CHAPTER FORTY-THREE #3
Carefully, Ford asked, “We’re not pretending she survived that, right?”
I shot him a look. “We don’t know what happened.”
“Which means we do,” he muttered.
My jaw tightened. “No body means no certainty. Pixies vanish when they want to.”
“She didn’t deserve that,” Elva whispered, hands twisting in her lap.
“No one does,” Nezra stated.
“But a Veyari?” Elva pressed. “She must have known. Must have seen it coming.”
“Not all visions are warnings. Some are just endings.” I swallowed. “She saw hers long before we arrived. Veyaris always do.” I met their eyes one by one. “Whether she walked into it or was dragged, maybe even she couldn’t tell the difference.”
Ford’s arms flew out in my direction as he dipped his chin. “Well, whether she’s alive or not, the Brights also stole someone.”
I frowned. “Another pixie?”
He nodded. “A girl. I’m told she’s quiet, kind of different. Doesn’t leave her tent much. They think she was hiding during the attack. Her name is Willa, she’s about Wells’ age. But here’s the thing—” He blew out a strained breath. “Like Maerin, she’s a Veyari.”
Everyone froze, except my hand, trembling against the stammer in my chest.
Nezra’s sorrowful voice broke first. “Obrann must have had Maerin hunted down, knowing she would never bend to him.”
The words gutted me. Mae had known that they were coming, that it couldn’t be avoided.
She was exactly where she was meant to be. That’s what she told me. And I had overlooked it, brushed it aside. Fate had told her she would find me. And then...
Had she even fought back? Or had she welcomed it, ready to follow the love she’d lost into whatever world waited beyond this one?
Either way, her life might have ended because of us. Because we had been here.
My throat burned, the Viper pressing closer. You brought death. You always bring death.
How the fuck did they find us?
“They took Willa because she’s young,” Nezra said, pulling me out of the spiral. “Unshaped and easier to manipulate. Her visions are likely raw and untethered, more valuable to them but also dangerous if they learn too much.” Her stare warily swept the room.
But it was me who spoke next. “They want control over their fate. And if the future isn’t to their liking,” my arms dropped, fists tightening at my sides until a gentle rush down the bond sent a calming shiver over my spine and I relaxed a bit, “they’ll twist it.
Shatter it.” A swallow burned down my throat. “Rewrite it.”
All eyes landed on me as though I held the answers, as though the curse curling inside me was meant for wisdom and not ruin. But I knew better.
Obrann wasn’t chasing shadows without reason. It was why he was searching for the Nyctom heir, why he was slaughtering servants for the Ryuu heirloom gone missing.
It all was for one tyrannical result.
I grabbed the tome where I had left it on the chair, skimming the pages as quickly as I could. “What happens,” I asked, already dreading the answer, “if Obrann and Isolde get all six divinity stones?”
Two stones per crown. Balance, order, unity. So why did it feel like preparation?
Ronan said, snarling, “That will never happen. They’ll never collect all six. And we will steal Willa back before they can even touch her power.”
Inessa’s dagger spun endlessly between her fingers as Nezra watched Ronan, the caravan darkening as horses snorted outside where his smoke leaked back into the world.
“They weren’t just symbols of unification for ceremony or show.” My fingers traced a sketch of six stones orbiting a broken crown. “They were reservoirs…for survival. They hadn’t abandoned the kingdoms and left them defenseless. They left behind everything needed should war return.”
Elva nodded. “Surely they had foreseen this too. That one day the war wouldn’t come from beyond our borders, but from within.”
I dragged my fingers down the inked edge of the page—destroyed palaces, shattered wings, fire raining from the sky. Not against an invader, but over the stones themselves. Over the temptation to wield them.
“They’re to protect us against ourselves,” I whispered, mostly to myself.
That was why they chose the heirs as they had. It had never been just about bloodline or strength. It was about trust. About a unity strong enough to resist the lure of limitless power. Strong enough to bring the stones together only when desperation demanded it.
Which meant…Reve had been right when he said worth had nothing to do with it. In Selvarra, obedience was what earned a crown.
But if balance required six, why did the memory only show one?
Something cold slithered under my skin. Ronan felt it through the bond, his eyes snapping to mine.
In the wrong hands, the stones wouldn’t defend the kingdoms—
They would unmake them.
“If Obrann controlled the stones, he wouldn’t just rule Selvarra.” My stare scanned the room, catching on the panic heightening through everyone’s eyes. “He would reshape it.”
And it would be catastrophic.
He needed the heirs to stop the Bale from wiping our world off the map. But he also needed the stones to kill them all afterward. To drown Luamis from its light, burn Nyctom’s darkness to ash. To scour every dragon from the sky. Perhaps even to awaken what slept beneath.
“That power is too holy for Obrann to be able to command alone,” Inessa stated. “It would rip him apart.”
The raven’s throat warbled as Nezra reached her arm out, allowing it to walk and perch back on her shoulder. “There is no such thing as holy power when those unworthy of it try to wield it.”
Inessa slammed her dagger into the table beside her, wood splintering.
Elva flinched, Ford clutching his chest. “You can’t just—stars above—warn a man!”
“Nyctom’s heirloom vanished with its heir, didn’t it?” Elva asked.
Ronan crossed his arms. “That’s the rumor.”
Gently, she pressed, “Does anyone remember what its stones were? Or at the very least, what relics they were forged into?”
Nezra ignored them all, looking directly at me.
“Oh! I know this one.” Ford cleared his throat, shuffling toward the center of us. “Amethyst was one. Forged into a glass orb that King Kairos always kept on him.” His eyes fell, brows drawing together before he looked toward my hip. “The other…was—”
“Ruby.” I cut in.
It had bothered me since the day he gave it to me. And the more I turned it over in my mind, the more the cracks in Callum’s story about how he found the stone for my dagger split wide open.
He had said his mission took him into the caves near the mountain. But it hadn’t. He’d gone west to the shore that day. And in the library, when Elva and I had been scouring over numerous books, I studied every stone Luamis could forge.
White marble was not one of them.
Which meant there was no way he had found that marbled stone in any cave. No way Wells had forged my dagger from it.
The weapon pulsed once against my hip, my hand dropping from the book to the gem at its hilt.
Ruby—the color of a gift to the night domain when the kingdoms were built.
Callum had given me Nyctom’s heirloom, knowing Obrann would burn the realms to get to it.
Unknowing that Nezra had already shown me that it was a fake.