Arwyn Hopkin was the first person to break through my hardened shell of years of distrust and hate. He had tricked his way into my orbit, lied to me and cast illusions around us just so he could get close enough to get what he wanted.
No, not what he wanted. What hisfatherwanted.
The first question came to me so quickly there was no thought to go behind how I asked it.
I just did.
“Was all of it fake? What happened between us I mean.”
Arwyn looked me dead in the eyes, his answer coming easily to him. “Not at all, Hector. It wasn’t for me.”
I didn’t realise how badly I needed to hear those words. My eyes pricked with unfamiliar tears, tears I’d spent years fighting back until Arwyn entered my life and turned me into a puddle of uncontrolled emotions.
“When did you…”
How could I ask that next question? It was like my brain refused to put together the right words I needed to ask the one and only question I cared deeply about.
“Take your time,” Arwyn encouraged, his tone like a soft caress. “No rush.”
I took a deep inhale, giving up on overthinking and just letting the question flood out of me. “When did you realise that things changed between us? At what point did you come to terms with doing what your father wanted for you, and doing what was right when it came to me?”
Without taking his eyes off me, Arwyn took a long swig of his drink until the dregs of liquid dribbled onto his pink tongue. The glass clapped down onto the table, the sound reverberating over the silence between us. And then he broke it with his answer. An answer that was like a stone in a house made of glass, thrown carelessly and with great force.
“In the library on that first night. That was when doubt was seeded for me. The second you walked in, presented yourself before me and looked at me with those eyes of yours, I swear I almost backed out of the competition then and there.”
I didn't dare blink, for fear of transporting myself back to that moment when I first interacted with Arwyn. The emotions were too raw, still too painful to face.
“Why?”
Arwyn’s brow hardened over soft, emotion-lit eyes. “It is one thing to know you’ve ruined a person’s life, but another to stand before that very person and face them. When I did what I did to your family, I never truly understood the repercussions. I was too young to understand them… only that if I didn’t do as my father asked, it would… it would?—”
I gave in to my urges and reached across the table, snatching Arwyn’s hand in mine. The tension in his muscles relaxed, fingers threading with mine, his heartbeat a thunderous canter between our palms. “We were kids,” I said. “As much as I hate you for what you’ve done to me, I also understand that you were not in control of the situation.”
Arwyn shook his head, as if refusing to take in my words. “Regardless of my fear of my father, or my deep-rooted need to prove myself to him that I’m worth something, I should’ve refused. I could’ve said no and I didn’t.”
“They still would’ve died,” I said, numb to the reality that my parents were always destined to perish at the hands of Tomin Hopkin. “And you would’ve been punished for your lack of action.”
Arwyn returned his eyes back to mine when he replied, the emotion so palpable it almost knocked me off the chair. “I have been punished. Over and over. My suffering came every time I looked at you, every ounce of kindness you showed me, every act of intimacy. It was punishment. I didn’t deserve any of it, Hector. Didn’t deserveyou. Deep down I knew that, and yet I kept taking it from you expecting that it would fix me. I was so frightened to face the truth, thinking that if I kept concealing it, playing out this idea of a life with you, that it would all just fade,that this desire for forgiveness would be forgotten. And yet it is the one andonlything I crave.”
A single tear slipped out of Arwyn’s left eye, coursing down the planes of his proud bone structure. That was when I saw it; buried beneath his regret and sadness, a new emotion revealed itself.
Resilience. It called in every line across his forehead, the sharp downturn of his brows.
“Before the previous Witch Trials, I always knew about this underbelly of demonic power. Whilst you put it together, the knowledge was already something I had. And it became clear to me that I had to take it before you could. I thought that I could win Bahmet’s favour, and save you from the demon. I could use the power to refuse my father… maybe even punish him. Right his wrongs. I couldn’t let you have it. In some twisted way by winning, I thought that it would be my way of obtaining a forgiveness from you with action rather than truth. Look how that turned out.”
My chest ached. My head pounded. There wasn’t an ounce of my body that wasn’t suffering facing this conversation that we had to have.
Arwyn only won because I failed.
“What does your father want? All this has to be for something.”
“My father wants to break some curse a witch put upon him,” he said, nodding to himself subtly.
“Curse?”
“The kiss of immortality. As you’ve likely worked out already, he cannot die. I have attempted to kill my father so many times that I couldn’t even conceptualise a number. His only purpose in life is to see all witches punished for the suffering he wasrightlygiven. Then, and only then, once his desire is achieved, he would find peace in a truly endless death.”
“And he thinks Bahmet can solve all his problems?”
