“Are you sure I’m ready?” She holds her head up high, pressing her shoulders back.“Abso-fucking-lutely.” His face shows no doubt that she’ll be his perfect queen.
“What if they discover I am not her? What if I fail?”
No! Don’t do this! Please! Let me go!
Horns lower as he bends and places a kiss to her forward, her heart racing in response. “Impossible. I will not let you.”
“Together?”
“Always,” he replies as if nothing could be more true.
As if nothing will ever come between them or take them away from each other again. As if he’d kill anyone who dared to try. He will. I pray no one comes for me. I pray Kairos and Hekate leave it alone, thinking I’m exactly where I want to be and blissfully happy. I pray my sweet sister finds a way to move on. I’d rather Kairos believe I never remembered the truth, for all of them to forget about me rather than getting themselves hurt or worse trying to save me.
The goddess whose dark thoughts are impossible to block out, impossible to fight through, presses her palms against his cheeks. “It will be an honor to rule beside you, my savior. My king,” she tells him, voice quivering and overflowing with emotion.
Please, let me out! I want to go home! These are not my words!
I fade a bit further as sharp claws scrape down my mind, commanding me to keep quiet, to not think, to not even be. It’s so dark. Gods, it’s so cold and I’m numb and my heart doesn’t exist within me anymore. I am nothing. I do not exist.
He wraps his hand tightly around hers and together they face the steps leading down to their realm. None of this belongs to me. It never did and it was never going to. Nyx whispered into my mind once that I belonged to darkness, and she was right. I never had a chance at belonging anywhere else or to anyone else. This was my fate. Erebus’ eyes burn into hers and mine as we descend the stairs, their waiting people carving a path for our bodies to make our way through the crowd.
The darkness, the void, the endless abyss, it stares into me, and I stare back, and I am not afraid. I’ve become familiar with endless darkness. We were friends once, or so I thought, but still, I am comfortable within it. I will not hide. I will not kneel. I will not fucking break. I hope he feels my wrath and hatred for him somewhere within his lover’s eyes.
“My queen,” he whispers, and as he smiles, the beautiful monster forces one in return, through the many heartfelt tears that fall from our eyes.
“My king,” she whispers back, linking our arm through his.
Their hearts are full. To them, this place doesn’t feel dark or gloomy any longer. This is their home. Their fortress of hope. To thrive in. To love in. To reign in…
Always together.
But I’m here, too. And the thing about being friends with darkness is that no matter how hard it tries, it cannot steal your soul or break you entirely unless you let it, because you know all of its little tricks. It will not win. I will be here in the background, watching and waiting to tear them apart from the inside out however I can. I will not go quietly. I will fight.
Fear will not rule me.
Maybe I’m too far gone already. Her thoughts are mine and mine are hers, and deciphering where she begins and I end is growing harder by the minute. Are these even thoughts of my own? Gods, is this even me?
Kairos…
My love…
I am so sorry.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Birth of a Queen
NYX
OCTOBER 6TH, 1848
Waking up on the cold, wet floor, the sound of rain smacks against the cave walls outside as I pull myself up, wrapping my arms around my knees, trembling in fear. The scent of wet earth, rot, and death crawls down my throat and steals the oxygen straight from my lungs. I press my hands to my chest, gasping for air, tears sliding down my cheeks from both the heartbreak of losing my wings and my home, and from the thick, rancid air making it impossible to breathe. I snap my eyes closed and press my forehead against my knees, praying for the gods to just end me. The chilly midnight air prickles across my cheeks, the icy numbness wrapping me up in a blanket that steals my heartbreak and fear away.
When the realm leaders, the two people who had been like parents to me, cast me down to earth, I felt the edges of my soul begin to rip and then my heart shattered, soul splintering and cracking into hundreds of tiny little pieces. They do not love me. Hekate did not save me. The gods have abandoned me. No celestial has ever been cast out of the Realm of Light, and certainly has never had their wings burned to nothing by Ananthe’s holy fire. I will never forgive any of them. I will never forgive myself for losing my soul to such darkness.
Hekate once told me the Earth Realm is where darkness roams free. It is why she believed I did not belong here. As much as the celestials and witches have tried to stop it, it always lingers, bringing chaos and death with it. The mortals are their own sort of monsters, in a way, some of them more wicked and cruel than the demons who feast on mortal bones. Some are consumed by a sickening amount of hatred toward their own kind over trivial things that should not matter. Some power hungry to the point of never doing right by the people here, so long as they are thriving and have people kneeling at their feet. And for some reason I will never understand, they love to see others fail. This hellscape cannot be where I die, but I believe it will be. I will fade out of existence here, alone and broken, forgotten and despised, and feared by those who once loved me.
I am surrounded by cracked, faded skulls and bones of others who found their resting place within the darkness of these cave walls. I try not to think about who they could have been. Maybe other celestials or witches the rulers and gods banished from existence. Digging my nails into the dirt by my feet, I push away old bones to clear a spot to rest my spiraling, tormented mind.
