Chapter 39 Kess
Kess
The castle is worse than I expected.
We finally drag ourselves out of bed near midday, and the walk through the corridors is sobering.
Scorch marks climb the walls in places. Whole sections of stone have crumbled, leaving gaps that show grey sky beyond.
The smell of smoke is everywhere, thick and acrid, mixed with something darker underneath that I don't want to identify.
Rhystan walks beside me, close enough that our shoulders brush with every step. He hasn't said much since we left the guest chamber—just holds my hand and surveys the damage with an expression I can't quite read.
"How bad?" I ask as we round a corner into what used to be the great hall.
"Bad." He stops, and I stop with him. "Not irreparable. But bad."
The great hall is gutted. The massive wooden table where we shared meals is charred rubble. Tapestries that hung for centuries are ash. The throne—his throne, the seat of three hundred years of cursed kings—is cracked down the middle, blackened by dragonfire.
"Your father did this?"
"The priests, mostly. Holy fire burns hotter than dragonflame." He releases my hand, walks toward the ruined throne. Runs his fingers along the crack. "They were trying to stop the ritual. Destroy anything that might help us."
"They failed."
"They failed." He turns back to me, and there's something in his expression now—grief, maybe, or just exhaustion. "At great cost."
I think of the guards I saw fighting in the courtyard. The servants who must have been caught in the crossfire. The household staff who had nothing to do with curses or rituals or the politics of dragon kings.
"How many dead?"
"I don't know yet." He crosses back to me, takes my hand again like he can't bear not to touch me. "Corvith is doing a count. The mystic is tending the wounded." A pause. "My father's body is still in the courtyard. I should... deal with that."
I squeeze his hand. "We should deal with that. Together."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then nods.
The courtyard is a graveyard.
Bodies everywhere—guards in castle livery, priests in blessed silver, dragons caught mid-shift and frozen in death. The stones are stained dark with blood that's already going tacky in the afternoon air. Crows have gathered on the walls, waiting.
And in the center of it all, Valdris.
Rhystan's father lies where he fell, throat torn out, eyes open and staring at nothing. In death he looks smaller than he did in life—just an old man in ruined armor, not the monster who threatened to kill me and my children.
Rhystan stops at the edge of the carnage. I feel him go rigid beside me, feel the complicated tangle of emotions bleeding through the bond. Grief and relief and guilt and anger, all twisted together into something that doesn't have a name.
"I killed him." His voice is flat. Distant. "I killed my own father."
"He was trying to kill me. And our children."
"I know." He doesn't look away from the body. "That doesn't make it easier."
I don't have words for this. Don't know how to comfort someone who committed patricide, even justified patricide. So I just stand beside him, my clawed hand in his, and let him feel whatever he needs to feel.
"He wasn't always like this," Rhystan says eventually.
"When I was young—very young, before my first rut—he was different.
Stern, but not cruel. He used to take me flying over the mountains.
Taught me to hunt. Told me stories about our ancestors.
" A pause. "Then I killed my mother, and something in him broke.
He looked at me differently after that. Like I was a weapon that had misfired. A tool that couldn't be trusted."
"You were twenty-five. In your first rut. With a curse you didn't ask for."
"I know." He finally tears his gaze away from his father's corpse, meets my eyes. "You told me that before. That the curse was the monster, not me. I'm trying to believe it."
"Keep trying." I reach up, touch his face with claws I'm still learning to control. "It took me a long time to stop blaming myself for my heats. For the violence I couldn't control. You've had three hundred years of believing you're a monster. That's not going to change overnight."
"But it can change?"
"It's already changing." I pull him down, press my forehead to his. "You broke the curse. You chose your children over your father's legacy. You chose me over power." I let him feel my certainty through the bond. "That's not what monsters do."
He's quiet for a long moment. Then he pulls back, straightens his shoulders, and becomes a king again.
"We need to burn the bodies," he says. "All of them.
Dragon tradition—return them to fire, let the smoke carry them to whatever comes next.
" He looks at the priests' corpses with something colder.
"Even them. They were doing what they believed was right.
I won't dishonor that, even if I hated what they stood for. "
"And your father?"
"Him too." The words cost him something—I see it in the tightening around his eyes. "He was a bastard and he tried to kill you and I'll never forgive him for that. But he was still my father. He still deserves the rites."
I nod. Don't argue. This is his grief to navigate, his complicated tangle of love and hate and loss. All I can do is stand beside him while he does it.
The burning takes hours.
Rhystan shifts to dragon form to provide the flame—proper dragonfire, hot enough to reduce bone to ash. I stand at the edge of the courtyard and watch body after body disappear into white-hot heat, smoke spiraling up into a sky that's finally starting to clear.
The household staff gather to watch. Corvith stands at the front, face grim, keeping count of the dead.
The mystic tends to wounded guards nearby, her ancient hands steady despite the chaos.
Servants I recognize from the kitchens, the stables, the endless corridors of this place that's become something like home—they all stand witness while their king burns his father and his enemies alike.
When it's done, Rhystan shifts back. He's naked and ash-covered and looks more exhausted than I've ever seen him, but he stands straight as he addresses what's left of his household.
"The curse is broken." His voice carries across the courtyard, steady despite everything. "The ritual succeeded. My children will be born free of divine punishment, and no more omegas will die on claiming altars."
Murmurs ripple through the crowd. Some faces show relief. Others show uncertainty. A few show something that might be fear—directed at me, at the scales visible on my arms and throat, at the gold eyes that mark me as something not quite human anymore.
"There will be consequences," Rhystan continues. "My father's allies will not accept this quietly. The War God's remaining priests will call us heretics, blasphemers, oath-breakers. Other kingdoms may see weakness where the curse once projected strength."
He pauses. Finds me in the crowd. Holds my gaze.
"Let them come. Let them call us whatever they want. I have my mate, my children, and my people. That's worth more than any curse ever was."
Corvith is the first to kneel.
Then the mystic. Then the guards, the servants, the stable hands and kitchen staff. One by one, they drop to their knees in the ash-covered courtyard, pledging themselves to a king who just killed his own father for the right to love freely.
I don't kneel. Queens don't kneel to their kings.
Instead I walk through the crowd to stand beside him, take his ash-covered hand in my clawed one, and face whatever comes next together.
The weeks that follow blur together.
Rebuilding. Recovery. The slow, painstaking work of putting a castle and a kingdom back together after everything fell apart.
I learn my new body in pieces. The claws retract eventually—not easily, but with practice.
The scales don't spread further, settling into patterns that cover maybe a third of my skin.
My eyes stay gold, stay slitted, stay inhuman.
My strength is greater than before, my senses sharper, my reflexes faster.
The curse is a weight in my bones, but a manageable one. Most days.
Some days it's harder.
Some days I wake snarling, the divine rage pressing against the inside of my skull, demanding release.
Those days Rhystan holds me until it passes, talks me through the breathing exercises he developed over three centuries of containing his own beast. Those days I understand, truly understand, what he's been carrying all this time.
And those days I love him more for it. For surviving. For staying sane. For finding ways to be gentle despite everything inside him screaming for violence.
The twins grow stronger. I feel them constantly now—two distinct presences, two heartbeats alongside my own. Our son is calm in a way he never was before, the curse's absence leaving him peaceful. Our daughter is bolder, no longer hiding, her kicks growing stronger every day.
The mystic says another month. Maybe six weeks.
I'm not ready to be a mother. Don't know if I'll ever be ready.
But I'm going to be one anyway, and somehow that feels right.
Like everything that came before—the violence and the fear and the betrayal and the breaking—was leading here.
To this moment. To this family we're building from the wreckage.
Rhystan and I don't talk about forgiveness anymore.
We don't need to.
It's there in the way he brings me tea every evening—just chamomile, always just chamomile, and I've stopped checking.
It's there in the way I let him hold me when the rage gets too big, let him see me at my worst without fearing he'll use it against me.
It's there in the slow, patient rebuilding of trust that happens not through grand gestures but through a thousand small moments of choosing each other.
He lied to me. Drugged me. Made decisions about my body without my consent.
I love him anyway.
And maybe that's not weakness. Maybe that's just what love is—seeing someone's worst and choosing to stay. Watching them break everything and believing they can put it back together. Giving them the chance to be better, and holding them accountable when they're not.
We're not fixed. We might never be fixed.
But we're together. And right now, that's enough.