The chuckling stopped at once as Rook, Lark, Cass, and I all exchanged a glance. Cass broke the silence and answered her first.
“You might want to sit down for this one, Aunt Gem.”
Chapter thirty-three
A Lack of Control
“You’retellingmethatthe five of you went to Hellscape alone to bargain with Medusa for information regarding the princess of the Court of Peace and Pride and found a rift through the divide into the mortal realm,” Gemini repeated, dumbfounded, as she stared around at all of us where we were gathered upon the furniture that Lark had summoned back once the others had returned.
“Technically, we already knew about the rifts from when we helped Ren with hers,” Rook intervened.
“Again, not my rift,” I grumbled.
“Do you know what this means?” Gemini asked, turning to her niece and nephew.
“That the heir to the Peace Court, who doesn’t much care for me—” Lark began.
“I wonder why,” Cass muttered under her breath.
“And whose daughter is currently staying in my apartment after a failed rescue or abduction attempt, not quite sure about that, from the Court of Friends is tearing hole after hole into the Divide from the confines of Hellscape, risking the exposure of our existence to the mortals as we speak?”
“Why would she do that?” Cass asked.
“Ariadne is obsessed with mortals,” Gemini explained, her tone growing grim. “Specifically, controlling them. If she has amplified her power enough to tear through the Divide, imagine what she might do to their minds. She could control legions of them, all mindlessly marching to their death to win her war, to do her bidding. Millions of minions succumbing to her every desire, suffering the same fate as your father.”
Gemini’s gaze flicked to me and I felt bile rising in my throat.
“She wouldn’t do that,” Cass said in a horrified whisper but I could tell that she hadn’t even convinced herself. “Why would she do that?”
“It’s not for me to answer for madness,” Gemini replied with a shrug. “But I know she’s always longed for the day where she could rule over the mortals. I thought the position of ambassador would satisfy her but it’s clear to me now that this was a threat I should have taken far more seriously.”
“How can we stop her?” Lark asked, his eyes dark, his tone unforgiving.
Gemini looked at me again.
“No,” Lark growled.
“Ariadne has gone too far, Canis,” Gemini snapped, the use of his given name from the lips of someone he trusted making him flinch. “Seren might be the only person left alive who could talk some sense into her. We should try. Even if it doesn’t work, we should try. Think of the countless lives we could save.”
“She has a point,” I told him, reaching over and laying a hand on his. “If I could stop her—”
“Absolutely not,” he said, his voice rough. “I won’t allow it.”
“Lark,” Cass chided gently.
“You know how this goes, Canis,” Gemini said slowly, letting the meaning of her words sink in. “When Fae begin to consider the possibility of mortal subservience, when they seek a way to enslave humanity—”
“This isn’t like that,” Lark argued but I saw his shoulders slump, his eyes dart from her to me and back again. “The Immortal War ended two thousand years ago.”
“You don’t have to tell me, boy. I remember. I was there.”
I glanced between them, at their narrowed gaze and, though it likely wasn’t the time, my academic side got the best of me and I had to ask.
“The Immortal War?” I inquired.
Lark and Gemini held each other’s gaze in challenge and, when it became clear that neither one of them was going to answer, Cass sighed and accepted the role of my educator once more.
“Two thousand years ago, we lived among the mortals. All of us together, entwined. But then some Fae started to believe that equality wasn’t the right way to coexist, that our magic and our immortality made us superior to humanity. They fashioned themselves as gods and ruled over human subjects that they enslaved over generations. The Fae who disagreed decided on a route of separation. Though they preferred the idea of living amongst humans, they recognized the mortals would be safer without them, without the threat of enslavement to surface again later. So they fought the Immortal War, the first civil war of our kind, a war of ideology. Brother against brother, sister against sister, parents against children. You chose your side and you were willing to die for it. In the end, the separatists won. They executed the slavers, hunted down the beasts threatening the mortals’ existence, and erected the Divide. They made Hellscape later, a prison in a hollowed out volcano in the middle of the lands forever dead from the fighting.”
