27. Naeris #2
The ship hummed softly around us as it cut through the outer edges of Nox Eternum, damaged systems groaning every now and then beneath the strain. Beyond the viewport, darkness churned endlessly, vast and alive.
“So what happened to the females?” Thyros asked again.
His tone was quieter this time. Less sarcastic. More careful. Zapharos seemed to pull himself out of distant memory with visible effort. For a moment he looked ancient in a way I had never seen before.
“They went to Terra Nova before it was expelled from the Celestial Portal.”
“The original plan,” Dravok added softly, “was for the males to strike directly at the Harrowed One’s prime lair.”
“And then follow the females once the darkness was contained,” Zapharos finished.
His expression darkened. “Only Ashera refused to leave.”
Something tightened painfully in my chest.
“She and Caelor were…” Zapharos searched for the words. “The first, perhaps. The prime bond. The strongest among us.”
A strange hush settled over the room.
“Ashera stayed to watch Caelor lead the final assault against the Harrowed One.” His jaw tightened. “Caelor was Praetor of War before me.”
Even Thyros went still at that.
Zapharos’ gaze drifted somewhere far beyond the ship. “He led entire legions into the heart of the darkness.”
Everyone hung on his words, even though all of us, except Thyros, had experienced those memories during the Reconstitution process.
More quietly, Zapharos added, “He was overtaken.”
The words landed heavily.
“Overpowered,” Zapharos continued. “Dragged into the Fire of Darkness.” A flicker of horror moved across Ella’s face as if she were watching it happen in real time. “Where he burned.”
I let out a small gasp, because in my inner eye I watched Cealor too, being dragged by the Darkness into its depths. Straight into the Harrowed One's lair.
The moment the words left his mouth, something pushed against my mind. Not painful. Urgent. A whisper wrapped in unbearable grief. Where he still burns.
The words escaped my mouth before I consciously realized I was speaking. Everyone turned toward me instantly. He's not dead. He's been burning for millions of years.
I blinked hard and shook myself. Thyros was in front of me before I could breathe, one hand framing my face, his amber eyes a shade deeper from concern. “Naeris.”
“I’m okay,” I assured him quickly, though my pulse had begun racing. “I think…” I exhaled shakily. “I think I just had a little Ashera push.” I tried to laugh it off, but it came out more like a cough.
The revelation hit all of us. I could see it reflected on their faces. Except Thyros, who was more concerned with me than anything I said. His thumb brushed my cheek once more before he reluctantly eased back, though he remained close enough that our knees touched.
“Anyway,” I muttered weakly, waving a hand. “Let’s circle back to the horrifying cosmic implications of eternal suffering later.”
To my relief, Ella snorted. It relieved some of the tension. Only for a moment, but it helped.
Zapharos cleared his throat. “From what Ashera witnessed, all the males died in the assault.”
My chest tightened.
“She fled back to Terra Nova believing Caelor—and the others—were gone forever.” Zapharos paused. “But time moved differently there.” Understanding began to dawn slowly across the room. “The Arkhevari women had already spent generations on Terra Nova,” Dravok said quietly.
“They built cities,” Zapharos continued. “Entire civilizations. They waited for us.”
Emotion roughened his voice unexpectedly. “They believed we would return.”
The ache in the room became almost unbearable.
“But the females…” Nadine whispered.
“They became mortal,” Zapharos said softly.
No one moved.
No one breathed.
“The farther Terra Nova traveled from Nox Eternum and the Celestial Portal, the weaker the connection became. The women lost immortality.”
Ella looked stricken. “And they died?”
Zapharos nodded once. “By the time Ashera reached them, all of the original Aelyth were already gone.”
A terrible sadness washed through me.
“Their children didn’t know her,” he continued quietly. “And Ashera could not bring herself to tell them the truth.”
That their mates were dead.
That they would never come home.
That the universe had broken beyond repair.
I felt tears sting my eyes before Zapharos even spoke again.
“In her grief,” he said softly, “Ashera shattered herself.”
The room fell completely silent. He looked directly at me.
Then at Nadine. Then Ella. And suddenly the enormity of it settled over all of us at once.
All of us were Ashera's fragments. With the only difference that my ancestor had been taken by the Sythari, ensuring a pure bloodline—the irony of it was not lost on me—while Nadine and Ella's ancestors mixed and mingled with the early humans.
Still, all three of us were pieces of a grieving immortal female who had loved so deeply she refused to let herself vanish completely.
Ella pressed trembling fingers to her lips.
Nadine stared down at her hands again as though seeing them for the first time.
Beside me, Thyros looked at me with an expression so raw it nearly shattered me all over again.
The realization hit the room like a large meteor crashing on a planet.
Emotions ripple like tsunamis. Shock rippled through us in violent waves.
Confusion crashed against understanding like opposing tides.
Grief rose heavy and crushing, like violent tornadoes.
While beneath it something brighter struggled upward, hope so sudden and overwhelming it was almost painful.
Through the bond that connected all six of us, emotions surged wildly. Ella’s heartbreak swept through the room like a tidal wave, warm and aching and impossibly compassionate.
Nadine’s thoughts spiraled with the force of a storm system, racing to reorganize everything she believed she knew about biology, physics, memory, and the soul itself.
Dravok’s ancient restraint fractured beneath a quiet fury that rolled dark and deep beneath the surface, directed not at us but at the millions of years stolen from them.
Zapharos radiated stunned disbelief so profound it felt like tectonic plates shifting beneath my feet.
And Thyros?—
His emotions struck hardest of all. Rage crashed through him like black fire.
Not the poisoned rage the Harrowed One whispered into him.
Something older. Rawer. The fury of a male realizing that the female he had mourned without ever knowing had spent millions of years trying to find her way back to him. The force of it shook me.
Then, slowly, like dust settling after devastation, another emotion emerged beneath the chaos: Relief.
Enough to understand that perhaps the universe had not abandoned them after all. If Caelor still lived—if some part of him still burned inside the Harrowed One—then the Harrowed One had not merely consumed him. It had imprisoned him. Was using him, feeding on him.
“Dear God,” Ella whispered.
“The Harrowed One’s greatest source of power,” Nadine announced faintly.
Dravok’s expression darkened with terrifying clarity. “Caelor.”
Silence crashed over the room. Another realization followed immediately after.
Earth Prime.
Not Terra Nova.
The original Earth. The one they had called Elysium.
The world swallowed by Nox Eternum.
“That’s where he is,” I breathed.
Zapharos' eyes sharpened. “The Harrowed One’s lair.”
The center of the wound. The place where reality had first broken. For a heartbeat, nobody spoke. The enormity of it struck like lightning. Zapharos straightened as the Praetor of War emerged fully once more.
“Then that,” he stated with absolute certainty, “is where we will strike him.”
A pulse of fierce agreement rolled through the room.
But my mind had already snagged on something else. Something that suddenly made no sense at all. “Wait.”
All eyes turned on me. I sat forward slowly, trying to untangle the spiraling thoughts in my head. “Explain this Aelyth thing to me one more time.”
Ella blinked. “Oh, good. We’re all confused again.”
“The bonded couples split,” I said carefully. “The males stayed behind to fight. The females fled to Terra Nova.” The others nodded. “And the original Aelyth became mortal there.”
Another nod.
I frowned. “Were there unbonded females?”
Dravok’s gaze sharpened instantly. He already knew where I was going.
“No,” he said slowly.
“The Aelyth bond was absolute. Every female had her counterpart.”
A strange chill slid down my spine.
“Then where,” I asked carefully, “would the Aelyth for Zapharos, Dravok. and the others from the Hall of Seven have come from?”
I looked between them. “Or Thyros.”
"Well," Zapharos cleared his throat, "when a male and female really like each other?—"
Ella, elbowing him, stopped him before he could finish the sentence. "No really. How did you guys reproduce?"
Zapharos rubbed his side, pretending Ella had actually hurt him. "What I was going to say was, a bonded male and female will produce a fitting Aelyth over time."
"When the universe declares the male mature enough to find their Aelyth," Dravok added.
"So then, one of the bonded couples would have had a baby girl for Zapharos?" Ella asked with a slight nod of jealousy in her tone.
"Not a baby, no," Zapharos shook his head. "We don't reproduce the way mortals do. It's just… there."
I closed my eyes, even with the history and information I had received during the Reconstitution, my mind was still way too wrapped around mortal reproduction, as Zapharos had so eloquently called it, to even comprehend how this was possible.
"So, what? Poof, there just would have been a mature," Nadine made quotation marks around the word and arched one of her eyebrows, "woman there for you? While you had to mature over many millennia?"
"It's more complicated, but in essence, yes." Dravok agreed. Grinning at his mate. "I wonder if she would have been as prickly as you."