Chapter 53
T hough the mountain air was cold, Alora’s hands wouldn’t stop sweating. And that breeze disturbing the weeping willow branches and trellises of white hydrangeas and wisteria was calming enough to tickle loose wisps of curls from her pinned hair.
Silvery moonlight caused the sprinkling of pearlsea petals, which lightly fluttered along the ancient stone path, to glisten. Alora followed those considerable stones under a canopy of towering trees delicately hung with glass lanterns. And though her path was marked with pearlseas, she didn’t need their aid. Following that endless tug, the strong call across their tether, Alora weaved inside the maze, past spiraling staircases leading to alcoves offering views of the garden’s heart, and others down deep to tranquil ponds and fountains.
The only sounds: the click of her heels on stone and the sanctuary of bristling leaves. Amidst the beauty of night’s slumber, her heart thundered louder with every corner she turned, every lantern and white petal she passed.
Carved into what seemed to be an endless maze, Alora stood at the top of an alcove, leaning on the graystone railing as her eyes met the same glistening of silver under the moonlight she’d glimpsed from Garrik’s balcony.
Alora descended the staircase, then walked a short path to the next. Down to an annulus of glass lanterns and pillar candles illuminating every shade of green. Where blazebugs danced around Garrik like spirits.
Offering their flickering display against his onyx jacket, they cast plumes of moonstone and pearlescent light along the silver threads and gleaming off his sword.
Garrik’s blade reverently dropped the moment she broke the barrier and stepped into the oasis of light. His eyes closed, chin raised to the sky as if he were drinking in a peace only the night understood. And as she closed the distance within a place only dreams could offer, the male of hers deepened a breath, so slowly, opening his eyes with dangerous hope and longing.
Alora’s hand fell to her chest, hopelessly battling to slow the forges pounding.
Garrik extended his hand. Unending hope coursed between them. Between their magic, when he offered, “Dance with me, darling.” Garrik’s eyes… She’d never seen them that way.
Unlike before. Unlike when he kissed her. Unlike when she stole the venomous darkness on the cliff.
This was something far greater. Something ancient existing outside the bounds of time and distance. Everlasting. Extending across this life and the next.
Garrik cradled her against his chest, curling her hand in his between them, at his heart. Then, cupped her back with a gentleness this realm had yet to know.
“There is no music,” she breathed in a voice unlike her. Shaken, yet entirely sure.
That true and real smile curved up his face, breaths before the annulus trickled with the sound of ivory keys and strings. There was no one around that she could see. And like the peaceful promise of winter, a call home, a familiar melody filtered around them. She could almost hear the words. An ethereal, angelic voice singing it to her little lion cub.
An icy finger brushed a tear from Alora’s cheek as she breathed, “The tavern in Maraz.” The song her mother used to hum. “It was you who played that music.” The music she had gazed around the room for at the bar. When she had desired, for the first time in decades, to play a piano again.
In answer, Garrik pressed a tender kiss to her forehead, near her crown. “I have waited for so long to dance with you. I thought this one would be fitting.” His eyes, the swirling ash and polished silver, glowed and she couldn’t speak over the pressure building in her chest.
Swaying to the melody, Garrik brushed his fingers along the curve of her back. She didn’t know how long they danced, but like the beauty of the music, their eyes never left the wonder of each other’s face.
When Alora’s hand trailed up the smooth fabric of his jacket, over the mountainous muscles underneath, she remembered the words she wanted to say. The reason she explored the maze and descended those staircases. Why her heart was ready to burst and bleed for him.
Alora’s lips parted, but instead, her traitorous tongue mustered, “You had a nightmare.”
Garrik deepened a healing breath, admitting, “It was … before my magic-washing was nulled and I returned to myself. From the Blood Years.” And winced as if the words were a sword through his eternal soul. “A village I desecrated. Not a soul survived.”
The pain there… So much it split her heart in two.
Alora’s glowing hand cupped the back of his neck, pulsing warmth as he made a low humming sound. Taking in his hollow eyes, the small hint of liquid collecting in them. With a simple thought, Alora brought the night sky around them.
Star-like sparks twinkled. Thousands of them hovering like idle snowflakes in a serene winter storm.
And he must have remembered the last time she’d offered him this sense of peace. Because Garrik closed his eyes and breathed in, eliciting a slow escape of shadow from his shoulders curling around her stars.
Alora spoke softly, “That wasn’t you.” Not the real Garrik. A flutter of star-kissed flames flickered into the night, meeting a tendril of shadow, intertwining until they faded into the sky. “This is you. The male who would see himself ruined in exchange for Elysian’s freedom. Who is fighting to bring Magnelis to his end. That is you.”
Garrik considered, surveying a glinting star flaring at her words, and murmured, “I know—or at least learning to accept that.” His eyes softened. An earthy breeze whorled around them, disturbing his hair. “Can I take you somewhere?” Voice raw and open as he smiled. That smile he rarely, until recently, let the world see. Let his friends—his family —see.
Alora couldn’t stop herself from smiling, too. “Yes. Take me there—anywhere,” she said. It didn’t matter where or how long. As long as it was with him.
Garrik didn’t hesitate.
Silver never wandered from her sapphires, as those powerful arms cradled her close. In a calm storm of shadow and pearlsea petals swirling in the wind, they left behind the flickering lanterns and willows.
Alora couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.
Of all the wonders she dreamed about, nothing compared to this.
A mountain made of glassy ice soaked everything in sun-kissed light. Shadows gathered in front of their eyes, preventing a sharp sting as sunlight reflected off every inch of crystal and polished snow.
It should’ve been utterly freezing. But the air… It felt like what she imagined Kennazar’s wall of flames to feel like.
And there was a presence there …
She couldn’t see it. But whatever it was, was nothing short of magnificent. Perhaps omnipresent.
“Allseeah…” Garrik tenderly spoke. Like a youngling speaking with adoration and respect for a familial bond. “I met him here.” From their high peak, he gestured a nod to the middle of the lake that, at such a high distance, looked more like an ocean.
Clothed in white robes, a … presence walked the glass. That presence angled its head to the peak, disturbing its glowing hair.
Alora hitched a breath as it gracefully bowed its chin.
In a flash, as swift and magnificent as lightning, it vanished. Rippling a prism of auroras across the lake and mountain, beneath her feet, casting her white gown in sputtering colors. Even Garrik’s trickled with it.
A murmur of great power and unconditional affection had them both closing their eyes, breathing it in. As if it were an invitation. Perhaps a blessing. Alora settled into the solid chest of ice behind her, and Garrik pulled her close.
“There is so much more I wish to show you,” he whispered in her ear, causing her skin to pebble as Smokeshadows inched from his shoulders and down the silver swirls of her dress. Up from his boots like a fog, turning them to shadow.
When darkness cleared, the first thing she noticed was not the crystal-clear glass dome above them or the square room of shelves and glass with sea creatures swimming beyond. It was the smell. The aged vanillian wood of tomes and histories bound in leather. The stories waiting inside.
Surrounded by the flaring lights of the teal water and the shadows of swimming creatures, Garrik hugged her tightly as he had in Allseeah’s lands. A flutter of his breath was enough to stir her to turn over her shoulder as he said, “Here, in this world, is where my love for reading began. My mother would sit at those couches”—gesturing to the dark brown leather with buttons indenting the cushions—“and sketch on parchments of the next world she would create. I listened to the scratch of her quill while losing myself in her favorite stories. Fighting dragons, killing monsters… Princes falling in love.”
Alora sighed against him, imagining this essential piece of Garrik’s past. Imagining him as a faeling here and blond curls spilling over the monarch to Mist and Sea.
His sigh was wholly content as their gaze roamed the shelves and waters, simply standing there, just … being. Existing in a small, small world of books and his mother’s ocean. Her scent lingering in a room that held peace and dreams.
After some time, darkness crawled, and she felt weightless again.
This time, when the darkness cleared, a crescent glowed in a sky filled with clouds so close she could reach out and drift through one. Inside a cloister with high architraves hewn in the side of a blue-gray mountain, no doors, no windows to escape inside, she and Garrik starred down the rolling peaks of evergreens with hidden escapes of lakes between.
“Here is where Thalon taught me to fly.”
Alora frowned, curling her fingers over the solid stone balustrade. Suppressing her nausea as she looked down, down, down the endless expanse of rock and forests. “You mean where he pushed you.”
Garrik chuckled, placing his hands on the stone beside her and caging her there, and placed a kiss to her temple. “Indeed.”
Again, shadows whorled.
Youngling’s giggling and tiny feet padding along crunched stones met them. Alora barely stepped when a parade of faelings raced by. She gasped at the symphony of laughter. The buildings, street, and climbing courses made for younglings to play.
Alora cupped her chest, knowing why it ached so terribly that she almost fell to her knees.
Tears silently flooded down her face as … as a young male with membranous wings and night-blue eyes flew above them. Two others, a female with brown eyes and a male with gray hair, giggled while following below.
Little Wings. From Alynthia. Brown-eyes and Little Gray … The three orphaned younglings. “You brought them here,” she sobbed, seeing how their frail and thin bodies were growing fuller, color returned to their clean flesh.
Garrik brushed a tear away. “I could not leave them to the whims of our cruel world.” Alora turned and threw her arms around his neck, uncontrollably sobbing into him as he continued, “There are hundreds of orphans being raised here. When old enough, they can decide to remain and mentor the next generation or return to Elysian to start anew. Those with magic are trained in their skills. They, too, decide their future when old enough to make wise decisions. Deimon left this world to join the legion.”
When her tears finally ceased, Smokeshadows dawned them from that world too.
It was like she soared through endless portals, only there was no lightning storm. Garrik held her through it all. Both wonderstruck as they parted the shadows from one world to the next.
The impossible depth of gleaming crystalline white before her was enough to convince her he’d dawned them inside a star.
But those weren’t starflames glistening. And they weren’t gemstones.
Those were pearlseas—an endless sea of them.
An entire world of them.
Magnelis had tried to ruin Airathel’s gardens. But Alora imagined he didn’t know when he murdered the High Queen that her memory would live forever—here and in every world Garrik brought her to that night.
She still lives —amidst the flowers. She heard Garrik think just like the last time they stood in a mystical meadow such as this.
“Mother created this world after Magnelis usurped Elysian,” he started. Ushering her around bushes, weaving between petals as white as her gown.
He fell silent, observing the petals as if he wished to pluck one but released it before continuing along.
After some time, Garrik quietly said, “On Elysian’s peaceful nights, not knowing of my torturous ones, I clung to myself on her balcony, trembling and drenched in her scent as I found the night sky. Most nights, I would sit and stare into a void, pleading for the stars to end my life when I was too cowardly to do so myself.”
Garrik’s eyes went distant. “But on others,” he rasped, face brightening. “When I could not hear the voice reminding me to breathe, I would dream of my mother’s worlds. Of this one especially.”
‘ The flowers were where I found peace, too.’
Alora laced her fingers through Garrik’s as he stopped in the near middle of that field. Eyes glistening in the brightest silver she’d ever seen. “And what about this world?” It had become sort of a custom for him to explain each one. So, she asked, “What happened here?”
Through the tether, like the swell and crash of a mighty wave, Alora felt Garrik on guard. A wall of shadow grew and morphed like a shield.
He looked at her as if it were the first time. Studying every detail, burning them to memory. The way her gown flowed over every curve. The snow and ice-like details. He scanned to the crown weaved through her hair, then he found her lips and at last answered in a voice so unlike him, “Here is where I confess.”
A harsh swallow. He appeared to be preparing for battle as the beautiful planes of his face softened and met her eyes.
“I love you, Alora. I have loved you long before my eyes saw you.”
The world—this one and all the rest—went silent.
Alora could only blink.
Garrik released her hand and stepped away. No matter the distance, her soul ached. “The night you kissed my scars, you said that one day I would share my every secret.” He paused, searching her eyes. Then added, “There is one story remaining.”
Why did it feel like the day she had lost her parents? Like she was entering the smuggler’s caves to never see him again?
He pulled a silver ring from his finger. It gleamed in the moonlight.
Alora glimpsed the faint scar below the knuckle when Smokeshadows whorled around her thumb. The frigid cold of the metal encircled her as a tendril prevented it from slipping off.
“This ring will carry you to Elysian should you decide to leave without me.”
Alora pinched her brows. “Why would I?—”
“You thought you were absent when I was reformed of scars.” Something began burning in her veins, burned straight through them. “Alora.” Devastation stole his voice. A sound so fractured it was as if he’d been whipped and beaten. A sound like death.
Garrik said, “In my dungeon—the voice. By whatever gift the stars conjured … it was yours. Your voice crying, reading, talking … singing. Perhaps not to me, but you found me, and I listened. You cried when I was fucked. When I was bound and beaten, all I wanted was to listen and find you. I did not care what was happening to me so long as it was your voice over theirs.
“You kept me from breaking. Even when I did not know who you were. You kept me from tearing myself apart, reminding me to breathe.”
Listen. Breathe. What the voice in his nightmare had repeated. What he had said to her in camp the first time she and Jade sparred… Listen. Breathe.
Garrik fell quiet. “Thirty years in my dungeon, and on the last, you went silent. I never heard your voice again. I thought you died, or that I had finally gone mad. It was the worst torture to have known you and not know where or who you were. If you even existed anymore.”
Alora’s eyes flooded the same as his.
“After the Blood Years, when my magic or some token from the Celestials kept me from locating you, I remembered your voice.”
Telldaira… It hadn’t been breached in decades. Spared from the Savage Prince’s reign. Kaine had never worried about a siege. She’d thought it a result of his favor with Magnelis, how low his knees could sink.
Garrik went on, “I was terrified of never hearing it again. Of the possibility that you had died. Until one day, Magnelis summoned Zyllyryon’s lords to the castle… A lady, frail, in her lord’s shadow, pleaded to return to their bedchamber …
“And there was the voice.” His own awestruck, caught in a dream.
“Feet from me—there you were. Yet I could do nothing but stand in the threshold of the foyer, cloaked in shadow while he gripped your arm so fiercely it bruised.” Garrik’s fists tightened. “When you returned to Telldaira, I dawned to Kaine’s estate. Stood on the hills with an army of darkness inside the forest, prepared to lay waste to everything he treasured. All of Telldaira would suffer ruin for what you endured. For what they knew was happening and cared nothing about.
“But I saw you again,” Garrik’s voice cracked as his lips trembled. “Smiling at a male with blond hair. Riding in a green gown toward the forest—toward me —with a pack on your saddle and sword at your side. And somehow … I knew you were safe that day.”
She remembered. It had been one of the first days she and Rowlen sought security in Rhidian Forest. One of the first times she held a blade by Rowlen’s careful instruction. He wanted to take her to his home. His parents were in another city, clothing nobility in fine garments for a betrothal reception. Kaine had forbid her from leaving the grounds. And since the Fae-made forest to the west was his property, by all technicalities, she wasn’t disobeying him.
“Until I intervened.” There was deep-seated pain in her High Prince’s eyes. Regret.
“Kaine—I found him inside the manor while you slept in a glade beside Rowlen.” Garrik’s jaw feathered, gritting his teeth. “I was determined to usher him to Firekeeper. I almost did.”
She remembered that too—the servants screaming that a cloaked male shattered the front door. Saw the blood dripping down the staircase and speckling the hallway. The rotting stench of Kaine’s blood as disgusting as his heart as she had entered his study and tried to pull him from the floor. But he had backhanded her for displaying him as weak.
Three days. She did not wake for three days after he had given her that beating.
“I sat by your side while you slept. Knowing if I would not have laid my hands on him, you would not be suffering. I decided then that I could never return. I could never be the reason for one of his outbursts. Fuck , I was terrified of the retribution he would deliver on you for it.
“So, I made his suffering subtle enough that he remembered it as another’s offense. But even then, he would return and accuse you as the reason for his misfortune. So, I began settling illusions in him. Of needing to travel for days on end, leaving you in peace. When his carriage departed, I collected him, forced him to my Dawnspace. Alongside Malik and Brennus and …” Garrik shook his head. “Kaine suffered. After his pitiful screams, I allowed him to lay in his blood and piss and vomit until he healed and returned him without a solitary memory of it.
“Thalon followed me one day, brought Aiden, Jade, and Eldacar the next. I had fallen so deeply inside her magic that I almost killed Kaine when Thalon secured me in bonds of portals around my wrists and ankles. The rest of them did their damnedest to protect him from my shadows until I returned to myself. They demanded I stop, but I couldn’t. Not for all Kaine had done. It was the only thing I could do, how I could repay you for what you did for me, for so long.”
Moonlight reflected off Garrik’s ring, which she stroked on her finger. A tendril of darkness danced there as if waiting for a command, but instead, with her simple thought, misted away.
“Thalon reminded me of my duty to Elysian. If I lost myself to serpent darkness … without me, Elysian, including you, would fall to Magnelis.” Regret—terrible, endless, dark regret—filled his eyes. “I stopped torturing Kaine. Vowing to inquire about your well-being periodically but never touch him. Months passed and not one damned day offered me peace.
“But Thalon was right. Among his many reprimands, he reminded me if I ever was too far gone to empty Kaine’s mind of the memories, he would likely kill you. I warred for so long with abandoning you while he reminded me you were not mine. You were Kaine’s wife, bonded to him. The way our politics works, a lady inherits not the lord’s position and estate. He would be dead and Galdheir would likely have blamed you. I could not risk Magnelis imprisoning you, or worse, so I distanced myself, killing my heart more than the decay of sustaining thousands of deaths.
“It was unbearable.” Garrik’s eyes darkened. “So, I ordered my darkness to protect you instead.”
As if they were called from every corner of the realm, Smokeshadows curled along the flowers near them. Gathering and coiling around her hands like a velvety kiss.
It occurred to her that all those nights she was alone—she never truly was. ‘ Such beautiful shadows .’ Though some part of her after meeting Garrik thought maybe it was his power, his presence there, she’d never been brave enough to ask. Why would the High Prince of Elysian, after all, care about some orphaned High Fae who belonged to another male?
But she thought of that last day Kaine laid his hands on her. On the table. The candles flickering out. The smoke drifted between them. How a flame had crawled along the smoke and burned Kaine to release her from his hold.
And on the cliff after…
The shadows—the figure —that stepped through her firestorm…
Alora’s throat constricted.
“Magnelis,” he continued, repentance in his eyes. “Mounted my limbs to a wall inside his breakfast chamber. He dinned while my blood dripped to the hardwood. Apparently, a Marked One was reported in Telldaira, and the High King was less than amused that his son failed to sense the treasonous wretch . As he pulled the daggers from my flesh, the last remaining in my hand to restrain me hanging there, I was ordered to ride with Brennus and perform .”
Garrik deepened a breath. “Telldaira’s untouchables would be nothing but cinders by morning, but the fucking lord and his ilk would suffer for nothing. As was his deal .”
Alora’s body drained of blood. This world began to spin.
‘You won’t go anywhere until I return. No visitors. Stay inside the manor. Do not leave.’
Then her own voice spilled into her memories. ‘Get to the western gates inside the city. We’ll be safe there.’
‘It is not safe there.’ Her captor—her High Prince—had said.
“Kaine offered me to Magnelis,” she breathed out the revelation, trembling as she tightened her quivering fists. He turned her in for—for what ? More riches? More power? A strangled noise escaped her before shadows curled around her shoulders, encasing her tight as Garrik moved forward but hesitated to touch.
He nodded. Hatred—so much hatred filled his face. “The moment I found you outside Telldaira’s western wall, I wanted to thieve you then. But I imagined stealing you from a meadow with nothing but a pack on your shoulder would leave you with nothing. Thinking it was better if you returned to the manor and perhaps collected what was most treasured, but instead, when we slipped inside, none of us found you there. Only a maidservant my powers convinced to inform me of where you were. Then I saw that pompous male’s hands on you, my … murderous tendencies snapped.”
‘ Are you alright?’
‘I know how to take care of myself.’
‘Clearly.’
“Not exactly the way I wished to introduce myself, but alas.” He chuckled. “From then on, I decided it was better for you to hate me. I cloaked myself as the bastard you saw me to be. And by the stars, I almost caved that morning in my tent. You touched me, Alora.” Garrik’s eyes found the sky. A tear, brutal and swift, fell. “For the first time in decades, I did not feel her talons or body as you kissed me. For a moment, you were mine—not mine —but you concocted the ruse, and I selfishly desired to know what it felt like to pretend you were. So, I continued along with it. Though you longed to kill me, though I am a monster, I desired to show you what a gentle hand could do.
“Then you left. And I imagined this great and terrible thing the stars had granted me was nothing but for their cruel entertainment. My punishment for my brutalization of Elysian souls. Because I finally had you safe from that vicious life, only for you to nearly find yourself killed by a gamroara. It tore me apart. I almost revealed myself un-magic-washed in Brennus’s camp. Once you were away from harm and Aiden under Ozrin’s care, I vowed to see you safely to Dellisaerin. I did not want you in my legion. Did not want you risking your life after already fighting your own war.
“But no matter how I warred with myself, no matter the bastard I am, I could not stop desiring to be around you. To protect you, even if it meant killing my soldiers. To show you that peace and love, that gentleness you deserved. If not from me, then Eldacar and Thalon and Aiden, even Jade after it all. That you could find a home and faeries who cared about you. And I watched as you renewed your shattered pieces as mine…” A strangled breath ripped from him. “As mine began to mend too.”
Her vision blurred to the point every color feathered together. Alora’s eyes stung, knowing how red-rimmed they must’ve looked as she stepped forward and calmly demanded, “Tell me. How does it work?” She twisted the ring on her thumb.
That tether …
Deep sorrow. Pain. Unfathomable loss cracked across it.
Garrik’s face paled, and she wasn’t certain he would remain standing when he brokenly answered, “Will your mind to Kadamar, and after, if you wish to go straight to Dellisaerin?—”
She didn’t want that.
Cutting him off, Alora grabbed his hand, trembling so terribly that his shadows were unsettled, and spoke to the darkness gathering around the ring. “Take us to another world.”