Chapter 9 Stellen
Chapter Nine
Stellen
The Oracle is too light in my arms, as if the weight of her soul is already lifting from her body.
Her lips are white, and her fingers have turned a terrible shade of blue.
I slip from my wolf’s back, my arms shaking as they haven’t shaken in years, a nameless fear pushing at me.
The Oracle… Thyra… Her heartbeats are dangerously weak in my ears, the dying thuds wrenching at memories I can’t acknowledge because they have the power to tear me apart.
I tell myself: loss does not control me.
No more.
“Hold on,” I command her, a harsh order even if she can’t hear it.
The faintest flicker of golden energy shines across her exposed forearm, where it drops at her side, but whatever final pulse of magic caused it is quickly swept away.
I chose to cross the border and race into the snow, determined to reach the nearest tower as quickly as I could. I judged it the safest option, but that was a mistake. The moment we passed into the snowstorm, Thyra shuddered, and her heartbeat stopped.
For too many seconds, I heard nothing within her chest.
Then her lips parted, the briefest exhalation of unexplainable warmth emitting before her heartbeats faltered to life again.
Now I lay her down on the snow, trying to sweep my cloak beneath her, not that it will keep the ice from chilling her bones.
Nara drops beside her, exposing her belly to share what little warmth she has with Thyra. My wolf’s soft whimpers tell me she knows she can’t do much to help, but still she tries.
I judge the distance to the tower, but it’s too far through this raging storm. Thyra will succumb to death halfway there.
The only way to save her now is to take the truly dangerous path.
“I have no choice,” I whisper to the Oracle, as if I could convince fate not to close its jaws around me as easily as the wind snatches away my words. “It’s the only way to save you.”
The worst way to save her.
Carefully, I rest the fingertips of my right hand on her temple, then the fingertips of my left hand against the opposite side of her throat, pressing lightly to both pulse points.
This magic will require both of my powers. My frost power, along with a Lethian song so devastating, it was forbidden. My mother taught it to me in a moment of despair. She begged me to use this song on her because only with my dual powers could it work as she desperately wanted.
I refused. I was afraid I’d kill her. But I lost my family, anyway.
Closing my eyes, exhaling softly, I give myself a moment to allow the freezing air to leave my chest, a soundless expelling, before I draw the air in again, focusing solely on the way it flows past my vocal cords.
Rusty vocal cords that could betray me.
Once my breathing calms, I draw on my frost power, the smallest, invasive trickle forming in the fingertip I press to her temple, creating a needle-sharp thread to pierce her mind.
With it, I seek the smallest sparks of her warmth and heart, the glimmers of energy that transform her thoughts and experiences into emotions.
Joy…love…hope…sadness… Even anger.
To use my power to mess with her mind like this is perilous. I could accidentally paralyze her. Leave her unable to speak. Cause her so much mental damage, she might not function afterward.
I remind myself it’s the only way.
I must make her as unfeeling as I am.
Only then will she be able to walk in snowstorms without freezing to death.
Logic must be her guide. Not emotion.
The icy needle finds its mark. The brightest spark within her mind.
That’s when I begin to hum.
A soft song of pure emptiness.
Not fury. Not hatred. Not fear.
A song that will simply consume every emotion within her heart and mind. All the good. All the bad. And turn it all to nothing.
She will become calm like a still pond.
Behind my closed eyelids, tears gather, a physical reaction that carries no emotional content and has no logical cause.
I have no reason to feel grief for what she will lose. I barely know her, have scarcely interacted with her. I have no personal experience of her dreams, hopes, aspirations, or even her resentments, sins, and dislikes.
No logical reason to mourn.
But with every soft note I utter, my shoulders hunch further forward, my head bows, and my throat squeezes, tightening around my vocal cords.
Until…
“I can’t.” My whisper is snatched away in the wind, met only with Nara’s soft whimper, but it doesn’t change what I know to be true: I can’t do this to the Oracle.
Overwhelmingly, it’s now logic that tells me so.
Without emotions, an Oracle cannot be an Oracle. In all my research, it was clear that Oracles do not wield their power with precision, but with messy hope.
They foresee harm and act to prevent it. Without an emotional connection driving them to thwart that damage, they would not act at all. They may even relish the cruelty that follows from their inaction.
If Thyra were heartless, she could become another False Queen.
Reason tells me it would be far better to let her pass away so that another Oracle can rise.
Logic tells me I’m right.
Why, then, does a roar press at my throat?
Why do I feel as if my chest were cracking open?
Squeezing my eyes closed, I push back at both sensations. To utter the wrong sound right now when I’m drawing on my Lethian power could cause catastrophic damage to everything around me.
Pressing my lips firmly together, I stop singing, allowing the air to fill once more with the rush of wind, the billow of icy snowflakes, and the darkness of an unfeeling night.
Slowly, carefully, I withdraw the needle of icy power that did not complete its work, leaving her thoughts and feelings intact.
I expel a final, soundless breath, releasing the tension in my vocal cords and allowing my Lethian power to become dormant once more.
Then I gather Thyra into my arms, pulling her close, wrapping my thin cloak around her and leaning into Nara, nestling Thyra between us. Like a dying mother wolf trying to warm her cub.
Nara whines softly, pressing inward, her wolfish eyes raised to mine.
I wish I could feel what other fae might feel right now.
Regret. Sadness. Maybe even reverence for Thyra’s passing power. All the emotions that should come with the tears escaping my eyes and falling down my cheeks, where they quickly freeze.
These tears are as empty as I am empty.
Lowering my forehead to Thyra’s, I murmur into her upturned ear, “It’s up to you now, Oracle. You must decide if you will live or die.”
She doesn’t respond. Her shallow breaths tickle my neck, her lips so white, their outline is barely perceptible. Her right arm is bent between us, the way I pulled her toward me, jamming her elbow into my ribs, but it’s hardly the worst discomfort.
Around us, the snowstorm intensifies, and visibility reduces to a mere foot in every direction. Whirling snowflakes pluck at my back and hair, tugging at Thyra’s upper arm, nearly lifting it, as if the wind would claim the Dragonstone Blade for its own.
At the same time, the faintest glow of golden light shimmers between us, and for a moment, I’m certain I can see, once again, the threads that extended from her body on the first day I met her.
Three trail around her chest, appearing at her side where she’s pressed against me, one amber, one blood red, and one icy blue.
When I first met her, the blood-red thread had connected her to Antony, the amber thread had connected her to Maxim, and the icy-blue thread had dragged at my heart.
Now, all three threads slide between her chest and mine, and it’s only as their ends appear that I realize they’re slipping away from her body, unanchored to her.
The icy-blue thread is untethered from me.
Abandoning both of us.
My instincts fire, and my left hand snaps out, grasping all three threads before they can float away.
Sharp energy burns my palms, coming from the threads, a powerful sensory mix of cold and heat and thirst. Energy that can only reflect the nature of each of us kings: Frost, Ember, and…fuck me…not Iron, but Vampyr.
But, even more startling, a fourth thread becomes visible at her back.
I saw this thread, too, on the day I met her, but it was unclear to whom it was attached. It’s still unclear.
The black thread pulls taut in the air, its dark light glowing sharply against the intensely white backdrop of swirling snow.
That thickening, darkening cord appears fully anchored to Thyra’s back, not severed like the ones I grip desperately in my hand, a line of inky energy that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.
Even Nara shrinks away from it, snarling savagely and gnashing her teeth, as if she wants to tear it apart but at the same time won’t dare touch it.
With a sudden jolt, the black thread tugs on Thyra’s body.
But I can’t let it take her.
My left arm clamps around her, gripping the three threads at the same time, and I only narrowly manage to avoid wrapping my arm across the black thread too. Its energy sizzles in my ears, sparking at the nearness of my arm, but I won’t let Thyra go.
The wind intensifies, billowing harder, thrashing around us, fighting my hold, plucking and wrenching at Thyra.
I take a sharp breath as her upper arm—her right arm—slips free of my hold and, before I can catch it, floats up and back, as if pulled to the black thread.
Before I can stop it, the back of her hand hits the dark thread.
Black light flares across the blood bind etched on her skin. The dark thread instantly whips toward her wrist, snaking around her arm like a chain.
A fearsome shriek fills the air, tearing through my sensitive hearing. I don’t know where the scream is coming from. All I can tell is that it’s from far away, but the sound is somehow traveling through the thread, making it hum and vibrate.
I’ve heard a scream like this before. It’s the shriek of wood when a living tree is being felled.
Every instinct in my body is on fire. A growl grows in my throat.
As quickly as I can, I snatch at her arm, pushing it toward her torso while I fight to hold on to the three threads at the same time.
Thyra’s body is impossibly light and the black thread’s pull impossibly strong.
Where that thread leads or who might be at the end of it, I don’t know and have no way to tell.
But if I let her go…
My accusation is harsh, my voice rising above the wind as I speak to her as if she were awake. “You choose to welcome the oblivion of death.”
With a snarl, I lower my lips to her cheek, growling against her skin. “I, too, have welcomed that oblivion.”
My lips twist, hard, sneering, resolute. “But now that we have entered my kingdom, your fate is no longer yours to choose. You are mine from this moment on, and your life belongs to me.”
Three days ago, she commanded me to come for her when the stars went out. Given that the stars shone most brightly on the night she was born, I reasoned that if the stars were extinguished, it would signal her death.
I reasoned that this moment would come.
But now, I realize that logic… It has no fucking place in this moment.
Logic and strategy can’t help me now.
I press my cheek to Thyra’s, not a gentle touch, a hard one. Demanding. Commanding.
“I am not done with you, Thyra.” Her name tastes bitter on my tongue. “I haven’t even begun. And until I’m done with you, you will endure.”
My command falls heavily in the sliver of space now between her face and mine, a nearness that fills my chest with her scent.
White roses. The kind that could never thrive in my kingdom. The kind that will be crushed.
“Your death is not written in this snow.”
If she is to die, it will be when and how I choose.
I have one option now—an option I would not have even contemplated if it weren’t for the gleaming runes, the black thread trying to steal her away, and the Oracle’s final…slow…breaths…as she defies me.
An evil option that only a fae as heartless as I am could ever contemplate using.
“You do not get to choose death,” I whisper into her ear. “I won’t allow it.”
Drawing on my Lethian power, I begin to hum again, dragging up another song, but this one is from my darkest memory.
A song far worse than any other.
A terrible, violent melody that embodies only the cruelest, most brutal intentions.
A harmony my mother would not teach me.
So I taught myself.
I learned this song from every death I witnessed. From the faint whisper of every last breath and the low thud of every final heartbeat and the near-soundless descent of tears down lifeless cheeks.
Now, I wrench the melody up from a memory.
My memory of a time when I used this song once before.
A time of pure savagery and extreme pain, a moment filled with screams and blood and pleading cries for mercy…
Mercy I did not give.
And so I begin to sing.