I spin on my heel, bile burning my throat. “Keep your expectations low,” I throw over my shoulder. “You may force me to marry her, but you cannot make me love her.”
“Who said anything about love?” Kaelus calls after me. “I just want a wedding and an heir, Daedalus. You’re too ruined for anything else.”
My step falters. I half-turn, meet his eyes once more, but the words that crowd my mouth taste like ash. I swallow them whole, turn back toward the door, and leave.
***
After her.The void has never been so black, so devouring. Endless. Infinite. I walk its depths for hours, days, perhaps, treading on nothing but smoke and shadow, screaming until my throat is raw, my voice a withered husk on the windless air. No one answers. Not even the demons that haunt the farthest, foulest corners.
The void is empty.
They’re hiding in An’kel. A place I cannot reach. He knows that.
For all the curses the Father Below shackled to my soul, opening a portal to his kingdom was not among them. But today… today I try again.
With Emranth’s power now bound to mine, there must be hope. He could travel between realms. So perhaps… perhaps I can too.
What do I have to lose? Everything worth losing is already gone.
My father, for all his cruelty, was still my sire, my king. My mother, stolen before she could give me a name. My daughter, wrenched from my arms by the very thing I feared most. And my wife… my Amara. My heart. She dances between the worlds of life and death, and I do not know if we will reach the Grove before the music stops forever.
I stand in the dark, the silence a living, hollow thing, its thrum echoing in my skull. Emranth’s power coils within me, threaded through my own magic, his wails a constant, desperate plea in the back of my mind. I shove them aside. Voices in my head are nothing new.
I reach deep. Past the smoke, past the shadow, hunting for that elusive thread of power, the one that will rip the wall between the void and An’kel to shreds. The one that will take me to my daughter. To Gygarth.
I will kill him when I find him. Kill him and be free at last.
How? I haven’t dared think that far. I can barely think at all these days. But with a blade in my hand and hatred boiling in my blood, I will carve a way to make the god of death bleed for every piece of me he has stolen.
My body screams as I try to wrench the magic from Emranth’s grasp. Veins throb, muscles burn, teeth grind. But no power answers my call.
I fall to my knees. Fists clenched so hard the skin over my knuckles feels paper-thin, ready to tear. I lift my gaze, lungs dragging for breath, heart desperate for even the smallest sliver of light in the dark.
There is none.
No whisper of An’kel beyond the layers of realms. Only the void and it is endless.
A breath rattles out of me, long, shuddering. There’s sorrow in it, sharp as broken glass. A sound no one else will ever hear, because it comes from somewhere too deep, too fragile. I do not breathe it into the shadows, for fear they might swallow it whole, for fear they might know the truth it carries:
That I am weak. That I am hopeless.
That after everything, I could not keep them safe.
That I have failed.
That I was never meant to hold anything good in my hands for long.
That death and pain are the only companions I will ever know.
When the last shred of breath leaves me, the void unravels like smoke in the wind.
The deck solidifies beneath my knees. Salt-laced air whips against my skin, carrying the roar of the distant waves. Above, the hunter’s moon blazes, full and beaming in a stretch of midnight sky.
“No luck again?”
Zyphoro leans against the railing, the wind tugging her dark curls into a wild halo as moonlight gilds her cheekbones.
I drag my gaze to her, chest still heaving from the effort. Then I shake my head, chin bowing until I can’t bear to meet her eyes.
