Chapter 32
CHAPTER
Two days before Ozik’s Evocation, he crept through the thick forest outside the walls of the city of Wrultho, light on his feet, careful not to make a sound. He took one step. Two. Three.
A small squeal emanated from the sage green bush in front of him, and then Ellena sprinted out from behind it.
Ozik cut to the right and chased her, careful to always be a step behind, until she burst through a wall of branches into their small, sacred clearing, marked in the center by a towering olive tree—the tallest in the area.
Ellena threw her small body against it, spreading her arms over the long trunk and squealing in delight.
“You are far too fast,” Ozik told her as he feigned exhaustion, placing his hands on his knees and taking exaggerated deep breaths. Then he approached, running his hand upon his daughter’s inky black hair, braided around her head in a coronet.
From their left, Ellena’s mother Julianna emerged through a small path between trees, holding her shimmering black bow in her delicate fingers.
With the other hand she clutched a rabbit, a small red stain upon its underbelly, a product of the arrows that Julianna had surely conjured.
Her midnight hair fell from its containment in messy strands around her face, her cheeks blushed the same color he’d memorized from the first moment he met her.
He wanted to make her blush like that again, to be the reason warmth coated her cheeks.
Wrapped in a turquoise-blue dress, Julianna’s bare feet were stained from the forest floor, and though that same dirt smeared along the side of her leg and even a small streak across her face, she was still the most beautiful woman Ozik had ever laid eyes on.
At her side, a slinking fox made of the same wisps of shadows as her bow curled around her legs, darting in and out of the tree line in playful gestures.
The bow in her hands scattered to just licks of smoke on her wrists while Julianna’s fox leapt into the air, dissipating on the wind into glimmering streaks of black.
Dark magic ran through Julianna’s veins, one of shadows and smoke that could suffocate the very light out of a room. Because though she was sunshine, Julianna had always been eclipsed. She was born to the goddess Veragi, just as Ozik had been born to Zetyr.
Others called Julianna a curse, but to Ozik, she was a summoning.
He stepped toward her, but as he did, her eyes registered the movement. She stepped back. This was his plight: to love a woman greater than he’d ever known before, to be the father of her child, and still not have her.
Ellena ran to Julianna, and as she did, the rest of the world slipped into irrelevance.
Ozik had known women all his life, but never in the way he’d known his daughter.
Before he’d laid eyes on the tiny creature with his same liquid-gold eyes, he had known only one thing with certainty: The world was his for the taking.
But upon knowing his child, the axis of that world shifted.
It was no longer his to take, but rather his to give.
Together, they sat beneath the olive tree while Ellena braided strands of wild grass with vivid pink flowers.
Ozik fiddled mindlessly with the black stone embedded in his ring—an anchor to his Zetyr bloodline, the only surviving bloodline for generations.
Zetyr witches had been hunted to extinction.
No one knew how Ozik’s father, Laus Vichardi—an imprisoned criminal, no less—had come to claim the magic.
Laus had emerged from the catacombs beneath Wrultho with an anchor, a Zetyr talisman.
Some said he’d made a deal with the devil, others said he had been chosen by the deities themselves.
What they did know was that it was Ozik’s mother, a witch who hailed from Ohros, the goddess of fate and sight, who had given Laus the ultimate bargain: her magic, in exchange for a son.
It had given him a well of raw sentimental magic to draw from, and with it, Laus had vanquished the reigning Zuheia coven and conquered the city of Wrultho.
Yet Ozik had long learned that the how of things never mattered so much as the why.
And the why was simple: because of Ozik.
For the Ohros witches had the gift of foresight, and his mother knew that to take this path was to deliver them all to greatness.
It was on Ozik’s thirteenth birthday when the Ohros witches confirmed his mother’s vision and declared he would be the most powerful Zetyr witch in history.
And on that day, his father had taken the enormous black stone anchor inlaid in his dagger and split it in three.
One for him, one for his wife, and one for Ozik.
That was the first day he heard Zetyr’s voice in his mind. He had heard it every day since.
As they watched Ellena weave, Julianna was quiet.
There were times like these, where she seemed lost in her own mind, and then her eyes lifted to his.
Bright light shone from behind her irises, a sign that her own goddess spoke in her mind.
They were the same, her and him. Divine, born into a power unlike any other, a mouthpiece for their deity.
Just as Ozik had heard the voice of Zetyr since his father gifted him his anchor, Julianna heard the voice of Veragi. She convened with the goddess daily.
The white light in Julianna’s eyes dimmed, and she opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it.
“What is it?” he asked softly.
Julianna only shook her head. “We should go home.”
Home, to the house Ozik had built for them outside the city walls, where the river met moss and wildflowers did not have to hide from insular men.
Ozik looked at Ellena, who would never receive his Zetyr magic.
Instead, she would inherit her mother’s.
It was the only reason Laus Vichardi had allowed the child to live; she was a girl, and that at least categorized her existence as a disappointment instead of a threat.
The time Ozik could see Julianna and Ellena had grown shorter with every season; each year Ozik came closer to his Evocation, the less tolerant of a Veragi woman and a bastard child his father had become.
Last year, his father had insisted the visitations cease altogether.
He had demanded Ozik focus on more permanent things.
And so Ozik loved them in the shadows of the forest, beneath the leaves of an olive tree.
This half-life—it would all be over soon. When Ozik emerged from his Evocation and he had the complete anchor, Ozik would change every tile in his estate to suit their desires. The kitchen would shift, the rooms would overturn, the bathing chambers would be whatever colors Ellena declared.
Then he would marry Julianna. Somehow, he would convince her.
He would honor her in the way she deserved for having brought Ellena into this world.
Ozik didn’t care if Julianna’s magic marked her as cursed, if she would never offer him the same bargain his mother had offered Laus.
Ozik would be strong enough. He was destined to be the most powerful Zetyr witch in history.
There was a reason Zetyr spoke to him directly before he even inherited his magic.
“It’s time,” Julianna said, black mist curling around her fingertips as she brushed them over their daughter’s shoulder.
Ellena looked at Ozik with a somber lowering of her eyes.
Goodbye did not suit either of them well.
Still, she was an obedient girl, so Ellena rose from the grass and wandered, never farther than their hidden paths, her dainty hand dragging along the bushes and flowers.
Ozik walked her to their home’s gate just as her hand splayed toward a bush of white bell-shaped flowers.
Ozik blocked her fingers. “Tisel, dear, is more deadly than a blade. A quiet killer, quick as a breath.”
Ellena’s small hand shot back to her chest, the other curling around it. “Sorry, Papa.”
“We’re almost there,” Julianna whispered, taking Ellena’s arm and guiding her through the gate.
Ozik said goodbye to his daughter silently, with a shared look only they two could understand.
When he looked at her like that, the world around them went silent.
But then she slipped through the gate, and Julianna, too, and though his heart lurched to follow them, all Ozik could do was grip the bars and watch.
His guard sat atop a horse at the edge of the forest, faithfully awaiting Ozik’s return.
“All is well?” his guard asked.
Ozik nodded.
They traveled through the mighty walls of Wrultho and back into the great city, going directly to the center where Ozik’s family estate was built.
More guards lined the perimeter of the great Zetyr stronghold, but in the throes of his historic Evocation, Ozik had already begun to plant a seed.
The guards knew his father had an expiration date, and so he had slowly, inconspicuously turned them to his own needs.
The men protecting this home would bleed for him—for Ellena and Julianna, too, when he commanded it.
Because his father could be many things: a ruler, a witch, a king in his own right, but he could not be Divine, no matter how hard he tried.
When Ozik ambled back through the door of his father’s estate, a part of him remained in that forest. Two more days, he repeated to himself. Two more days.