Chapter Forty-Six
Amonstrous storm welled within me and erupted with a force that would have flattened mountains had any remained.
My power flashed around me, unstable, chaotic, and wild.
Nothing remained except the mists and my screaming.
Owen had said to not lose myself. Charles had told me to never change.
But they had been my tethers to reason. To light and love.
And now they were gone.
My heart became a cold, cracked vessel, leaking fury and despair, a graveyard where memories burned. With Owen and my friends now dead, only a void remained.
It couldn’t end like this. It couldn’t. Not after everything we had endured.
But it had. Everyone was dead.
My eyes flew open. I will burn the world for this.
But there was no world left to burn, and I knew I couldn’t defeat Craos. I had already tried and failed. Twice.
Only one thing remained that I could destroy: Aed. Bound to her by the horrific connection we shared with Craos, I could feel a stuttering of life slowly blinking out among the swirling mists, somewhere on the Root Path.
“Aed!” I didn’t recognize my own voice. It was a screaming wind, a vortex of devastation. “Aed!”
I fled through the mists, and the fire followed. It breached the Root Path, and the Veil began to disappear. The fire rose in the distance like a tsunami of death.
I welcomed it. When it killed me, I would be reunited with Owen.
But first I needed to destroy Aed.
At last, I found her, crumpled on the ground, nothing more than a dried husk, injured from our battle by the river over six weeks ago.
Her eyes slid to mine, full of hate and agony.
She was so close to death that it would be easy to rend her skull from her neck.
I could plunge my knife into her black heart again and again.
I wouldn’t even need to use my power. A thousand ways of killing her, of taking my vengeance, flashed through my mind, and I threw back her cloak to reveal her skeletal head and ghastly eyes. I drew back in surprise.
In the shadow of her hood, her face had always seemed more skull-like, but now I could see that skin stretched so tightly across her face, it was almost translucent, allowing every ridge of bone to show. Wisps of hair even clung to her skull.
It didn’t matter. She was still a monster. Tearing her head from her body would be too quick, I decided. I would take her apart, piece by piece, and scatter her bones across the Veil.
And then I would lie down and wait for death to take me.
I grasped her bony fingers, ready to rip them from her hand. Around us, the mists swirled silently. The only sounds were our ragged breaths—mine, heavy and rasping; Aed’s, little more than a death rattle. Both were filled with suffering beyond compare.
She was completely helpless, lying there like a sick, wounded, dying animal.
I tried. I tried to rip her apart. I wanted to hurt her. To make her pay for my pain.
But there would be no satisfaction in torturing such a creature. Owen and my friends were dead, and killing her would not bring them back.
I screamed in anguish and threw her hand away from me, collapsing onto the ground and sobbing as I wrapped my arms around my knees. I keened and wailed and clawed at my cheeks, where the tears wouldn’t stop falling.
I had no idea how much time passed—minutes, hours, I no longer cared—but as it did, the wall of fire crept closer. It wouldn’t be long now before it took us both.
Good. It would end my despair.
Eventually, my grief quieted as I exhausted myself, and I rocked myself for comfort. I slid my eyes to Aed. Of all the ways I pictured myself dying heroically in battle, sitting beside this pathetic creature while waiting to be obliterated by fire was certainly not one of them.
Aed groaned and stretched a bony finger toward me. Surely, she couldn’t live much longer. Every breath she took sounded like her last. I thought for a moment about covering her bony legs with her rotting cloak. What comfort could I offer a dying monster?
No. I did not feel sorry for her. Not after everything she had done.
I tried to picture Owen, tried to remember the sound of his voice, his smile when he looked at me, the touch of his hand against my own.
I wanted to see his face when I died, not Aed’s.
But each thought of Owen was like a knife cutting open my heart.
There was no comfort in memory. Not yet. Not at this stage of my grief.
Aed and I were the only two beings left in this world. I hated her, but my eyes kept finding her, studying her.
She had once been a Druid, like Freya and Shae.
She had once been a woman like me.
What had she been like? I could barely imagine her as anything other than what she was now.
“Tell me your story,” I whispered, bitter yet curious. I had nothing better to do anyway. Thinking about Owen and my friends, about what could have been, about my failure, was too painful.
And I do not feel sorry for her, I told myself yet again. But seeing her lying there made me hate her a little less.
Aed regarded me for a long time, and I thought she would never answer. That we would die and those would be the last words I ever spoke.
But she reached out, using the last of her strength, and clasped my wrist in a bony grip.
“I’ll show you,” she rasped.
Images flashed before me and then I was Aed. I saw through her eyes, felt her pain. Her loneliness. Her despair.
I was in a dank, earthen hovel, a rope tied around my ankles that prevented me from running away. Not that I had the strength to go anywhere. The rope cut into my flesh, the skin around it raw and festering. I was cold. Sick. My body slowly ate itself as I starved.
I was a slave, and I had been his since I was but a girl.
Through the blood and grit in my eyes, I saw an old man in a long robe.
An ancient Druid, my cruel master. He called to the powers of the earth and the Tree Spirits around him.
Using dark, forbidden magic, he tried to open a portal to another realm again and again.
Cloaked in fur and leaves, his skin was pale, his hair tangled with moss, feathers, and bones.
At last, near an ancient yew tree, the old Druid opened a gateway to Craos’s realm.
The sky above split into a swirling vortex of smoke and flame, and Craos—colossal, horned, and wrapped in fire—emerged.
The blast of the gate’s first opening obliterated the old Druid, but I lived, sheltered in my hovel.
Three high Druids—Charles, Shamus, and Freya—rushed toward the gateway. They raised their staffs, and as they channelled the life force of nature into a binding seal, a black stone sigil formed, slamming into the gateway.
Craos bellowed in rage, clawing at the shrinking portal.
He struck one last time, his blow shattering the seal mid-formation.
This, I knew now, was when he cast his seed into Aed, me.
The Druids disintegrated, their spirits scattering with the broken seal, and each became the Guardian of a stone: earth, fire, and water.
When all turned quiet, I crawled out of my hole and into the destruction around me, trembling and crying and overcome with emotion at being given a second chance at life.
While a new life began to grow within me.
But when I eventually died, I did not pass into the Veil with my brethren. I was cursed to wander the Root Path forever, decaying but never dying. Some tether kept me attached to Craos. As long as he existed, I was fated to suffer endlessly.
Aed let go of my hand, wrenching me back into my own body. I gasped for air and clawed at my belly, heaving the contents of my stomach into the mists.
Oh God.
I stared at Aed in horror. How had she survived such pain? Such torture? Had she ever known a moment of happiness?
No human could survive it, I realized. Not without becoming a monster like Aed.
The fire was almost upon us now. The mists were almost gone, and soon we would be, too.
Craos was never meant to enter our world, but when he did, he cast his seed and changed everything. Once the door was opened to his realm, it would always exist. There was no way to seal, lock, or destroy it. The only way to defeat Craos was to ensure the door never opened in the first place.
What had Aed said to me at the river? I was an impossibility.
If I was an impossibility, then the normal rules didn’t apply to me. Besides, Charles had told me I was destined to be a queen, and a queen could move in any direction she needed.
And I knew what I had to do.