your—” his eyes cut both ways again, “friends will have to do the rest.”
The ache stopped. My what?
My face stayed smooth, unreadable, as I lowered my hand. But inside, everything screamed.
He knew. About the Order. About me?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied, flat and effortless.
He gave the barest nod, a look measured, strong with what he wouldn’t say. “Very well. Watch for my letter.” Then he turned, hurrying down the corridor.
The light above the council door wavered once, twice, and died. And I could have sworn the golden-haired queen in the portrait below shifted her face from me.
Not in scorn, but down, sorrowful, as the last glow guttered out. As though she mourned what was coming.
The archives in the Csolenia palace ranked high among my sanctuaries.
First was the Roux Forest. Second, the dream where the woman’s hum threaded through my sleep. And third, this: the sacred vault layered in memory and myth.
Unlike the palace’s ivory bones and beige austerity, the archives breathed diversity.
Cherry-oak floors gleamed beneath my boots, shelves of polished crystal and dark wood soared twenty feet high, lining the chamber in perfect symmetry, all rising toward a mirrored ceiling, where their reflections stretched on forever.
Three majestic floors wound above one another, each rimmed with balconies that encircled a single, spiraling staircase of deep turquoise.
At the very top, the dome arched wide, its surface alive with color and motion—suns, constellations, radiant glyphs, all drifting and swirling in quiet harmony, casting a celestial glow over everything below.
The stained glass above spilled animated colors across the spines, as if each story, once frozen in time, was suddenly alive again.
It was more than a library. It was a haven. A place where memory and magic knelt side by side, breathing through every spine. Not because the tomes themselves seemed to hum, beckoning me closer. Not even because the pages carried the scent of the realms, like nostalgia pressed into paper.
But because of the freedom it offered.
I sat there, temples throbbing beneath my fingertips, willing the ache to fade. Elva and I had come to the archives after the closed-door meeting, a small rebellion of our own, Elva chasing solace, me chasing answers.
She had always loved the fairy-tale shelves, the ones with princes and towers and girls waiting to be saved. But lately, I feared the stories had started to sound too familiar.
Hours had bled away and we’d abandoned the folklores of gallant rescues, now knee-deep in brittle scrolls about the Bale and its hunger.
In the margins of every text, I searched for something else, a footnote, a cure, a loophole for the curse that marked me. Though there was nothing but dust and half-truths.
“How many more are there?” I groaned, letting my head fall against the velvet chair. The fabric was soft enough to smother a scream.
Elva set a tome in her lap with a soundless thud. “I don’t understand,” she murmured, voice too gentle for what we were seeking. “Not one scribe thought this was worth recording?”
We’d devoured every record that even whispered of the six Gods or curses. At first the scraps we found had hinted with promise. Now they were nothing but faded ink and dead ends.
A millennia ago, a curse had been loosed upon one soul. That was all it said. No name. No place. No fate. No end. As if history didn’t want fate to remember.
And as the silence of the great library stretched, I felt myself begin to fray from the quiet, rising terror that I would never know.
The sickly-sweet perfume of roses drowned the lower floor, clawing down my throat. Cloying. Choking. I shoved the stench out through my nose and slammed the tome shut.
“Verena—” Elva’s whisper cracked like glass. “Those are ancient texts; you must handle them delicately.”
She snatched it from me, smoothing her palms over the leather spine, then stacking it with the others, every motion precious. She placed them on the crystal table as if they were relics of bone, then reached for another.
This one was painted in gold, and she held it against her chest like it, hopefully, held all our answers.
I ignored her. Ignored the looming weight coiling up my throat. The doom that felt too close, too certain.
I would not be lost.
Not to history. Not to this curse. And certainly not to myself.
The texts spoke of no ending. But there had been a beginning. Someone had walked this path before me. If they had drowned in the dark as I am now, then maybe, just maybe, they had found their way back to the light.
My dread must have been written across my forehead, because Elva’s face softened as she looked at me, giving me one of her sympathetic smiles. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She meant the snake. The one I’d lost.
I cleared my throat, skimming the titles strewn across the table. “No.”
Yes.
Her hands rubbed together, folding against her lap. “Verena…”
I reached for the nearest book, cracking the spine and pretending to read. “I’m fine.”
I’m lost.
All I wanted was to be rid of the curse. From the moment I opened my eyes and felt its nails rake into my skull. And now a fraction of it is gone and I was suffocating.
She stretched a hand over the edge of her chair, fingers drifting in the air, waiting to find mine. “It’s okay to share what you’re feeling. It’s just me.”
A few pages shifted under my fingers as I blew out a slow breath. “I am feeling nothing but an oncoming headache, Elvira.”
I feel broken.
Her hand fell back to her lap, her gaze following it. “I might know a thing about a part of you that should be there—”
She flinched as I snapped the book closed.
“No, you wouldn’t. Because your magic has always been this way.
It’s all you’ve known.” I hadn’t wanted to throw the words at her, but once they tasted my mouth, they didn’t stop.
“I had something,” I lowered my voice to a rasp.
“A weapon that made me feel like maybe this curse was not the worst possible fucking thing that could have happened to me. A defense I could pour that anger and never-ending resentment into.” Her eyes welled, grief brimming.
My own voice fractured. “And it was taken from me. Never to exist again.”
She swiped a tear from the corner of her eye, as if I hadn’t already seen it. But I had. And gods, I hated myself for it instantly.
None of this was her fault. Not her magic’s half sleep. Not her endless patience. She was only reaching for me, trying to build a bridge across the dark. Trying to make me feel less alone.
But that was the wound at the heart of it all.
The snake had been my mask, my fangs, my vessel for everything I couldn’t voice—resentment, rage, the ache. It bared its teeth, so I didn’t have to. Now it was gone.
And what remained was raw, unfiltered, me. And I’d turned that wreckage on the one person who had never deserved it. Shame coiled in my stomach like a second curse. My head dipped, heavy, my braid slipping forward as if to hide me.
“I’m sorry.” That I meant.
Elva sniffled, not looking up, blinking away the tears as if they’d never been there, the way she always did. Letting it roll off her heart like it didn’t leave cracks. She never gave grief time to take root.
But me? I would carry this moment like poison in my lungs. I would remember how I’d made her feel, forever.
“V, look at this.” Elva’s fingers ghosted across a brittle spine, the gold script almost faded into nothing:
Gods and Creations.
We were still here. Hours gone. Buried in this godsdamned archive, begging dead pages for truths no one thought to write down.
She continued, “It says five hundred years after the six Gods gave Selvarra the three kingdoms, a darkness fell. Brief. But it swallowed the continent whole.” Her finger traced the passage.
“Some believed the galaxies shifted, causing a temporary blindness. But others…others thought it meant only one thing—” The pause stretched.
I leaned closer. “That one of the Gods had fallen.” Her breath caught.
“They exist as one, Verena. Without all six, life unravels.”
A beat passed. Then another.
If even a single God fell, so would we? The entire world?
I pinched the bridge of my nose, exhaustion gnawing the corners of my mind. “So, some thought one fell...” I exhaled, air spilling between my teeth. “But wouldn’t that mean we’ve already begun to perish? Unless they fell...but didn’t die?”
The question had always burned quiet in me. Why they left us. Why they vanished after the war. Deimos was chained, imprisoned in the pit he forged for himself. And he wasn’t a true God, but damn near close enough to end us. Close enough to earn the title.
And still, he had never risen because he couldn’t. Not unless the others had fallen too.
“Can a God even be killed?”
Elva shut the tome with care, the sound a hush instead of a thud. “Anything can die.” She rose, smoothing the pale-yellow folds of her gown into obedience. “Even a God.”
Even a curse?
I dragged the book from her hands, my thumb following the carved grooves scorched into its cover. Black etchings spearing outward, flames leaping from the corners, reaching for the single broken line that was seared into its heart where a half circle waited.
Not embellishment. A seal.
“And what does that have to do with my curse?” I frowned.
This wasn’t one we’d pulled from the shelves, wasn’t one I remembered choosing at all.
My eyes drifted over the library where the high window poured light down through the dust and hush.
And for an instant, long enough to notice, the light caught on something—a glimmer, gone as soon as I blinked.
She twirled a strand of golden hair tight around her finger, knuckle blanching. “That I don’t know.” Her lips pressed into a thin line. “But maybe the darkness connects to the last one who bore the mark.” She hovered her hand over the triangle, careful not to touch.
The faint light in her expression faltered, dimming with the thought: two friends, mourning the fates we’d never asked to carry.
“If a God had truly fallen,” I asked, “wouldn’t Selvarra already be dust in the wind?”
The question lingered—Reve’s delayed ship. The tremor in the air that night at the tavern.
Maybe when a God falls, the world doesn’t break in an instant. Maybe the ruin begins somewhere unseen, and the ripple is already on its way.
A pale orb was conjured from her palm as she lifted it, fragile as breath. The stained glass shattered its glow into wisps of color that cut across her skin, stars flickering, here for a heartbeat, gone the next.
“There’s no record of how long it takes,” she whispered. The light wavered, then shrank back into her hand. Her hiss broke the silence, followed by the catch of a sniffle.
I pushed to my feet. Darkness stirred, restless, flexing inside my bones, then curled deep again. It never bared its fangs at Elva. “But can it be stopped?”
Her shoulders sagged, a weight she couldn’t hide. “I don’t know, V.” She tipped her chin to the guards. They closed in, cloaks brushing as they folded around her and she drifted toward the doors, her voice trailing. “Selvarra still stands. Thousands of years later. So, I hope so.”
The kaleidoscope above dimmed to nothing as a cloud passed, hope dimming with it. And I stood alone, knowing the end wasn’t waiting.
It was already in me.