Ask not what she is. Ask why you were drawn to her.
He exhaled sharply.
“Could it be that Maris is bound to Eiren the same way that priest was — tethered by fate. We cannot let her be used and left to burn.” Kael said, rising fully.
Riven exchanged a glance with Draeven.
“Then the question is,” said Draeven carefully, “do we teach her what she may be… or do we use her power before she learns?”
Kael’s voice was ice. “She is not a weapon.”
Silence.
Then Draeven, eyes sharper than steel, murmured, “She might be something far more dangerous.”
Kael sat alone in the private dining hall, firelight reflecting off the polished obsidian walls like the flicker of passing thoughts. The wine in his goblet had long gone untouched.
Draeven’s question still gnawed at the edges of his mind:
Guide her… or use her?
She is not a weapon, he had said. He believed it.
Didn’t he?
Kael leaned back in the high-backed onyx chair and let the thought devour him.
She could be a weapon — something carved of starlight and wrath, wrapped in mortal skin, claimed by the goddess.
But to wield her that way…
He had seen the tremble in her hands. The confusion in her gaze when her magic burst forth.
She didn’t know the extent of her power. But she would soon with or without him.
His seer had spoken in riddles. The council had pressed. Even Valea had begun to act like she was watching a wick inch toward a flame.
But Kael?
Kael couldn’t shake the memory: Magic radiating from her, soft and searing. He'd frozen in that moment barely breathing. He saw her fear — but even more, the fierce life force it awakened in her. A missing piece to her soul.
He needed to see it again. Feel her again. Even if it meant breaking the last bit of sanity he clung to.
A slow, grinding creak split the air as the massive door edged open behind him.
There she was — as if she heard his silent prayer and he fell apart quietly within himself.
-Maris-
The gown shimmered like liquid starlight, each thread catching the light as if it had been spun from raw lightning. It clung to her, whispered across her skin, dipped scandalously low along her back, and trailed in soft tendrils like smoke.
She had stared at it for a full minute after the twins laid it across her bed.
“Dinner with the King,” they’d said, smiling in tandem. “Alone.”
Now, standing in the threshold of the private dining room, she felt stripped bare, more than she ever had in the copper tub or wrapped in sheer lace. Because this wasn’t about nudity. It was about being seen.
And Kael saw her.
