1
VEYKA
There is sleep, and then there issleep.
The kind where nothing can touch you, where the world falls away and you are totally consumed by the darkness. Not the darkness of despair or loss, but of comfort. Sweet oblivion.
I’d always loved sleep.
Even in the water gardens, I used it as an escape. I would drift off to the sound of water crashing into a still pool and try not to see the parallels to my own life, to my mother’s endless attempts to force something to grow inside of me which simply was not there. I practiced with my blades, battled invisible enemies, so that when I lay my young head on the pillow, exhaustion would blot out the nightmares.
After my brother’s murder, I slept endlessly. Hours that blurred into days interspersed with drinking and fucking and begging the Ancestors to take the pain away. Then one day it was gone, replaced by a numbness that felt like salvation. But that was wrong.
Salvation came months later, in the male who was first my enemy, then my lover, and then something more. Not something—everything.
That was when I discovered what it truly meant to rest.
For the first time in my life, I slept without fear. Without some fraction of my consciousness trained on the world around me. Even when I’d longed for my own death in the wake of my brother’s, there had been the specter of revenge to keep me anchored. But in Arran’s arms, even those pieces of myself ceased to matter. With my head pressed to his chest, the Talisman inked there warm against my skin, his heart beating in time with mine—then, and only then, did I finally, truly, sleep.
I gave myself up to a darkness blacker than the void I’d come to love. I let my body and mind unmoor, with no fear of being lost forever to the in between.
It was not that he was my mate, though I was so often lulled to sleep by the humming growl of his beast. Nor was it the fact that he was every inch the Brutal Prince who’d given himself to me and to Annwyn at the Offering nearly a year before.
We had chosen this.
For my entire life, choices had been stolen from me. But loving Arran Earthborn was a choice I’d made again and again. I would never regret it. Even though it would end.
That, too, would be my choice.
My sacrifice. For my kingdom, my friends, and my love.
I was no longer a princess without choices. I was a queen, and I would make my final choice count.
2
ARRAN
The entire world shifted beneath our feet.
I grabbed for Veyka instinctively, but she held her ground even as the stones of the bridge shook. My fingers closed around her arm, feeling the jolt of pain where I touched her freshly inked Talisman as sharply as if it were my own. But I did not let her go—could not. Not with the castle behind us shaking on its foundations, the lake splashing up over the parapets.
“Can you feel it too?” Veyka shouted.
Of course I can feel it, my beast growled through the bond. But the concern ebbing through our connection was not for me. Veyka’s eyes were still fixed on Gwen, through the portal rift Veyka had opened. The shining white spiral edges wobbled and pulsed, but it was impossible to tell if it was the quaking ground or the nature of this new extension of Veyka’s power.
Gwen dropped into a crouch, one hand splayed for balance on the goldstone floor. She could feel it in Baylaur.
The entire continent was shaking.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the world around us stilled. It took several heartbeats to realize it, with the wavesstill gnawing at the stone around us, our bodies still trying to compensate for the movement that was no longer there.
Veyka’s arm slipped from my hold. Gwen rose cautiously to stand.
The ground remained steady for a full minute, but our reality was no more stable.
We did not have time to contemplate what could have possibly caused the entire continent of Annwyn to shake as if unmoored from the earth itself.
Gwen said again, a slight tremor at the edge of her voice— “Baylaur has fallen.”
