CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Verena
MY MIND STUTTERED, refusing to catch up with what my heart already knew.
Elva was the lost heir.
I couldn’t piece it together. None of it made sense.
Why forge me into her protector if she’d been hidden, nameless, all this time?
Isolde kept her glare on Fritz where he bent beside Elva, cradling her head against his leg.
She’d gotten inside my head, controlled whatever part we shared. But how could I be shackled to her venom while she walked free inside her darkness?
How could she only control mine like it was hers to command?
Nezra’s whisper from months ago rose unbidden, Isolde once being beautiful, radiant. Happy. Before something broke her. Before bitterness rooted so deep it turned her magic into a cage.
A terrible clarity flashed through me.
If our curses were entwined, threads spun from the same loom, then maybe, just maybe, I could see her like she saw me.
I closed my eyes, plunging down that connection, shoving past her power, diving under the black ice.
For a moment, it worked. I saw flashes of her memory: Isolde young, her smile unguarded, her hand clasped with Kairos’ beneath a storm-lit sky.
His lips at her throat, promises breathed into her skin.
Then another image—Leora, stepping into the light, gilded and untouchable. Kairos’s gaze shifted. The laughter died from Isolde’s mouth. Then the moment she began to wither completely from what she hid in her veins. The moment she made a deal with death.
My eyes shot open as I came up, gasping. “It was you.” My head shook in disbelief. “You cursed me.”
“Sneaky little thing, aren’t you?” Her face twisted, a scowl licking across her lips. “He was mine,” she hissed. “We burned for one another. Until that wretched queen cast her glow on him like a spell.”
My stomach turned.
“Leora and Kairos were pathetic at pretending their love was anything less than kindness. Sebastian saw through it the moment their gazes lingered too long. He warned me the second he had proof.”
I almost wanted to laugh at her. “You’re nothing but a scorned lover.”
A sound between a scoff and a snarl left her lips. “He stopped loving me because of my curse. So, I made sure he’d never escape it. If he couldn’t love me, then he would be forced to love someone just as damned.”
And it all snapped into place. “So, you cursed his nonexistent firstborn. You used the same magic that damned you. Then why isn’t Elva the one cursed?”
She huffed a laugh. “Because someone found out and warned him.”
I stood, moving forward before I could stop myself, not making it more than a step. Reve’s hand clamped around my arm, yanking me back.
I didn’t even look at him. My eyes stayed locked on her. “Why were you cursed, Isolde?”
Her jaw flexed, that mask of control starting to crack. “Because I agreed to it.”
“Who—”
“Don’t bother,” she waved a hand at me in dismissal. “You already know who would make such a bargain.”
A name thundered in my mind. A ruler of monsters.
Isolde’s attention slid to Elva, still limp on the floor, and her tone turned almost wistful.
“Her necklace?” She gestured, like this was all some exquisite jest. “It was Leora’s first. A gift from Sebastain, passed from mother to daughter, neither realizing it was suppressing what they were.
Keeping their power buried. Dulling the light. ”
My pulse pounded in my throat. “Sebastian knew? He doomed his own daughter and that’s why her magic never surfaced…”
Her lips curled. “Oh, it surfaced. It just never answered. You see, it takes two halves to wake what was buried in her. And Sebastian always knew Elvira wasn’t his. He played his part as well as he could, but his loyalties have always been to me.”
My eyes darted to Elva, the air around her hummed, faint with power straining to be born. “You silenced her,” I muttered. “You caged her.”
“Not I.” Isolde gestured toward Obrann. “Your king did.”
I couldn’t breathe. All this time…Elva hadn’t been powerless. She’d been bound.
Obrann stepped forward, snatching the necklace from Isolde’s grasp. The chain clinked against his fingers as he held it up for all to see. “The stone inside,” he said, “is no mere trinket. It’s Kaida blood, laced with nix metal. Designed to cage magic until called upon.”
Ronan’s voice ripped through. “That’s why you wanted more of their blood.” His glare didn’t waver from Isolde, not once. “You needed it to create more of them.”
Elysian went still beside him.
Ronan’s jaw flexed. “You’ll never find them.”
Isolde didn’t even glance at him. “You think I care now?” Her attention turned to me, and her expression twisted into something crueler than hatred. “You wear her face,” she said. “And still, you think yourself above me. But we are the same damn creation. Only wearing different skins.”
“We are not the same,” I spat.
“Do you want to know why you were chosen to protect her? It’s not just the curse who taints your veins—”
A shudder crawled through me.
I’d always told myself that the weight in my soul was the curse gnawing for control. But in truth, I knew what she meant.
The floor tremored beneath my feet. I could feel it. The pull. The truth I had never dared name.
“My mother,” I rasped, voice breaking,” she was powerful.”
“Mother.” She gave a humorless breath. “That’s generous. But once, yes, she was.”
Was. The word slammed into me.
“She made you only to watch you die.” She paced, circling me like prey. “But guilt makes even divinity do strange things. She couldn’t kill you.” Her expression didn’t change, but something sharpened beneath her voice. “Nor could he.”
“My father?”
Obrann stepped into our space. “She called forth the stone. The one forged to contain what she truly was.” He turned the pendant in his hand. “She made each into a twin, a decoy, and told only your father.”
“Vivianna poured her essence into that one true stone. Every drop of creation, every breath of divinity. And when she placed it in its vessel,” Isolde’s finger pointed at me, shaking with fury, “it became yours to claim.”
The name burned through me in an ascension of breath reborn. Vivianna. The first Goddess. The primal mother. The beginning. Creation herself. She wasn’t a myth, wasn’t a dream.
And what I had believed to be solely my curse, the thing that had hunted me, haunted me, was her.
“The only reason the Viper hasn’t devoured you whole,” Isolde hissed, “is because you are already filled to the brim with forces much rarer, keeping you balanced.” Movement slithered behind her eyes.
“But even your blood won’t save you once we have that stone.
” Her eyes shot to my dagger, the one sheathed at Reve’s hip, landing on the ruby.
“Do you know what that makes you, cursed one?”
It began low, quiet, learning its shape again, rebirth a holy ache beneath my skin. Then it burned. Not to destroy, only to remind me what I was made of. Two forces moved within me—one a hymn, one a hiss.
But then Ronan said, “You forgot one.”
Isolde turned, the edge of her grin faltering. “Forgot what?”
His eyes were on me, unwavering.
Verena. It slid down the bond, smooth smoke over open wounds. Don’t hold it back anymore. Don’t suppress it. If you’re lost to the darkness, I’ll find you. Every time, in every life, my soulflame.
Something inside me snapped in release. The tension I’d carried all my life splintered. And from those fractures, power bled out. Because the divinity stone wasn’t something I held—
Ronan turned to Isolde, eyes like cataclysmic fire. “Verena Vyratheon—” His voice carried a command to the universe. “The risen Goddess of Selvarra.”
I bore it in my soul.
Isolde went still, her face blanching.
And then I broke open.
Light and darkness collided in my chest, a shockwave ripping outwards through the air. The Viper recoiled, hissing inside me, overtaken by something older, something Primal. The ground trembled. The palace shuddered. The stars themselves leaned closer. Because I wasn’t the curse any longer.
I was the origin.
My veins lit with new power, liquid divinity flooding through my blood, my bones, my very breath. Euphoria and agony braided together until I didn’t know which I was feeling, only that it was everything.
My head fell back. My lips parted—
And I screamed, soundless and infinite.
It was all too much. Too much force, too much fury, too much truth.
My bones threatened to splinter as my muscles stretched against themselves, blood burning in liquid fire.
Centuries of suppressed power poured through me, no longer chained, no longer asking permission.
And for the first time, it wasn’t the Viper, it wasn’t the curse—
It was only me.
Heat grew beneath my skin, prickling, as gold light sliced through my veins, mixing with the crimson and onyx, living lightning dancing together.
I watched it move in a terrifying charge as the first crack split across my arms, down to my fingertips. For the first time, power didn’t consume me, it completed me. Divinity and darkness merging into one.
A laugh tore free from my throat, building into something hysterical and triumphant, the cry of something ancient remembering itself. If they wanted a nightmare, then I would show them Godhood wearing its face.
Energy erupted from my palms in streaks through the air, the force circling my feet as it lifted me, inch by inch, until I hung suspended above the floor.
My hands spread wide; palms open to the world as a web of electricity leapt from my fingers.
It struck the chains binding my friends, splintering them to dust, breaking metal ringing in the air.
Ronan’s head tilted back, his throat working as he drew a breath. Then, slow, he touched three fingers to his lips before holding them against his heart.
The gesture hit me harder than the power ever could.
It shuddered in my chest, love and pain and the remembrance of every life and lie that led to this moment.
A whisper swept down the bond, his voice quiet and wrecked. At that moment, I knew. The way he looked at me, the words he spoke, I had him. Entirely.
Ronan bowed his head in devotion, and the dragon prince fell to his knees before me.
And I smiled. Because this is how kings break.