The captain’s eyes burned with conviction. He believed he was the hero, protecting his kingdom from a fraud. “We’ll bring you before His Majesty for judgment. If you’re truly innocent,you have nothing to fear.” He wanted me to hand him victory without a fight.
“The druid traded your secret for clemency,” Andre, his second-in-command and once my friend, added quietly. He stepped back as the captain shot him a warning glare.
“His Majesty accepted intelligence from a proven enemy of the realm?” I kept my voice steady, even as rage and fear warred within me.
“Youarethe enemy.” Captain Ashborn raised his sword, and twenty-three others followed in unison. “Twenty years of a stolen birthright!”
There was no getting out of this. Fear for my mother hammered in my chest.
“Where’s my mother? Where’s the queen?” I demanded.
“The queen can’t help you now,” Captain Ashborn replied coldly.
“Where is she?” I roared.
The circle around me tightened. Each elite guard had trained since childhood in swordcraft. In a fair fight, I might survive half of them.
“Take him alive, if possible,” Captain Ashborn ordered, his blade slicing toward me. “The king needs him to suffer.”
King Emyr wanted me captured so he could torture me before carving me to pieces.
“But if he proves difficult, we end him here,” the captain added coldly.
“Fuck you!” I snarled, and launched myself forward, intent on breaking through to reach my mother.
Twenty-four swords converged on the space I’d occupied.
Chapter
Eight
Sy
The onyx arrow pierced Barbie’s heart and mine.
Pain detonated every nerve we’d ever shared. Not the sharp, clean cut of a blade, or the raw burn of fire, but something deeper. The agony of being unmade. Of existence itself unraveling.
I felt myself torn from the only home I’d ever known. Twenty years of shared breath, shared blood, shared thoughts now shredded like gossamer by Heaven’s Arrow.
“Sy…Sy…” Barbie could barely hold onto her own name, but she still remembered mine.
Our faces blurred and overlapped, features shifting like reflections in a mirror that broke into thousands of pieces.
For a desperate moment, her dark flame and my light intertwined, wrapping around us like a womb—the same space we’d shared for so long. Her heartbeat synced with mine, her terror tangled with my own.
We didn’t know where this would lead or how it would end. There was onlynow, and we were still us. Still one.
Then the womb burst and burned to nothing.
Nothing could shield us, not her goddess essence, not my magic. The agony became everything. One second, I had control of our mouth, screaming. The next, Barbie surfaced, her scream pitching differently but just as raw, just as terrified.
Together we burned and blurred, consciousness spinning so fast I couldn’t tell where I ended and she began. Or where I began and Barbie ended. Our throats were hoarse with silent screams. Blood filled our mouths. The lava around us felt cool compared to the inferno raging in our chests.
Would this unbearable unmaking ever end?
My entire existence flashed before me, the early years when I was nothing but instinct and hunger, a beast wearing a girl’s face when Barbie let me out. I tasted everything through her, watching from the other side of the glass. Always wanting. Needing to consume and never sated. The only thing that kept me from becoming a true monster was my duty to protect her.
Until Rowan came.
