The Queen of the Dawn (Shadows and Crowns #5)

by S.M. Gaither

No matter what dark waters await us, I will keep fighting my way back to the surface.

Elander. A light inside the darkness, leading her home.

“You found me.” He held her more tightly, cradling her head to his chest. “Nowhere you could go,” he reminded her.

She had not traversed timelines and realms to fully embrace herself and her powers only to arrive too late.

The legend says it was the site where a warrior-elf of the same name—the eventual founder of Mistwilde—went to battle with one of the Moraki who were trying to strip the elves of their magic.

No matter how many times he looked at her, her beauty still threatened his balance.

And she had been drowning all her life before that, it sometimes felt like—sinking into waves of anxiety and fear where her surroundings grew murky and her breaths came heavy and slow—if they came at all.

“There are stories that say my great-great-grandmother on my mother’s side fell in love with the God of Fire.

“There is always an after,” she whispered. “The stormy waters can’t last forever.”

“I’ve been carrying on in spite of my fear for my entire life, and I don’t plan to stop now.”

“It’s so annoying when you remain rational despite my best attempts to panic.”

At least…at least, there was a possibility in my case. And a love powerful enough to break a world.

you would have stood by my side through all of it. I believe that.”

The light cannot always overcome the dark, but it must rise to meet it.

Suddenly he was staring at her the way he had just before she’d kissed him in the forest earlier that day—with the weight of lifetimes in his eyes, and his lips parted as though on the cusp of a thousand things he wanted to say.

In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to look upon him and that smile for all the rest of her days, however many or few they were.

“Across lifetimes, through endings and beginnings, with all that I have, all that I’ve ever had…”

“I never stopped loving you. And I never will. I’ve made that vow before—nearly every time I’ve looked at you in this lifetime and every other—and I make it again now.”

“Now arch your back and lift your hips,” he ordered, one of his hands slipping between her legs and pushing up, persuading her to comply. “I want to be inside my wife.”

That’s the problem with loving deeply, she’d once said to him. It means you have to hurt deeply too.

And whatever is coming…if this is to be our ending, then believe me when I say I will be waiting for you in whatever comes next—whether in this lifetime or another. I will find you again. I swear it.”

He looked to his right, seeking and finding the one thing that usually slowed his racing fears and brought him balance—her. His soulmate. His queen. His wife.

“If this is the end, then we will go out with the sun rising around us; it will be the brightest light this world has ever known.”

Holding the darkness at bay until she found the strength to rise once more, to pick up her sword and face that darkness alongside him.

She had no fear in that moment—she was the terror, the storm, and she continued to summon more and more lightning into her command.

“We’ll take different paths now,” the goddess whispered before pulling away, “but that doesn’t change the roads we’ve already walked together, does it?”

But she was well-practiced at doing things in spite of her fear, so she clutched the broken shard of her sword and managed to put one foot after the other until she was at the beginning of the path.

He nodded, smiling back as he took her hand, and together they walked on toward everything after.

Elander wiped them away and pressed his lips to hers, and she tasted lifetimes in his kiss, the salt and tears of all they’d been through, all they’d survived, and the promise of all they still had left to do.