“I know, love, I know. So let me carry you for a while. Let me hold the burden. Let me be your anchor, your shoulder, until Araz comes home.”
I nodded, releasing a sigh and letting the tension bleed from my limbs. I let him hold me because in that moment I wasn’t strong enough to hold myself.
I foundChandra on the bow later. He tensed as I approached.
Guilt tightened my stomach. “I’m sorry about how I reacted earlier. It wasn’t about you.”
“I’m sorry if I contributed to the emotional load.”
“To my mini breakdown, you mean?” I gave him a wry smile. “Better for it to happen now than mid battle.”
“There won’t be a battle,” he said firmly. “We will make sure of it. All we need do is give C’ael the opportunity to touch Araz’s vessel, and the fight will be over.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It will be. I believe it.”
Araz’s words about shaping our reality with the power of belief filled my mind. Yes…we could do this. We could make it happen if we all believed.
I leaned against the hull. “So…you’re Vritra, huh? The god that spawned the Danava. Reborn as an Asura?” I lifted my brows.
He snorted softly. “The rebirth and the bloodline were not something I chose, and the irony was not lost on me. But…it afforded me some protection to be amongst those that supported my demise when I was Vritra.”
“Tell me what happened to you. Tell me the truth.”
“It’s a long tale, but I shall tell it in as few words as possible because you need to know. You need to understand what the gods are truly capable of.”
“Yes. I want to know it all.”
He nodded and sat on a bench made of clouds. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to the contradiction that was this ship. I joined him on the bench, waiting for him to continue.
“I was created by the Deva. Born of the essence of many. Theirs to command. When the time came, they made me into a villain. Not all of them were complicit. Some left before my demise. There were factions amongst even those gods. The ones that stayed used me to overpower and capture Mizikiel, the being you now know as the primordial evil.”
I stared at him, unblinking, then nodded. “Go on…”
“I did what I was tasked to do and then went back to my life. To my family, to the bloodline of Danava that I’d spawned. But the Deva came for me one night. They captured me and used the Vajra to end me…or so they thought.”
“Why? Why did they do that to you?”
“Because when I went into Mizikiel’s realm to find him, I forged an unexpected bond with the throne. One that the Deva could not allow to stand. The throne was the connection. The pathway to Mizikiel’s world and its power. They wanted to control it. They destroyed my body and tried to burn away my soul, but I survived and was reborn into the very bloodline that now had a connection to the throne.”
“Vijayroodra…”
“Ironic. I know. But I believe it was my connection to the throne that kept me alive. It allowed me to come back.”
“But you couldn’t claim it because you didn’t have enough Deva blood.”
“That’s right. They destroyed the body that had once forged a bond with the throne. But the essence, the essence that defined me remained. I remembered everything, and I kept my power banked. My death allowed the Deva to keep the throne, but it also helped them to gather the power they needed to alter history and hide the truth about the origins of the throne and the existence of Mizikiel. They altered history a second time when they locked away Iblees. Vayelle’s death and the death of her people powered that alteration.
“I was vilified because the truth would have madethemthe villains. My offspring, the Danava, were given lower status, allowing the Asura to control them, and this control intensified once the Danava king was falsely accused of killing the Vijayroodra family.”
Falsely accused. “He didn’t do it? He was innocent for real?”
“Yes…” He looked away, and an awful thought occurred to me. “Chandra…did you have something to do with the death of the royal family?”
He inhaled sharply through his nose, then exhaled heavily from his mouth. “Yes.”
My heart sank. “Tell me what you did. Tell me why my bloodline was killed.”
