“It’s beautiful,” Ophelia breathed. Her hand stopped at the top of the left side, and from the slow, barely-there touch, I knew what she was reading. “Lyria.”
I dared a glance over my shoulder, heart splintering at the tears slowly tracking down her cheeks. I pulled Ophelia to me, laying back against the pillows with her wing draped across my chest and the other spread along the bed, her body flush against mine.
“How have you been coping?” she asked. It was such a damn personal question, but from her, it cracked the ice numbing my heart. Or maybe her light had burned it away.
And in its place, a flood of feeling soared through me. Grief, guilt, despair.
“I haven’t been,” I admitted. “I’ve just been trying to figure out a way out of this mess because I couldn’t even come to terms with what happened.”
“Do you want to talk about it now?”
I considered, dragging my fingertips up her spine. “I want to understand. Lyria told me—” I paused, my sister’s final moments a bruise I was afraid to press. But the floodgates opened. “Lyria knew it was coming. A Soulguider hinted something cryptic, and she figured it out, so I’m grateful she seemed to be at peace with it, but I’m just so fucking lost as tohowthis could happen to her. How is it fair? How did she deserve such a short life?”
“She didn’t,” Ophelia responded quickly. “She deserved so much more than what she was given. Death isn’t fair, and that’s why we’re fighting. For Lyria and all the Lyria’s of the world.”
“Death isn’t fair,” I repeated, resting my head atop Ophelia’s. “That’s such a fucking painful truth, Alabath.”
She brushed her fingers over my ribs absentmindedly. “When my father died, I questioned it for months. I still do. I don’t know why the Spirits give us these people to love so fiercely only to have them taken from us too soon. But the only comfort I can come up with is that some people—those like Lyria, like my father—are full of so much love that they leave the same impact in a short lifetime that others leave in centuries. They deserved to have those centuries regardless, and it will never be fair, but their Spirits will forever echo with their impact. Through those of us they loved and left behind.”
Ophelia had lived with her father over her shoulder at every turn since he left. I’d do that for Lyria now. I didn’t know when I’d grow to understand what happened to her—how it could happen—but I’d take it one step at a time. Grief was slow, healing was slower. But every damn thing I did from now until Echnid was gone from this realm would be for the commander who loved so fiercely, she gave a lifetime’s worth in a few decades.
“I love you, Ophelia Alabath,” I whispered. “Since I was a boy and infinitely.”
“I love you, too, Tolek Vincienzo,” she answered, fingers dancing over the edge of my tattoo. “I am so relieved to be back.”
She rested her head on my chest then, her tears still warm and flowing, but a different sort of peace sealed between us as we gazed out in the direction of the Mystique Mountains, a little closer to healing now that we were together.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ophelia
That first afternoon back,Tolek told me of the numbness he’d slipped into after Lyria’s death. Of how he didn’t feel like it was her time and had been wrestling with how to accept that. Of how he was trying to find a steady place between burning anger and echoing emptiness.
And I told him every little detail of Echnid and how I feared what the god was trying to turn me into.
Tol showered me with affection to erase the stains left on my soul. His hands along my skin, gripping to the point of bruises blooming, erased the Warrior God’s poison lingering in my veins. The small purple spots across my ribs were works of art dotting my scars. Visible markers for the tainted soul within.
And as he stroked gentle fingers up my arm beneath the sheets, I whispered to him, “My body is my own. My mind is my own.” It was safe, to be held by him.
“No one else’s,” he assured me, lips against my shoulder, life brimming in his hungry eyes.
My body is my own.
My mind is my own.
And that night, when he kissed down my stomach and lowered himself between my legs, a part of me thought,My body is his. And he was the only one I wanted to give it to.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Damien
Bantand I stood atop the mountain peaks facing southwest, his eyes locked on the horizon.
“You know there are others out there—the friends of the girl—who have somehow retained more magic than they were meant to,” my companion, once my sworn enemy, said. Somehow, despite the missteps we both made in delivering us to this spot, we had become allies. We disagreed on every process but desired the same results.
“They have, but that may work in our advantage based on what the prophecies require,” I reminded him. “It may be a scheme of the Fates, orchestrating an opportunity.”
“You know the Fates do not interfere in that way. Their purpose is guidance and maintaining fortunes, not changing them.”
