“Tethys! Enough!” Obscuros boomed, sending shadows spewing toward her. She swiped them away once more.
“No fun,” she mused, rising back to her feet. Procyon rolled to his side, panting in agony. Although the smallest of her siblings, the spring queen towered over every immortal and primordial alike.
“I’ve let you win for far too long. You have pushed me away, isolated me, ignored me, allowed my abuse. But this time,you will listen. Give me my son, Obscuros,” she commanded.
Araes groaned in the corner, pulling at the shackles keeping him chained to the wall. His heartbeat pulsed next to hers, like two rhythms orbiting the other, in perfect time. But Tethys didn’t feel it. She burned in the calamity unleashed from the Rift.
The realms crashed into each other, spewing flames and death across Venia. Screams thickened the air outside, stretching over the endless horizon. Lowborn andhighborn alike succumbed to it. Their bones snapped and hearts stopped. In an instant, those made from earth and sky perished. Only themarked ones, touched by the void, remained.
“Tethys, sister, stop!” Polaris cried, sending her midnight borealis through the air. It dissipated on impact with Tethys’s gleaming golden light. Altair, with a sweat-dampened brow, focused his daylight power into an all-encompassing sphere. It cracked with the intensity of a vicious thunderhead as it barreled toward the spring queen. She snapped her finger and it burst like a bubble, scattering droplets of magic, like rainfall, to the floor.
“Tethys, please!” Altair groaned, flexing his palms as he slid to his knees, utterly exhausted of power.
The onlooking audience fled for the exit, but Tethys threw out her hands and the heavy oak doors snapped shut. Their fists pounded on wood like frantic drumbeats.
Some prayed. Some begged for mercy, but when Tethys snapped her finger again, all went still and collapsed to the floor. The life, leaking from their ears, was an expanding stain on the pristine white marble.
“Jaide,” she growled, her eyes locking on the lady-in-waiting.
“Tethys please, he made me say those things. The autumn king forced me to testify. Please, I love you. Please.” Jaide crawled across the floor, her lips spewing words like a frantic, gurgling fountain.
“I trusted you,” Tethys seethed, closing the distance between them.
“Please, my lady. He was going to kill me if I didn’t. Please! I’m sorry—” Jaide’s words cut short with another snap of Tethys’s fingers. One moment absolute terror encompassed the lady-in-waiting. The next, only quiet death.
“Goddess,” Araes’s weak whisper beckoned her. She stepped toward him, the soles of her feet barely touchingthe tile. “This isn’t you, I know it.”
But Tethys didn’t hear him. She’d burrowed too far into her own depths, letting the Rift pull her strings like a puppeteer.
“Yes, Daughter of Dawn. Give them no mercy. Make them feel your pain. Your heartbreak. Slaughter them all,”a cold voice licked down her spine.
She knelt down and wrapped her fingers around the hilt of Procyon’s discarded blade. The god still shrieked like a piglet, dousing his eyes with the pitcher of crystal water laid out for the mortal council members. The golden blade dragged across the floor, slicing the silence in the hall.
Even Obscuros froze, still clutching the babe in his arms. He was utterly powerless against the flood of magic now dripping from Tethys’s every pore. Only Polaris moved silently, racing to the dais. She took the babe from her father’s hands, soothed his frantic cries, and lunged for the hidden alcove behind the thrones.
“Tethys, put the sword down,” Araes whispered. The man kneeling before her was a stranger now. A mortal standing between her and her child. She raised the blade overhead, feeling its perfectly balanced weight in her palms. The sword, crackling with golden embers, became an extension of her arms—a lethal limb designed to kill.
“Remember who you are, please,” he begged.
With teeth bared, she swung the blade in a near perfect arc. Her roar drowned out the whip of metal through the air.
Then, like a tear through fabric, the realm split in two.
One side, an iridescent reflection, like a blurred, rippling image. The other, violently clear and reeking of death.
Chapter 75
“What did you do?!” Obscuros cried, wrapping his massive cloak around his wife. “What did you do?”
“My love! Listen to me,” Araes said, throwing his hands up. The chains rattled against him.
Something snapped in her chest. A tether, long forgotten and faded away, kindled back to life. It amplified a heartbeat not her own. Araes’s rapid pulse boomed in her ears, stifling the sound of her own entirely. She faltered.
Another heartbeat, quiet and fast, played its melody. The two intertwined to form a symphony of light and love andpeace. Tethys dropped the sword. It clattered to the floor.
She wasn’t a beast or a demon or a monster.
She was a mother, a lover, bonded by an infinite promise. Her flesh wasn’t of shadow, nor were her bones carved from stardust.
