Chapter Thirty-Five #2
With the wall gone, a massive form is revealed with the glow of the moon’s light.
The head comes first, sleek and crowned with spiraling horns of black shadows. Wings beat up and down in deliberate sweeps, scattering rubble with each draft of air sent our way.
Vayrith.
Recognition and happiness erupts from within me. Not just from Katalina’s memories, but from my own. From the dream I had where I met him in that beautiful forest of magic.
I ache to sit atop him and feel the wind along my body in this life.
A strangled curse tears from Rhune’s throat as he summons his magic to his palms, light gathering in fierce, crackling bolts ready to be unleashed.
“No!” I cry out, instinct taking over as I throw myself between them, arms spread wide, my back to Vayrith’s steady, humming presence.
Rhune’s magic flickers midair, his hands trembling as he stares at me with a look of wounded disbelief.
The silence between us stretches taut as his shield of shadows slinks away from me, retreating back to him.
Our new reality settles heavily between us.
We aren’t just Elysia and Rhune anymore.
We’re two souls shaped by blood and war, by choices made long before we were born again.
The weight of it presses down on us, and I watch it suffocating any hope that might have lingered in the wreckage.
Rhune lowers his hands slowly, the light fading from his palms, but the betrayal in his eyes cuts deeper than any magic could.
“You defend him,” Rhune says, his voice breaking apart like brittle glass.
I clutch my hands together at my chest, as if I can keep the cracks within my heart from splitting open completely.
“I have to,” I whisper back, the words barely making it past the rawness in my throat. I feel something deep inside me tear free, a protectiveness so old and vast it feels like it was stitched into my bones long before this life. “I created him.”
The admission hangs between us, thick and poisonous, bleeding into the ruined air around us until there’s no space left to breathe.
Rhune closes his eyes, his entire body taut with the war raging inside him. His hands tremble at his sides, the shadows that cling to him flickering with each ragged breath.
When he finally lifts his gaze to me, the elf I knew—the one who kissed me like salvation, the one who broke every rule to reach me in my dreams—he’s gone, swallowed whole by the shattering weight of everything we’ve remembered.
“I spent all these years wondering why I felt drawn to you,” he mutters, the words scraping out of him like they hurt to say. His head shakes slowly, as if he still can’t quite make peace with what he now knows. “Why I couldn’t bear the thought of letting you go.”
A dry, broken laugh huffs from his mouth, but there’s no humor in it, only bitterness. A grief so profound it threatens to swallow us both whole.
His voice isn’t tender anymore. It’s hollow and vacant, like something beautiful inside him has died and left only the ruins behind.
The hot sting of tears blurs my vision before I can stop them, slipping free and carving silent tracks down my cheeks.
“Rhune, please,” I choke out, reaching toward him without meaning to, the tips of my fingers trembling with the need to touch him, to remind him of what we still are.
His mouth twists into something that is almost a grimace, his hand lifting halfway toward me as if he might reach back, and then falls limply to his side again.
It still hurts him to see me like this, and that small mercy shatters something deeper in me.
“I understand it now,” he says through clenched teeth, every syllable torn from his chest like a confession he would rather die than make.
The finality in his voice cleaves through me, sharp and merciless.
I stumble a step forward, unable to stop myself from reaching for him. “Rhune …?”
His name on my lips is a whispered breath, a plea, and me desperately reaching across a distance that grows colder and wider with every heartbeat.
He takes a single, agonizing step back from me and the distance between us spreads open like the battlefield we once stood upon, on opposite sides of the Blood War.
He looks at me with devastation hollowed into the shape of his face, like he’s already mourning what was, even though I am still standing right in front of him, wanting to fight for what we could have now.
He looks at me as if the decision has already been made. As if fate has been laughing at us all along for thinking we could find happiness in this life, together.
It’s like he believes to the depths of his soul, that no matter what we do, we are doomed to repeat the same tragedy written into our blood.
His violet eyes, once filled with the fierce, trembling hope of a future together, are now empty voids. When he speaks, it’s so soft and full of fear, yet the crack in his voice cuts through me deeper than any weapon ever could.
“Will we kill each other in this life as well, Elysia?”