I stare at the man for a moment and try to make sense of what I’m seeing. It’s impossible, and yet there he is. Black hair and lime green eyes take me in, patiently allowing me time to recover from the bewilderment he must know I’m experiencing.
“Dad?” I whisper, still not trusting my eyes or the words spilling out of my mouth. “Am I dreaming?” I ask as his eyes light up with a familiar light and his lips spread into a joyous smile.
I look around again, wondering if this is just another memory my conscious has become aware of, but that can’t be it, I’ve never been here with him before.
“How?” I breathe out, barely audible, my heart hammering in my chest, and tears prickling my disbelieving eyes.
He opens his arms and leans in to give me a hug. My first reaction is to flinch back away from him. I hate that my body immediately reaches for protection away from him instead of toward him, but I’ve seen too much to fully trust him anymore. I don’t know who he is. I’ve realized that I never did. Not him, not my mother, not my gran. I was left in the dark, thrown to the gryphons, my body and soul abandoned to mop up the mess that was left in my parents’ wake.
My dad is shocked by my reaction, and he pauses, studying me for a millisecond before dropping his arms. I don’t miss the sadness that bleeds into his lime green eyes, but what does he expect? He’s supposed to be dead.
“Falon,” he finally speaks, my name like a worship-filled prayer floating on the air between us.
The sound of it breaks me in ways I didn’t know possible. I clutch my chest as a sob bubbles up out of it. Flashes of my memories, new and old, move through my mind, and I have to fight not to see him through the five-year-old lens that I used to know him through.
“How are you here?” I demand, my tone laced with bone crushing sadness.
“I am, and I’m not,” he tells me cryptically.
My brow folds with confusion.
“Your magic called to me when it tried to awaken. I bound a piece of my magic to yours so if this ever happened, I could explain, make sure you were okay,” he tells me, and I’m surprised by the explanation.
“Make sure I was okay, or try to stop it?” I ask, wishing accusation wasn’t dripping off of my every word.
“Falon,” he chides quietly, and his eyes drop from mine and look down at his hands. “I can imagine what you must think of me, but I swear to you, I was just trying to keep you safe, keep you alive.”
“But what you did to Gran...to me,” I counter.
“I know it may look brutal, but she was too trusting, she thought her people would keep you safe, but I knew that wouldn’t be the case. If she had told anyone, they would have hunted you down and slaughtered you, like they did…” He pauses, pain taking over his sadness, and I try to read his features to understand what’s causing it.
Agony and guilt pour out of him, and I watch as my dad, my hero, wipes tears from his cheeks and breathes deeply as though he’s trying to piece himself back together one inhale and exhale at a time. His hurt calls to my own, and sorrow leaks down my face as I reach out and thread my fingers with his.
“Your mother and I had a little girl before you,” he confesses on a tormented sob. “She didn’t...they didn’t allow her to…to live. We barely made it through alive, the damage they did to your mother, we didn’t think we could have more, and then you.”
My dad partially folds in on himself as his words rip open wounds inside of him that are incapable of healing. I wrap my arms around him, instantly feeling guilt and sorrow and shock at what he’s saying. I suspected a miscarriage or something, but this…
“If Sedora had told anyone, if somehow the Sentinels and Gryphons found out that you existed, they wouldn’t have stopped until they ended you. I couldn’t let that happen, Falon. I know what we did was wrong, that if our line ended, it would shatter all the wrong that we had enacted, but you were too precious. I was too selfish. I loved you too much. I’m sorry,” he tells me brokenly, his tone pleading.
“It’s okay, dad. I’m so sorry,” I offer, my attempts to comfort him feeling flat.
There are no words that could ever make what happened okay. There’s no saying or anecdote that will soothe the continuous ache and loss that I can see rippling through him right now. I instantly feel horrible for how angry I’ve felt at him, and my mom, and gran. They were all just trying to do the best that they could.
“I’m sorry, dad,” I tell him over and over again, until he wraps his arms around me and we trade places in our efforts to try and console each other.
And then it dawns on me what he said.
If our line ended, it would shatter all the wrong that we had enacted.
My heart hammers painfully hard in my chest, and I pull back so I can look my dad in the eye and see the truth.
“Dad, are you saying if I die, then the Vow will break automatically?”
His lime green eyes answer before his mouth does when they fill with shame and resignation. I watch as tears spill out of his black lashes, and they feel oddly like a death sentence. I pull in a shuddering breath and reel at the truth of that. My hands come up and cover my mouth, like that will hold in any selfish objection.
I don’t want to die.
My dad takes in the horror pouring out of my watery gaze, and he quickly starts to shake his head. “It’s not the only way, Falon,” he tells me in a rush. “You have the ability to break the magic.”
