“I’m fine,” I lied through a weak smile.
“You’re lying,” she whispered on a shudder of a breath.
“Iwillbe fine,” I began with a squeeze of her hand for assurance. “as long as you pull through this. Alright?”
“I’ll pull through with all these upper layer healers fussing over me.”
“Yeah, could you ever imagine we’d get this level of treatment?”
“No. Nor could I have ever imagined my own sister as queen.”
My smile turned brittle. Any other woman in the realm would be happy to have such a title.
They were all ignorant idiots.
Abaddon didn’t want a queen. He wanted a wild mare to beat into submission so all the realm could see his power and fear him. I couldn’t imagine anyone actually choosing that kind of life for themselves.
“He’d pick the wrong demon,”my beast whispered low in my ear. “We’ll make sure of that.”
She hadn’t forgotten the promise I made to both of us that day in the magma planes. We held tightly onto it like the anchor it was.
But now wasn’t the time to think about me and the pain I’d endured today. I had to focus and see my sister through hers.
The labor stretched on for what felt like hours.
The oracle began to mutter about gods and strands of realities, about wills that would stretch beyond chance. How a new age was upon us, that there would be a predetermined path for all creatures of the Underworld. The oracle called it fate. As the hours dragged on, I stopped listening to everything he was saying. He might as well be speaking in tongues for all the sense it made.
But when Nyx bore the first child, and the healers placed her in my arms first, something inside me shifted. It was just a babe, with lavender scales so pale they were almost translucent. It felt as though I were holding something profound, bigger than anything someone like me could even comprehend.
“Shouldn’t she be crying?” I asked the oracle.
“She will not be like any child you’ve ever known,” he answered.
“Will she open her eyes?”
“She needs a name first.”
I looked to Nyx, who was already working on bearing the next child. “Clotho,” she managed to grit between clenched teeth.
Just like magic, little Clotho’s ghost-white eyelids fluttered open. A gasp tumbled from my lips as I found myself staring into the biggest eyes. They were completely black, as dark as death. At first, they were as void as the deepest crevice of the Ninth Circle, like being at the bottom of the frozen lake, cold and empty. My heart thrashed in my throat because these were not the eyes of a healthy, normal child. These were the eyes of something that could see past realities, into space and beyond. Eyes that stretched so deep for a moment, I thought I could see whole new realities even though my own reflection didn’t show in them.
Then an image formed.
I’d never been there myself, but just looking at the scene, I knew by the formation of ice nestled between crags of mountains and snow-covered cliffs that I was looking at the frozen lake.
I could see the reflection of the Ninth Circle in my newborn niece’s eyes.
A cold gust of air swept over my body, making my skin erupt in goosebumps. It was like the cave around me melted away, and for a moment, I was standing there in the deepest layer of hell, surrounded by a bone-deep cold that I couldn’t have ever imagined in my wildest nightmares.
I was alone, swathed in darkness. Then, there was a flash of light that lit up the bleak, dark as ink sky. A streak of fire, a comet maybe, or a falling star, plummeting toward the ground, its tail of fire monetarily lighting up the darkness.
Then I realized it wasn’t a comet or a star at all.
It was a man.
He plummeted toward the frozen lake and, with incredible force, smashed through the layer of thick ice. The sound was deafening. Shards of ice and thick torrents of water crashed onto the frozen bank.
I watched with a slack jaw as the dark water’s surface stilled, and for a long moment, I thought the man might not emerge at all. After all, what could have survived that fall? Then, he erupted from the water’s surface with a gasp of air. He flung his head back, gasping. His black hair clung to his brow, masking his eyes. The muscles of his sinewy form flexed beneath soaking skin, hot flesh against ice-cold water, making steam rise from his sculpted body in wispy tendrils.
