Chapter Thirty-Five
Elysia
The world splits open inside me.
It starts with a tremor behind my eyes, a pressure that builds and builds until the ground itself seems to heave open beneath my feet, carrying me into the past.
Images crash through my mind like a blast of light magic, hot and blinding, each one cracking open the reality I thought I knew.
Steel clangs against steel, the reverberation racing up my arms until my bones ache.
I stagger, my balance slipping before I dig my boots into the ground and summon an illusion of myself.
I jerk to the side as my opponent watches the illusion of me falling to the ground.
He takes the bait before his eyes can perceive what I’ve done.
By then, it’s too late, and my blade slashes across his neck.
The next memory races into my mind, jerking me into the sky.
Ash thickens the air around me, clogging my throat as I try to see through to the destruction below. I try to breathe, but every inhale tastes of fire and ruin. Tears run down my face. Pain erupts in my chest as if a sword cleaves through me, but I’m alone atop my creature.
The pain disappears as I’m pulled through to another moment in the sky. The wind whips around me, snapping my hair across my face, the strands damp with blood and sweat. Shadows bloom overhead, vast and monstrous, blocking out what little light seeps through the clouds.
My dragon roars, its sound splitting the skies open as purple flames blossom across the battlefield like poisoned flowers.
I recognize the shadows swirling atop the creature and that same echoing roar.
Vayrith.
He’s the creature from my dream. He’s no longer some distant, beautiful myth. He’s mine.
The battlefield suddenly stretches out before me, my feet on the ground and not in the sky, or even the clouds. The human world. It’s a broken wasteland of torn banners and shattered bones.
Through the carnage, I see him.
A figure cutting through the smoke, light clinging to him like a second skin.
A man with violet eyes and long silver hair, his hands stained red, his face twisted with grief.
Rhune, but not Rhune.
Castion.
The name burns across my mind with the force of a memory clawing its way out of the grave.
I run to him, my heart a frantic drumbeat, my body screaming warnings I refuse to heed. His arms open for me, and like a fool desperate for the comfort of a past already lost, I throw myself into them.
His warmth is real. His hands are firm and trembling against my back. His breath hitches in my ear as he says my name, “Katalina.”
It’s so soft it cuts deeper than any blade. I’ve missed him.
For one stolen moment, I let myself believe we are still whole.
Then I feel it … the sharp, cold bite of a blade sliding between my ribs from the back.
I’d allowed myself to feel a semblance of tenderness again, just for it to be used against me. By him … by my soulmate.
My gasp is stolen by the storm as pain blossoms through my body, raw and all-consuming. I clutch at him, confused, terrified, feeling my blood hot and thick between us.
His hands don’t let go, holding me through the betrayal. When my knees buckle, he follows me down, murmuring my name like an apology.
Rage and heartbreak ignite within me, twin infernos tearing through my soul.
With the last strength left in my failing body, I summon a blade of blood, plunging it into the heart I once trusted more than my own.
I see the shock flicker through his eyes as his life spills into my hands, but there’s also relief.
We collapse together, tangled in ruin. Two souls cleaved apart by war and a fate we couldn’t fight.
The sky cracks open above us, raining fire and ash as our blood soaks the ground, and everything we might have become burns away into the void as our souls leave this world together.
The battlefield tears away from me with a violence that leaves me gasping, my body jolted back into the broken reality of the stone prison that had become my home.
I stagger, my hand clawing against the rough wall at my side, seeking something solid in a world that feels like it is crumbling beneath me.
The cold of the stone seeps through my palms, but it does little to steady the way the world tilts and reels around me. My brain struggles to know which life it belongs to—the one I live now or the one I remember from my past.
Pain throbs in my back, the wound that ended me remembered in this life. Each beat of its glow sinks deeper into my bones until it feels as if the mark has always been there, simply waiting for me to awaken.
The same spot Castion drove his blade into me.
I drag in a breath, the taste of iron and dust thick in the back of my throat as if the battle followed me to the present. As the haze of memory slowly ebbs, the weight of understanding slams into me harder than any blade ever could.
I’m not just a girl plucked from obscurity for the selection.
I’m the traitor that defected to the Dark God.
The Nithrin warrior who abandoned her court and soulmate and chose the path of ruin. I’m the catalyst for everything this broken realm still bleeds from.
Katalina.
The name surfaces from the ashes of my mind, carrying with it the crushing certainty of recognition. For a moment, I can’t do anything but stand there, feeling it settle into my skin like a second soul waking inside me.
Dots begin to connect as unknowns become clear.
The Valgys in my nightmares weren’t hunting me. They were trying to find me to follow me. I’d commanded them as the general of our army.
The Calling Flame didn’t stir for a human queen desperate to prove herself, but for a soldier it once lived to serve. Vayrith felt my soul. He knew it was me calling for him.
The ground shudders beneath me, a low, resonant vibration that hums through the stone and into my bones. I lift my gaze toward the crumbling stones above as a sound splits the air.
A roar.
Deep and filled with fury.
Dust rains down from the crumbling ceiling, a haze of stone and ash swirling through the room, and I feel my connection to him burst to life.
Vayrith.
He’s come for me.
I brace a hand against the wall, blinking hard against the grit stinging my eyes, forcing myself to scan the room as the last pieces of the world I knew slip through my fingers.
My gaze catches on the empty space where Sorryn’s body should have been.
A bitter sound scrapes from my throat, low and raw.
Whether he fled or was dragged away by an ally, I don’t know, but my gut tells me it won’t be the last time our paths cross.
I press the heel of my hand hard against my chest, willing my heart to steady, willing the fire in my veins to burn away the rising tide of dread as I turn my gaze to the one I called my soulmate in our last life.
The same elf who had just consumed my lips and swore to find me in this life, always.
Through the settling dust and fractured moonlight, I watch his head shake and his brow crease, like he’s coming out of the same trance I’d found myself in.
My lips open to speak, but as his gaze collides with mine, his body coils tightly and suddenly all words escape me.
The same violet eyes I was just relieved to see as he found me trapped in this prison are now the same ones that stare at me like I’m a dangerous unknown.
How had things changed so quickly?
He drags his hands down his face as if he could scrub the memories out of his skin, and for a fleeting moment, I wish we could. I wish we could forget and be those two souls who had embraced and felt safety and relief in each other’s arms.
He stares at me and for a long, agonizing moment, neither of us speaks.
It is not just his distrustful gaze that weighs heavy on me … it’s the crushing knowledge that we were soulmates. That we’re here now, again, and I have to wonder: That means we’re soulmates in this life as well, right?
Suddenly his earlier words hit hard and my heart squeezes. There’s nowhere you could be lost to me.
“I …” I try to begin, but the word is a mere rasp that quickly dies on my tongue.
He flinches at the sound of my voice, just slightly, as if it strikes deeper than any blade.
How do I apologize for a betrayal that spans thousands of years?
The question makes me bristle. Do I even need to apologize, when it wasn’t my hands from this life?
I take a cautious step forward, arms aching to reach for him, but he stiffens, the distance between us stretching wider than I ever thought possible.
The light from our marks still pulses faintly, casting eerie reflections on the broken stones around us. A constant reminder of where we’d struck each other down in our past lives.
I can see his struggle as his fingers twitch at his side before his hand lifts. I hold my breath as I think maybe he’ll reach for me.
The part of him that knew me here, in this life. The Rhune who held me with reverence. The man who tore apart enchantments to reach me.
Layered over it now is the memory of the man who drove a blade into my back to end a war.
His hand falls back down to his side and I let mine do the same.
The same war rages inside of me, an aching confusion of longing and horror, love and betrayal, tangled so tightly I can’t begin to separate where one ends and the other begins.
I try again, my voice barely above a whisper. “We’re not them. We’re not who we were.”
A muscle spasms along Rhune’s jaw as he drags his gaze away, his hands curling into fists at his sides.
“You say that,” he murmurs, voice rough and hoarse, “but it feels like she’s still inside you. It feels like I’m still him.”
The pain in his voice tears something vital from my chest.
I take another trembling step toward him. “We don’t have to be. We can choose something else. We can still—”
The stone wall behind him shudders violently, cutting me off with a blast of magic ripping through the castle with a deafening boom.
Chunks of rock and mortar rain down, forcing Rhune to pivot, shadows rising in a defensive shield around his body that quickly extends to encompass me.