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He glanced back, eyes of purest sin meeting mine, like a spill of oil mixed with hellfire. His face was brutally beautiful to look at, the slash of his eyebrows carving over those wicked obsidian eyes and the slant of his cheekbones like two cuts of glass driven beneath his skin. His black hair was as sleek as feathers, wayward and tumbling more to the right of his face than to the left, and there was a hint of deepest red to it, like a slick of blood glossed through it.
tried to speak to her, only to find my mouth was sealed shut with ice, so thick and impenetrable, I couldn’t even tell her that I loved her in the moment of her death. Because that was what this was, I knew it with such certainty that I was choked by it, crushed in the fists of the stars and forced to face the horror of it without escape.
“Find who did this,” she rasped. “Never rest, Everest. Until they pay for what they have done.”
The skin was ravaged, and if there was one thing I knew about Basilisk venom, it was that there was no healing its scars. Healing was a rarity of its own, the gift of such knowledge belonging to the Reapers alone, though they didn’t offer it out too many.
But it wasn’t them I hated most. It was the dark-haired man with the soulless eyes. The monster who had set that fire, who had watched as it swallowed us whole. But it had not consumed me as he had hoped.
Moraine was my sister in arms. If she fell, I’d fall too. She was my strength when I found myself lacking, my spirit when my own threatened to break, my comfort when the horrors of war pressed close in the darkness of the night. She and Dalia were all I really had, and she would not fall alone. A
I aimed for the open ground in front of Echo Fort, my eyes raking across the Fae who remained there, hunting for Dragor among them.
I was crossborn after all – birthed too early under the wrong sign. My mother had been waterborn and I had been planned for a Pisces birth, but the stars had intervened, bringing me to the world early and marking me as a child of Aquarius instead.
Yes, shame marked us all, and we had all been named as Sinfair – those whose reputation bore a stain which only glory in war could blot out - but they would never bear the weight of having weak blood.
“Violent little thing, aren’t you?” he said, giving me a look which was about as far from fear as physically possible.
Dragor lifted my hand to his mouth, smiling at me in the way a wolf might grin at a lamb before pressing his lips to the bleeding flesh, placing a kiss against the sting of the wound.
“Are you going to tell me why you reek of another man?”
“So tell me why you saw fit to include a new member in your squad?” he pressed. “He was very insistent,” I ground out. “And we didn’t have time to waste arguing over-” “Did you catch him in your snare, little demon?”
“One day,” he murmured, almost to himself as he withdrew, leaving me trembling from the possessive touch. “You and I will stop dancing around this and-”
But if my mother’s killer was nothing but a machine created for slaughter, then all the more reason to make sure he was destroyed.
“They’re un-Awakened – they don’t have their fire magic yet,” I gasped. “That’s how they got through The Boundary. Ransom pushed me through it tonight and I was unmarked by its power.”
My heart was a ragged, bloody thing in the wake of his attack and I despised him viscerally, to the core of me and beyond. This hate was pain, it was poison and it could easily destroy me, but not before it destroyed him.
“Your desperate need for vengeance makes you predictable,” he said, his voice dripping with malice. “Your death is inevitable, Raincarver.”
When I was fourteen, I was sent to war for the crime of having been born in a land other than my own. I was given seven years to prove myself worthy of a chance to enter Never Keep and unlock my air magic.
Strong arms banded around my waist, jerking me back into the sky and I choked down a breath as I turned in my saviour’s grip and found Cayde looking at me with an eyebrow raised.
“Are you certain? Because I’m getting the impression that your reputation was exaggerated.”
“You mean to claim new land?” Amoria questioned, her silver hair the only thing which seemed utterly unmoved by the wind that continued to whip around us. “The king hasn’t sanctioned-” “You answer to me, not my father,” Dragor sneered, though to my surprise, Amoria didn’t wither beneath the cold contempt in his expression. “And I assure you, the king will not question my choice in the matter when we return to the homeland not only with our target but with new lands claimed against our enemies.”
I looked to him as I said it, inhaling sharply as I found him leaning into my personal space, his cold eyes peeling me apart and inspecting me too closely to ever find me worthy. When he looked at me like that, I felt as though he could see the blood running through my veins, the weakness which I had been born with, the truth which no action of mine could ever truly banish.
Dragor smiled slowly, stepping close to me and taking hold of my waist between his large hands, bending down to keep his eyes locked with mine. “You are my creature,”
“I am,” I swore because he was the one thing which could offer me a true place in this world and if being his weapon, his assassin, his monster meant that I belonged, then I would become whatever he demanded of me.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t ignite the magic in this blade before stepping through The Boundary, or it would have been turned to ash.”
I was so close to him that I could smell oak and cinders on his skin, the perfect concoction of villainy.
“You failed her. And now you have destroyed one of the only worthwhile pieces of yourself,” the commander said in a cold tone, his words cutting deep.
“From now on, you will be a shadow in our land. A creature akin to rats and foxes, and you will be treated as the useless vermin you are.”
My mother’s parting words to me carried to me as if upon the back of the ocean breeze. I inhaled them like a toxin, letting them fill my lungs and bind themselves to the shattered remnants of my soul. And I felt them taint me with a dark kind of strength, one that twisted and altered me, shaping me into something sinister.
“But I won’t rest until I have her killer’s heart.”
Long ago in some madness or genius now forgotten to the dredges of the Endless War, Fae had taken wild beasts and experimented on them, melding their bodies with metallic contraptions imbued with magic. The idea had been to create more warriors to throw into the countless battles, but the reality had been these horrifying beasts which were impossible to control.
My blood isn’t who I am. My weakness doesn’t define me. I carved my place in their kingdom. I made them notice me. I earned my own name among them. I am just as they all whisper; black-hearted, ruthless, unstoppable, and above all else, un-fucking-killable.
Flames curled around the spot, but they were being doused by a roaring wave, and the space between them was waiting for the day I learned the name of the man who had murdered my mother. Once I held that knowledge, I would etch it into this very place and send a prayer to Pisces to bless the blade with all the fury of my star sign and grant me favour in my quest to destroy him.
“Yield,” he purred, and the deep tenor of his voice sent a shiver rolling through me. The kind that shouldn’t have been born between friends.
He was my lifeline in the dark, the one who had gotten me through the greatest depression of my life.
From guessing his age, and knowing that he couldn’t have been Awakened as he had crossed through The Boundary, I knew he would either be at war by now or perhaps about to become a neophyte at Never Keep. And the only way I would find him would be by walking in his footsteps.
“Be thankful I do not cut out your tongue for your impertinence, runt. For your behaviour, you will make the journey to Never Keep locked up in a cabin.”
Prince Dragor sat at the high table directly beside King Aquila in the position of honour at his right hand. Princess Laurina was positioned on the king’s other side and the two remaining princes, Roarson and Evard had places set for them bookending the line-up, though they weren’t currently present.
We’d been disguised as Flamebringers of course and had moved among them without too much trouble, allowing us to locate the gated mansion where our target lived.
I’d worked my blood magic into the decoration on my flesh and though very few Fae ever saw the ink which spanned my back and crept around my ribs, I couldn’t help but think of it as the most honest pieces of me.
let myself acknowledge the tremble in my limbs where the blood magic I’d used had carved a price from my soul.
Cayde Avior had become the most infuriating thorn in my side. He was one of us – the Sinfair whose shame clung to us like a second skin, though luckily for him he wasn’t born of weak blood like me. No, from what I had gathered by asking about him – purely because he was in my way so fucking frequently – first his mother had lost an entire legion to a raid on the earth lands of Avanis.
Cayde’s lips twitched with amusement - like I wasn’t the deadliest creature in this place - and I snatched the jar of healing poultice from his pocket.
“I’ve fought in a lot of battles,” I deadpanned. “Why are you still here?” “I was referring to those caused by lashes,” he pushed, his tone darkening as if my inability to follow all of the rules laid out before me was somehow infuriating to him.
“I was raised in a waifhouse, told from the moment I was placed there that I was not worthy of my star sign, that my blood would out and prove my weakness time and again. I have been looked at with scorn and disgust every single day of my wretched, wicked life and everyone surrounding me was simply waiting for me to fail.
In fact, they wanted me to fail. I have fought for everything I have, from the food in my belly when I was four years old and they told us that there would only be enough for the strongest to eat, to the right to even offer myself as a candidate for battle training. Which, by the way, I earned by brawling with boys twice my size when I was eight years old and winning. Every time I prove myself worthy of note, the bar is raised higher, making me reach for it once again.
“If you follow this path you’ll become my creature entirely, bound to me in every way. I won’t relinquish you once I’ve had you, so be certain you know what it is you’re claiming because once you’ve fallen for the sin of me there will be no repenting, no undoing it. If it is true that you will ruin me for all others then you will take on the full weight of that. You will be mine in every sense. So tell me. Is that what you want?”
I’ve seen the way your blood sings for violence, and I knew you’d be wet from the moment I found you pinned beneath that brute when I arrived in this room.”
The air was frigid here, this small, rocky island off the coast of Never Keep a sacred place where all magical Awakenings in the four lands were held. We were in the polar circle, the air frosty and what little I could see of the landscape was barren, made up of black volcanic rock with deep green moss clinging to it in swathes.
