Epilogue Kion
Epilogue
Kion
Estrela Field, Brazil
The entire bloody world is watching.
Watching, as the NCL Stymphs take to the skies against the ACC Longmas, bronze-beaked stymphalians staring down the dark green, winged, dragon-scaled horses from China.
Watching, as the match explodes into action, wings beating through the air to the rhythym of the crowd’s stomps below, as Kion rises higher and higher on Cato, blinking back the glare of the stadium lights in the midnight darkness, eyes on those draconian jewels shimmering on the top of the siege towers.
This is what it’s all come down to. The weeks of blood, sweat, and tears they’ve poured into the World Cup, the pulled muscles and weapon wounds, the hours spent training and training and training. This is the final, bloody match. And he’ll be damned if they don’t win.
His heart drums determinedly in his chest as he, James, and Taissa swoop into their Echelon Position, forming that diagonal line as straight as a blade, each wingbeat precise and measured.
As the crowd roars below, they speed like a launched arrow toward the Longmas’ tower, the cold wind whipping through their hair.
Come on, he urges Cato, as the defense spots them and readies for an attack, their Wingeds whickering in anticipation. Come on—
As the scaled beasts rush them, Cato squawks in fury and plummets into a neat tuck-and-drop, followed by a barrel roll that throws the incoming Knocker off guard.
Taissa and James, atop Cronus and Mabb, have done similar maneuvers, and although their Echelon has been disrupted, the momentary disorientation of the Knockers leaves a clear path toward the weapons tiers, and the draconian jewels above.
Nobody from their team has been imprisoned in the holding tier yet, so James serves as a bloody good distraction as Kion and Taissa twist and turn through the air on their stymphs, before realigning themselves and hurtling toward their jewels.
“They’re onto us,” Cato calls to him only a few moments later, and Kion grunts between his teeth, lifting a hand to signal to Taissa as the Knockers struggle back onto their tails.
She catches his stare, her beautiful brown eyes narrowed and determined as she jerks her head into a nod.
A Bait and Switch. Kion will make as if he’s flying toward the jewels while Taissa feigns interest in the weapons tiers, before both of them quickly switch places.
Their Dozers—Bronte, Knox, and óríon—are doing their best to keep the Knockers off them, but their longmas are fucking fast.
Kion bites the inside of his cheek as he and Taissa implement the switch—he drops down to the weapons tier as she rises up toward the jewels, and Cato hurtles through it, grabs an axe and a sword.
Rushing out of the tier, he catches óríon’s eye and hurls the axe toward him in a textbook Herculean Hovet.
óríon snatches it out of the air by the hilt and sends a dangerous smile to the player careening toward him. The player immediately pulls away.
Below, the crowd begins to scream.
Taissa’s got a draconian jewel past the pitch’s divider. A grin splits Kion’s lips. Two more to go.
Only the Longmas have snatched weapons from their siege tower, and as their Robbers sweep back to their side, one of them throws swords to two of the Knockers currently chasing Kion and Cato through the air.
Damn. He urges Cato into an aileron roll to avoid the blades, one of them just barely grazing a few strands of his hair.
Kion mutters a silent thanks to the healers waiting down below, watching with wary eyes.
And next to them, prancing back and forth with a banner reading, Go, Stymphs!
Go, Taissa! attached to both of her wings, Sansa is cheering on the team with all the charm of a wyvern covered in glittery pixie dust.
Which is to say, a fucking lot.
Mouth twitching as he glances away from Sansa, Kion blocks an incoming swordplay from one of the Longmas players with his own blade, the shining silver clashing together under the light of the stars.
He grits his teeth as Cato drops three meters in the air to escape the defense, and reorients back toward the siege tower.
Kion sees that Knox and Robin are waiting in the holding cell, and hisses in relief as James soars through the tower and tags them back into the match.
“KION!” a voice to his right shouts, and then there’s Taissa, grinning wildly at him as she gestures to the two jewels waiting ahead. One for each of them. “Think we can manage it?”
He feels an answering grin curve his lips.
“Bloody right, we can,” he shouts back, and then as the screaming crowd below reaches a crescendo, they hurtle toward those jewels.
Taissa looks over her shoulder to beam at him, Cronus snapping a bite out of a longma’s hoof when the winged horse dares to come too close.
óríon and Knox are shouting something behind them, something that sounds like, GO, GO NOW! Their Dozers are holding off the defense, but they don’t have long.
Come on, Cato, thinks Kion as his stymph’s wings beat faster and faster.
And then they’re there, at the siege tower, splitting to come through on opposite sides, both of them grabbing a draconian jewel as they pass each other.
The stadium begins to shake with the roars of the crowd. Kion holds the jewel close to his chest with one hand, the other tight around his sword.
Ahead of him, Taissa is nearing the boundary line when, out of nowhere, a longma comes hurtling directly for her and Cronus from her right side. Cronus seems to freeze out of shock, squawking something—
Kion watches with pride—and without even a bloody hint of nerves—as Taissa clocks it, as she shouts something in alarm…as, in one swift movement, she unbuckles herself from her harness and leaps upward…
In excruciatingly slow motion, she ascends upward, as if she has feathered wings of her own stretching from her back.
She lifts and lifts, one of her legs slightly bent, the draconian jewel glittering opalescent in her hands.
For a moment, time seems to stop, and she seems to hover there amongst the low wisps of clouds: an angel, haloed in sunlight. Ethereal.
Beneath her, the longma is flying over Cronus, hitting air where his rider used to be, stirring the old stymph’s sparse feathers.
Below, the crowd’s cheers are slowly cresting to roars, the tiny audience members lifting to their feet on the bleachers.
Taissa’s plait shifts in the wind, exposing her slender, bare neck.
And then time shivers, catching up to itself—the longma is shooting past in a furious blur of scales, and Taissa is falling back to her stymph, hitting his back and re-saddling with impossible deftness, clutching the draconian jewel triumphantly.
Screams erupt in the stadium as Cronus hurtles forward, approaching the damn midpoint with breathtaking speed.
Taissa Cho, thinks Kion, pride squeezing his heart like a vise, never needed that damn Luck glyph.
She twists back to look at him as she shoots across the pitch’s boundary line, disbelief written all over her face as applause covers the stadium like thunder. And with a start, Kion realizes:
They only need one more jewel. The one that he holds.
As the Longmas’ defense reorients toward him, Kion leans over Cato, keeping his breathing steady. Ahead, Taissa is waiting for him, her eyes shining. Just a little farther—
He streaks past the boundary line.
And the night explodes with cheers as Kion stares at the draconian jewel in his hand. They won. They fucking won the World Cup—
It’s a blur: the way the NCL Stymphs scream in triumph, huddling together in the air as one, tears streaming down their faces.
Their stymphs caw in triumph as the moon shines high, high, high above, as purple-and-silver streamers fill the air, as it’s announced, over the stadium, that the NCL Stymphs are World Cup champions.
When his feet hit the ground, he’s practically tackled by a massively heavy wyvern, who slobbers all over his face like a puppy.
Fans stream out onto the pitch, waving flags and banners, and amongst it all, he finds Taissa: Taissa, disentangling herself from an embrace with Estee and Coach Junie, turning to face him, her cheeks flushed with happiness and disbelief as she tackles him into a kiss, feverish and ecastatic.
“We won,” she whispers against his lips. “Morgana, Kion, we won.”
His heart ricochets inside his chest as he lets his hand slip into the pocket of his riding leathers—the pocket over his heart where, for the duration of the game, a small box has been nestled.
“Taissa,” he rasps, barely audible over the cacophony of joy, but she hears him—she always does.
She steps back, raising an eyebrow with a little grin.
“Yeah?”
Streamers have landed in her hair, and Cronus plucks them out gently as Kion pulls out the little box, hiding it behind his back.
As Cronus winks one of those unnerving eyes at him, and as Taissa beams up at him with more love than he could ever possibly deserve, Kion slowly lowers himself to one knee and opens the box to reveal the elf-made wedding band with the opal in the middle: the opal resembling the draconian jewels.
Behind him, he thinks he hears Knox shriek before the sound is abruptly cut off, probably by óríon clapping a hand over his mouth.
“Taissa Cho,” he breathes, and suddenly the speech he’s rehearsed dozens of times in the mirror is failing him, because her eyes have gone very wide and she’s pressing a shaking hand to her mouth. “I—” he rasps, fucking mesmerized by her, “I—”
“Go on then,” says Cato, sounding amused. “It doesn’t need to be eloquent. It just needs to be real.”
He clears his throat. Fuck the speech. Looking at her makes him go barmy, anyway.
“You’re the brightest sunshine in a world of fucking gray.
You’ve shown me what it is to be loved. This”—Kion touches his chest, where his heart beats wildly—“is yours. Forever. Falling in love with you wasn’t falling at all, sweetheart.
It was flying, flying through the skies, scraping the clouds.
There’s nobody else I’d rather grow old with.
I want to bicker with you for the rest of our lives.
” When the crowd around them gasps, Kion’s shoulders tense.
This—being vulnerable in front of so many people—is the hardest thing he’s ever done.
But for Taissa, he’ll do anything. “I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Taissa…” He smiles gently up at her. “Taissa, will you marry me?”
“No,” she says, deadpan, but then she’s laughing, taking his face in her hands, and kissing his shocked lips.
“Yes, you numpty. Yes, a thousand times over. I love you. I love you even when we’re in our home, squabbling over who gets the left side of the couch, or on the pitch, fighting over who gets to lecture Tanaka about staying in formation. ”
“Touché,” mutters Knox, somewhere.
“I love you when you’re at your happiest,” Taissa continues, her voice breaking, “and I love you when you’re not. I love you in all your in-betweens. I just…I love you. And I…Yes. Just…yes.”
Unsteadily, he rises to his feet, slipping the ring onto her slender finger as she hurls off the riding glove.
The screaming crowd seems to fade into nothingness as he gathers Taissa in his arms, as their team and their stymphs surround them.
Cronus nudges Kion’s shoulder with a gentle beak as if to say, About bloody time.
Sansa is squealing, and Cato is grinning as much as a stymph can while their teammates grin from ear to ear.
“One more kiss?” Taissa whispers, as streamers rain down around them.
“One more kiss,” Kion murmurs, and as his lips meet Taissa’s, he wonders if he should check the back of his neck for an illicit glyph.
Because he’s never felt so damned lucky.