If you have nothing left to live for, then allow me to give you something.
Her eyes opened and she gave one final look to the turquoise doors separating her from her mother.
I promise.
The vow branded deep in her soul. One that she could not ignore, a murmur in her mind, a strum of something vital in her chest, stirring and unsettled. She could not rest until she saw it through.
I will finish this.
The sun’s rays glared brighter on the side of her face, a cruel warmth she could never have.
“Darkness may not last forever for others,” she said, her voice dull and lifeless. Shadows crawled up from the sand and coiled around her. “But I am made of the night.”
Onyx tendrils whorled over her head, like a flower closing its petals at dusk, and swallowed her whole.
2
A VENGEFUL SMOKE
Acacius
Rain fellfrom the night sky and pelted the top of Acacius’s tense shoulders, drenching his hair and clothes as they melded to his skin.
Jaws clenched, he stood in front of Ruelle’s statue, the polished granite dripping with rainwater. Beads rolled like liquid glass over her eyes and down the crevices of her full lips—all made of stone, all perfectly carved.
His insides twisted with the cut of her thread still trapped in his ears.
He wasn’t sure why he’d come here. Perhaps to relish in his misery, in the throes of self-inflicted torture that kept his eternal agony ablaze. It was his only way to see her, feel close to her, as much as he could, now that she was…
Acacius glared down at the silver plaque with her name elegantly engraved across it. Bouquets of flower arrangements surrounded it, their ends wilted and soggy from the downpour.
It had been four months since her death, four months since he’d watched her reunite with Klaus in the Land of the Dead. Thememory was like hot iron branding his heart. Behind his eyes, it was all he saw—her arms draped around Klaus’s neck, swaying against him, her face lit with a smile, lips pressed into his. Such unblemished happiness.
He curled his lip at the sickness clotting in his stomach.
That could have been with me.
Ruelle didn’t have to die.
Acacius could’ve been her happy ending.
Marina,his Chaos whispered.
Divine power buzzed in his fingertips and festered like a manic itch up his arms. His hands balled into fists at his sides to quench the madness.
He was not in his own Land where his Chaos and Ruin could run freely. Here, he would need to keep himself in check to avoid deities feeling his call to run rampant and topple the city’s walls.
Acacius looked up at the statue again.
Perhaps hope had brought him here, to mourn her once and for all. Leave his love for her in the particles of the stone. Let the rain wash it all away.
He was sick of her ghost plaguing his thoughts: a specter, always there. Ruelle’s laughter infected his mind, the sound like a melody he dreamed of, yearned for, but never heard slip from her lips in his presence. She sang it so effortlessly with Klaus.
A sour taste hung in the back of his throat as a distorted, wet hiss came from behind him.
He made no move to turn and greet his sister. Her presence was soft, like frost in the dawning, quiet hours of the morning. That solace triggered a reaction to replace her stillness with wild frenzy.
He was in no mood to speak with Iliana.
