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June 5 - June 5, 2025
I’d thought I was protecting her from the monster who meant to harm her. But I’d only shown her the even worse monster she would become.
She might think that she could break me, but she wouldn’t. I’d been created of flesh and bone, forged in the fires of abuse and tyrants.
I held Khaos in my mind, the gleaming gold of his stare following me from behind closed lids. I was the daughter of Khaos. So chaos was what I would embrace.
There was no fear greater than this—greater than being consumed by power.
I forced myself to hold still through the agony, letting the power take root in my soul and flood my veins. I would never again be helpless. I would never again be afraid.
“A storm is coming for us all, and with it will come a shifting of the Fates. I wonder who will be owned when it is all said and done,”
“What am I to do with you, daughter?” he asked, watching as I tossed the collection of hair onto the sands before me in an offering. “Never before has someone taken their power back from Tartarus in the middle of the trials.” I shrugged my shoulders, shoving my sword back into the scabbard behind my back. “Good,” I said, smiling up at the man I refused to think of as my father. He might have given me my magic, but every other trace of him within me had to be gone after centuries of rebirth. “I would so hate to be predictable.”
“Estrella has been chosen for a fate that you cannot even begin to imagine. There is more to her future than simply having the power to do as she pleases. She must prove herself to have inner strength as much as outer strength. She must prove that she is kind, but fair, that she cannot be controlled by the human sensibilities that are undoubtedly a part of her given her upbringing,” Medusa answered, her voice quiet. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but he needs Estrella to prove who she is. Not the strength of her magic.”
“She is more than just a daughter of Khaos. She is the daughter of Khaos,” she said, a knowing grin spreading her lips wide. “Estrella is his chosen heir. She is chaos incarnate.”
“But I know what it is to live in the shadow of something far greater than I can ever hope to be. You have lived for centuries believing that one day you will have a human mate, a queen to sit at your side when you rule over the Winter Court. But what are the courts of Alfheimr to a woman who can move the stars and the moons themselves? Who can plunge the world into eternal darkness with a snap of her fingers? To the woman who will control the Void and all who exist in it?”
“And since when have women with that kind of power ever been allowed to have a life of comfort? I think deep down, you have always known that she was made for more. I think you’ve always known, in your heart, exactly what she is and what she was born to be. There is a darkness in her that you’ll need to accept,” she said, the softening of her smile feeling like a double-edged sword. “I’m the God of the Dead,” I said, returning her smile. I was no stranger to darkness and the elements of that reality that would also plague my mate.
The woman in front of me was crafted from darkness and something wild, a destiny written in the stars and trapped within the galaxies of her eyes. Until chaos reigned.
I didn’t care how. I didn’t care why. My mate was here, his mouth moving on mine, and all was right in my world.
“And I fear there is not enough time in all of eternity to give you the answers you seek. Your very existence was woven into the tapestries long before you were born,”
Soon I’d feel my mate in the same way. Soon, I’d be able to hear his voice in my head and his feelings as if they were my own. And so he would be able to feel and hear the same from me. Leaving me never truly alone in this world. Where that might have once brought fear, there was only comfort.
“You will always be my true legacy, Estrella,” she said as Belladonna pulled her fangs free from her wrist finally. “My daughter of chaos.”
“Let your father’s gift be a reminder,” she said, reaching up to cup my cheek as the wound healed over, glowing with golden light from within. “That no matter what the Fates may weave, you command the threads themselves.”
gentle reminder. “You are soft and gentle, and you want the things around you to remain so. You are not cursed like I am, but gifted with another means to protect yourself.”
“You are the master of your magic, my love. Do not ever doubt that or let it control you,”
“There is no need to be nervous about love, Estrella. You only need to fear all that comes after,” she said, the ominous words making my brow furrow. “To that end, I have one more gift that may help.”
“Mab may command the snakes on the surface, but the power she holds over them is only because she wears the stone that I crafted for my daughter upon her head like the thief she is. That magic is stolen, and one day,” she said, turning her attention to Estrella’s broad grin, “you will take it back.”
I looked for the light, as I’d vowed I would always do for the woman that I loved more than life itself, but I found something so much more. I found her.
“Every monster is the hero of their own story, and every hero the villain of someone else’s. You will always be Mab’s villain, just as she is yours,” the woman in the mirror answered.
I’d give her anything she needed, anything she wanted to take, if it meant that I would never have to leave this moment or this feeling.
This woman knew she owned me, body and soul, and that she would retain possession of me for all eternity.
If I were ever to get to choose a last meal, if I were to die with her taste on my tongue, then I would step willingly into the abyss.
The human mentality about sex and sin was gone from me, leaving me to embrace the primal connection I felt to the male behind me. Nothing we did together could be wrong.
“I see you now, my shadows.” “A shadow cannot exist without his light,”
“Our love isn’t gentle or kind. It’s rough and all-consuming; it’s a raging inferno that destroys the world in its wake.”
“I waited centuries for you. Waited centuries for this, and you still somehow manage to exceed every hope and dream I had.”
I was his star, and now his flesh was marked with the reminder of my ownership for the rest of his life. Caldris was mine and mine alone.
Mab’s mate was dead by her own hand, and the type of evil that took was incomprehensible. To lose a mate was to descend into madness slowly, to be the one who killed them … If she felt no remorse for the life of her mate, for the other half of her soul, then the rest of us truly stood no chance of surviving her reign.
We could only do what we were capable of, and a creature who was not capable of empathy would have no mercy to offer. Expecting him to help was a dream that would never come to fruition. In this, we were alone.
We needed to go, but we took a few minutes alone to grieve together, for what might have been before and could have been in the future.
“We kept him safe for you all these years, Child of Chaos, so that you may find yourselves united as one in this very moment.” Fenrir’s voice came as a deep growl in my head, his attention fixed on my face as he lingered over me. Instead of feeling suffocated by the cage his size might have created, I felt nothing but a sense of absolute safety. He was both my weapon and my armor, the shield that would stand between myself and the dangers lurking in the depths. I reached up a hand, smoothing it through the silky fur of his coat at his neck. My hand came away wet with blood, a reminder of the
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Together, we were formidable. Together, we would be enough.
If my time came, I would die in a blaze of glory and do everything in my power to take my enemies down with me. That meant I needed to escape the pit of Tartarus. That meant I needed to survive whatever they put forth for me.
Who you are at the very core of your being. Some may say that nothing is born good or evil, that life determines those things through circumstances and experiences, the Fates believe differently. They believe that one experience can alter two unique people in such profoundly different ways, changing one for the better and altering the other for the worst,”
I will not be a man’s weapon to be used at will.”
There is beauty in knowing who you are.
“You outshine even the brightest of stars, Little One,” my mate said, leaning forward to touch his forehead to mine. His eyes blazed with an icy blue, the magic of winter even more present in him since the loss of Twyla and the transfer of her power. “There is not a trial in this world that you could not defeat if you so much as dared to try. It has been my honor to stand at your side while you discover yourself and your heart after all of this time. I have waited centuries for you, and I would have waited centuries more, because there is no one in this world or the one that we will create who
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“I vow to be the sword at your back, to protect you from those who would stand in your way or make moves behind your back. I vow to support you in all you do, and to believe in the world you see for our future and our children’s future. My sword and my life are yours, min asteren. In this life and the afterlife, in this world and what comes next, you are my guiding light—the answer to the questions I didn’t know to ask.”
“What kind of King would I be if my first priority was not to serve my Queen in all things?”
and I realized just how stripped down the loss of one’s memories left us. It wasn’t just the loss of those he loved, but it was the complete and total loss of himself and everything that he was. It was a fate worse than death, I thought. One that I hoped one day I could free him from.
In this place, she might have been the Goddess they all sought to worship and believe in. But at the end of the day, when we all retired to our beds, it would be me she obeyed. There was something powerful in that, in knowing that this strong woman followed my orders and obeyed my commands not because she had to, not because she was weak or needed direction. But because she chose to. Because she wanted to be submissive to me and me alone because I was the only one who could make her kneel at my feet and do what she was fucking told.
“They want to watch you come undone, my star. They want to watch you rearrange the heavens with your chaos,”
It was in both his nature and mine, the very bones of our relationship. By day, he followed my whims, but by night, he led the way.
This was not an example of a woman being a hole to fuck, of being willingly used. This was where a woman offered her mate pleasure, serving him because it brought her joy to watch him come undone and be able to do nothing to stop it.
“There’s so much pain out there. So much suffering, and I know it’s only a matter of time before it steals someone else from me. The more time I waste, the more I think I’ll lose in the end.”
“Because our time is much better spent training to survive what may come tomorrow, so that we stand a chance of protecting the people we love when the battle comes,”
