“I was there when Starfall fell into darkness and became the Witherings. I remember little of that time. One day, there was home, there were the people I loved, and then the next… there was nothing. I became nothing, knew nothing of myself; all the people I loved were dead.”
I wanted to reach out to her, to grasp her hand and give it a comforting squeeze like Rosie had done for me countless times. To have lost everything to the point of being nothing, of being entirely void… But I didn’t reach out; instead, I kept swimming alongside her, hoping my silence wouldn’t be misconstrued as my own fear of what she would say or not being interested in her past. She kept on.
“Thanadyn—only a shadow at the time—sent for me.”
If I could have screamed out in horror in this underwater cave, that’s what I would have done. Thanadyn—Hesper knew him.
“He wanted me as a weapon, honed and cruel. I had been a dragon rider before everything happened.”
Dragons? Thanadynanddragons? Hesper’s past was shaping up to be something of legend, a terrifying one at that. I thought the dragons kept to their Keeps in the far north, never leaving their trove. If Hesper rode them, then there must have been dragons that weren’t evil. At least not then.
“The dragon riders were sacred protectors of Starfall. But we were not bonded with our dragons. If a bond had been in place, I think I would have died. To lose everyone as well as a bonded companion would have cut my thread of life irrevocably. And, at the time, I wished it had been cut. Better to fade away than to be forced to live in the ashes. I was the lastsurviving rider, one of the last survivors in all of Starfall, and Thanadyn was clever. He saw an empty vessel trained for war and sought to fill it.
“In my grief, I had no strength to fight his magic. His evil. Withering magic, it carves you out then redefines you. I had no defenses against it because I had lost the one thing that could fight it,” her voice rasped.
My heart clenched.
“Hope,” she finally managed to say. “Hope, I didn’t have any. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have love. I didn’t have a sense of self. The perfect prey for withering magic to wreak havoc on.” She took a breath. “The darkness enveloped me, and I became another minion for the Prince. I completed quests for him, but really, they were just killings, and I had lost too much of myself to fight against his power. But the worst part was that I was stillaware—I wasn’t mindless, though I wished to be. And I spent centuries doing his bidding.
“The last quest he sent me on was one hundred years ago. I was meant to eradicate the bits of Starfall that fell into the in-between realms. Starfallians with seeing magic, sensing the Prince’s descent into evil, had warned others of what was to come. Many left, but some stayed, trying to enchant bits of the land to go elsewhere. They had little success, as the land had already fallen into darkness with the Prince. But the water nymphs had found a way.”
Questions I’d had since the beginning began to fall into place. When Hesper saw Margast, it was not taunting I read on her face. She recognized him. They had seen each other before, long ago.
If I remember my lore books correctly, fae’s powers wereconnected to their kingdoms. If Starfall fell, then whatever Hesper’s power had been fell with it. She would have been forced into an immortal life with no one she loved nor the powers she had cultivated.
“I hunted the water nymphs for weeks, my mind set only on bloodshed, even though my heart beat elsewhere. After weeks of searching, I found an entrance on the outskirts of Fennings Forest. A crescent moon appeared in the trees, and I entered. When I dove into the pool, the murky blackness clouding my thoughts disappeared. I realized what had happened, what horrors I had enacted, and what Thanadyn planned to do.”
Marielle’s tail swishing slowed a bit as if she, too, remembered the story. Whether with fondness or terror or both, I couldn’t be sure.
“I knew I needed to help them and that I would die doing so. The Prince would have me executed for my treachery, but I did not care. Marielle greeted me, and I told her everything. I warned her of the Prince’s plans, that his withering magic would creep into their waters and suffocate them all. I could not give them much, but I could give them time to seek out a plan. I sent back word to the Prince, misleading his magic and his minions to the northernmost part of the Witherings. The misdirect only bought the nymphs a few days, but it was enough. They found their way beneath the lands and into Lore Isles. They were safe there.
“The Prince sent for my execution the next day. I went on the run, leading his minions anywhere but the entrances to the waterways. I shed the blood of many men who had been taken by darkness. Light might have still been in them—it was stillin me after all—but I couldn’t bring it out of them. Then came the dragons.”
My stomach went cold.
“They tried to burn me out of hiding. Fennings Forest lies in ruins because of me. The realm almost toppled, overtaken by fear one hundred years ago, because of me.”
Patti’s family. Patti herself. They were alive when Hesper roamed this earth as a killer. And the burning that set off the realm into a moment of collective terror was because ofHesper. What a terrible weight to bear alone.
“Thanadyn sent my own dragon after me. Circe was her name. She knew my smell, how I would hide, my defenses, all of it. I shot her out of the sky. And it almost broke me all over again to do it. But Thanadyn had forced the dragons into cruelty with his power, and there was no saving them as they ravaged the forests. Their only hope was death. I took down as many as I could as I stood in the ashen graves of Fennings’ people. Death was everywhere. Because of me. And his magic would never stop destroying everything in its path until it found me.”
“The Prince is to blame for all light lost in those days,” Marielle said kindly. Her voice was a welcome reprieve from the heaviness of Hesper’s tale.
“How did you survive?” I asked. Hesper seemed to be all power and soldier, but she could not outrun a legion of dark forces forever. Yet here she lived.
“Eldrene,” Hesper replied. “By fate or by some other force, I ran into her Train. We struck a bargain. She would offer me sanctuary from his magic if I swore allegiance to her. So I did.My first task was taking down more of his minions one by one. There are few left of them now.”
Sothat’swhy she never would tell me the details of her tattoo. The bargain didn’t just represent Eldrene’s deal; it represented a time in her life when killing was her only means of survival. It was her penance for the years she’d spent in darkness.
Yet Hesper was also the reason the Prince’s power was still confined. He had the capability to enact atrocities against Nestryia, but she’d weakened his ranks to the point of nothingness. She’d saved countless lives, but she had no true freedom. And she wouldn’t, not until Eldrene’s power was restored.
She was my protector, but she was also a protector of many, it seemed. Whatever stones lay around my heart chipped a bit at hearing her story. I didn’t want to be on this journey, I missed my home more than words could say, but I still had a home to return to. She’d lost hers so long ago that she likely didn’t even remember it in full. I couldn’t imagine that kind of pain.
Once again, it astounded me as to why I’d ended up here in the first place. I swam with a fae that saved the world and a princess who created her own, with all my hope resting on a seed pack that hopefully still remained dry.
Light shone through the end of the tunnel, golden rays dancing in the waves beyond. We were swimming into something more substantial than the magical rock pool we came from.
The sea.
