One of us had more power than we’d been afforded, more strength. The very one who didn’t deserve any of it. The one who’d caused this, who’d forced us down here. Whose broken oaths had damned us all.
“Is it true?” I asked, squinting as a flare of the retreating sun cast itself forward.
“Is it true that the fool put part of the Red Light inside of her?” His hands ran up and down my arms and I turned again, leaning my back against his chest. This was also something I was still growing accustomed to. I was never sure if the strangeness of Moriel’s touch came from the fact that we’d spent lifetimes not touching. If my mind couldn’t move past the forbidden nature of such a thing. Or, if I simply could not accept the newness and physicality of my body. The way my skin felt, the way it sometimes hurt and burned, and the way it sometimes felt so good when he touched me that I wanted to scream and cry with gratitude. I felt like I was being constantly torn between pleasure and pain, satisfaction and yearning. It was all so confusing. And exhausting.
I missed being unbound, I missed the freedom of my ethereal body. The simplicity of it.
“Yes, he did,” Moriel growled. “The light was dying in its etheric form, and all he could manage was a sliver of it into her heart. He has ruined the Valalumir with his treachery, breaking what was once whole. Auriel has damned us again.”
“But to restore the light,” I said, “To restore the Valalumir from a crystal to its original form, won’t we need to remove what’s now inside Asherah? Is that even possible?”
“Of course, it is.” His fingers dug into my arms. “Nothing new is created. Nothing is ever fully destroyed, only changed. What goes in, must come out, however tied to her it is. We’ll remove it in the end.”
“But she’ll die.” I frowned. “Won’t she? If it’s removed?” My throat constricted. I’d never begrudge them their affair. The idea of love, of a soulmate, ofmekarim… it sounded nice. More than nice, if I were honest. But I’d always thought of true love and soulmates as a kind of silly story. Something to dream about, to aspire to in the small moments of fantasy and dreams—not something to actualize. What made this even harder was the fact that for more years than I could count, Asherah and I had been close. Like sisters. I still found it difficult to do what I was doing now. To be here without her. To have chosen a side against her. To stay the course.
I feared for her. For her mortality. For her soul. Just as I feared terribly for mine. But Moriel was here for me, like he’d always been. Moriel understood what I was going through—understood in a way that almost no one else could.
Asherah had caused this. Asherah had damned us. And much as I cared for her—loved her, even—I knew the truth. Asherah had to pay for her crimes.
“Only her body will die,” Moriel said slowly as if contemplating mortality himself. “As all bodies in this realm will eventually. Her soul though?” He pressed his lips grimly together. “That’s another story.”
I took a deep breath, trying to process again the idea of dying, of death. Of what she’d experience. Of how she’d change form, and what she would become compared to what she once was. I tried again to reconcile the fact that despite the love I bore her, this was bigger than us. There was no other choice.
“So, we go to war.” The words were like wet sand in my mouth.
“We go to war.” Moriel rested his chin on my shoulder, his hands moving to my belly, rising to the curves of my breasts.
My stomach tightened with tension, and pleasure. Always both with him. “How? They’re all against us. Even the mortals. They worship Asherah and Auriel’s sacrifice. They think the Valalumir is a gift. We can’t fight them alone. Not with their support. Not with Asherah’s power. We’d need an army.”
“We have one.” Moriel’s words seemed to echo against the water, as his palms slid higher, rubbing against my suddenly sensitive nipples. They moved past my collarbone, and up to my face, until he covered my eyes. I sucked in a breath.
Did this pleasure come as a result of being untouched for so long? Or from the way my mortal body worked? Would it feel this way if anyone else touched me? Or was it just him, his hands, his fingers that wrought this reaction?
“Look, Ereshya,” he whispered into my ear. “Let me show you.”
I closed my eyes and allowed his memories to enter my mind. The vision he showed me was dark, a scene in the middle of the night. My inner sight needed to adjust, but when it did, I nearly gasped. I was looking straight into the evil, red eyes of an akadim. A monster.
Every instinct in my body told me to run. To get away. I had to remember it wasn’t really before me. It was Moriel’s memory. Somehow that didn’t make me feel any safer.
I braced myself, and looked back, looking the demon up and down. Another stood beside him, and another. I opened up my senses further, taking it all in. There was a row of the beasts, the akadim all standing at attention. And behind them, another. And another.
Despite my remembering where I was, that it was day, not night, that I was safe in Moriel’s arms, my chest pounded with a warning. I could not see how many rows of akadim had assembled. It seemed endless. The fear shot through me like an arrow. So many akadim. So many monsters.
“This is your army?” I choked out the words. I saw only death before me. Terror and violence. “Moriel, they’re demons. They triedto steal the Valalumir.” They were the reason we were summoned, the reason we were ripped from our families and made into Guardians. The reason we swore our eternity to keep it safe.
To keep it from them.
And, if the rumors were true, the reason why Auriel and Asherah fell.
“They may be demons,” he said. “But they can be more. They were once our ruin. Now, they become our salvation.”
I shook my head. “No. No. It’s not right. We fought against them for millennia. Longer. We exist to counteract them.”
“We did. Once. But no more. Now everything is different. Everything has changed. Now, the enemy is different. It unites us. Now we fight together.” His hands fell to my waist.
My heart still pounded, harder than before, and my eyes closed again as I swept through his memories, trying to see things differently, trying to see them his way. To see the demons as … not. As… more.
“You don’t agree,” he said at last.
