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Cayde might have made a traitor of my flesh, but he would never be able to make a traitor of my heart. I lived and breathed for Stormfell.
Every word from his lips had dripped a truth which I had been too fucking foolish to see. But now in the light of his betrayal they were all replaying through my mind,
And I had been – the perfect tool for him to wield in his bid to get closer to the prince. For the love of the stars, I had found him alone in my room, he had asked me openly if he might read a letter Dragor had sent me and had then so conveniently knocked the entire contents of my desk flying to the floor.
pushed myself to my knees, dimly taking in the breadth of his bedchamber, the naked woman who scowled at me from the towering four-poster bed. Everything was chillingly white, from the stone walls to the furniture, to the rug I was now staining with the blood of my most beloved friends.
“He seduced me,” I admitted. “It’s my fault.”
Of all their deaths, Vesper’s was the one that struck me like an anvil, the loss of her finding its way into my soul and tearing off a piece of it. She may not have been a friend, but I had respected what she was despite the lines drawn between us.
The words Harlon had spoken to me echoed in my head, making me fear for him with a deep kind of terror. “Run, Ever. Never stop running.”
Kaiser Brimtheon hadn’t witnessed its terrible power, but if he had, I was sure he wouldn’t have declared me the Void. He would know the truth as I did and he would see how preposterous his accusation was, but instead I was his captive for the sake of his mad claims.
His gaze didn’t stay there long, moving lower to inspect me with a scrutiny that made my skin itch. Heat flared along my flesh, my breaths coming too hard to not be noticed.
He was evil wrapped up in a suit of temptation, but there wasn’t a single part of me that could desire a creature like him.
“I thought I made myself clear, silka la vin,” he said in his deep baritone, his voice empty of the raw anger I’d witnessed from him down in that chamber. “You are the Void. And I will deliver you to Mirelle the moment we are free to leave Never Keep. This soul-tie forged between us will ensure you remain compliant in the meantime.”
“I have a duty to you now whether either of us care for it or not,”
His gentle touches were at complete odds with what I’d expected from him. In fact, I would have preferred he was cutting more marks into my flesh, showing the truth of him instead of this farse.
I was too hot in his company, this room blisteringly warm, and every touch he laid upon me burned ever deeper.
“Fight all you like. Thrash and struggle and plead with the stars for your deliverance, it will do you little good, and you will burn in the process. Once you are done with your rebellion, you will come crawling back to my door begging to fulfil the demands of the soul-tie. There is no escaping that fate. But if you wish to do this the hard way, silka la vin, so be it.”
The words Kaiser had spoken about this soul-tie rattled through my skull. “You will suffer so that I might thrive.”
“Now go to your room like a good girl. The soul-tie will demand that you return to me soon.”
“You have no idea how deep this magic runs, silka la vin,” he said, a warning veiled between those words. “You are my Fearsire and the meaning of that name will soon spark a terror in you that you will never forget.”
Dragor had never even assigned Cayde to me. All of it had been a fabrication which I had bought into all too easily.
With one act of brutal violence, a spy had slipped into our midst and spent years working to wrap himself in the identity he had stolen until finally daring to move closer to his target.
My prince was granting my wish. And I wasn’t going to disappoint him again.
“A creature which does not exist should leave no mark and go unseen at all times. Do you understand me?”
I wouldn’t simply wash their sacrifice away. There was power in what they had given for me. A dark and hellish power, far greater than any I had wielded before. All sacrifice was potent, but a life given out of love…
Perhaps I might have cared about that before, but now the thought of any man laying his hands on my body again only filled me with the sickening memories of Cayde and what he had taken from me. What I had so stupidly given him.
“I am yours,” I said, though the words tasted far more sour than the last time I had spoken them to him. Perhaps because I knew they had been a lie before, even if I hadn’t meant them as one, and now I couldn’t easily trust myself to pledge any kind of truth.
Nothing about the death I would offer him would be swift, no part of it merciful. I would cut him apart over days and weeks, months and years if I got the chance. I would burrow into the essence of him with my dark magic and bring every nightmare he had ever had into force against him while carving him apart in slow and precise measures.
Dragor’s eyes narrowed and he sat up in his seat. “You aren’t hunting the Stonebreaker brute. I’m sending you to hunt the Dragon.”
“I don’t give a fuck about the Dragon. Let it fly off to the stars themselves for all I care. I told you I need to hunt Cayde. I need to make him pay for what he did to-”
“You are my creature, Vesper Crossborn!” he bellowed. “Your life and everything you do with it is mine to command. You will not question me and you will not defy me ever again. And if you do not care for the continuation of your miserable existence beyond your desire for revenge then know this: if you do not deliver that Dragon to me then not only will I make you pay in blood and ruin for your defiance but I will also place a protection around the man you thought to be Cayde Avior which will put him beyond the reach of all the warriors at my disposal. I shall see to it that he is left to roam
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Next came The Tower, its white walls burning and struck with lightning, a weighted sense of prophecy seeming to fall over me as I looked upon it, making my spine straighten and the air stir around me.
if I surrendered to my pain, if I not only wore it but became it, I might just find the answer I’d long been searching for. I might just become a creature fierce enough to take down Kaiser Brimtheon, and perhaps far more than that.
I could make Kaiser’s Order form recede like turning ice back into water. I held that power in my blood and it bolstered the stubbornness inside me. I would break this soul-tie. Just fucking watch me.
If she was here, there would be nothing recognisable left. And the thought of that pierced something deep inside my chest, the wrongness of her loss not sitting right with me at all.
It was in that moment, I realised I had lost my faith in the Reapers.
One of the Reapers glanced back over his shoulder and my heart jolted, my gaze locking with the familiar copper eyes of my best friend. Harlon wore their cloak of gold, his hood pulled up and the blonde streak in his brown hair pushed back as part of a too-neat quaff.
It wasn’t like he could refuse their orders but witnessing him being a part of that fire…it unsettled me.
The Cardinal Reaper? Surely not. He was above all of this. He was godlike in his position; he was practically a myth whispered between allies. His touch upon your skin was said to gift you with the light of the stars in your blood. He didn’t just stride into a random breakfast hall. He was only present on the most holy of occasions.
My surprise only deepened at the sight of his face. He wasn’t the ancient, wise being I’d imagined, but perhaps only a few years older than my father, though his face was far less affected by war.
Solomon Imai. He was a Griffin, a creature known for their intelligence but also their prowess in battle.
He held all four elements in his veins, air, fire, earth and water, making him perhaps the most powerful Fae in The Waning Lands.
He represented each of the lands as if he was the beating heart of us all – that was what we had been taught anyway.
My head turned at the sensation of eyes upon me and I found Kaiser’s dark gaze boring into mine from the Flamebringers’ table, no emotion touching the harsh lines of his face.
Only a fool cages a wild creature and expects it to remain trapped forever, Kaiser Brimtheon.
I clapped along with the rest of the room and Harlon’s jaw ticked as a thousand words begged to be spoken between us.
The Vampire had been a member of the coven of five who had followed us below ground. He was devastatingly beautiful, his long copper hair like strands of shining metal and his eyes a striking hazel colour that seemed bluish-green one moment then gold the next.
-and why would Mirelle Brimtheon send her latest street urchin to me?”
“So it has a mind of its own, does it?” the Vampire sneered. “I hear she cuts out those orphans’ free will the moment she takes them in her door to suckle on her teat.”
“You know nothing of her,” Kaiser said, an edge of warning to his tone. “And if you speak of her like that again, I will ensure you regret it.”
So, The Matriarch was trading with Vampires?
“How long did the Cyclops interrogation last?”
