“What are you afraid of? Or are you too much of a coward to say?”
“I don’t choose. I destroy whatever is in front of me—friend or foe, it doesn’t matter.”
His jaw clenched, a darkness flickering in his eyes. “The Marked don’t understand what they exude when madness takes them.”
Their terror hits me like a command.” He tapped his chest once, hard.. “Like a pulse under my skin, and Vareth takes the rest.”
A cold understanding swept through me. Fear. That was the signal. The trigger for him. The very thing Vareth fed on.
And if fear was the spark, then my refusal to break was the only thing keeping him from becoming the monster he feared. I had to resist fear at all costs. It was my only chance with Fionn.
“At least be honest with me, Fionn.”
“I have always been honest, Tilly. We have no choice. Our people suffer the prophecy for a decade if we don’t offer the Marked as a sacrifice. Not even women and children escape Vareth's wrath in Elora. You have witnessed nothing compared to what happens when the prophecy takes effect.”
Was this Fionn showing real remorse, real feelings for his people? I was shocked. His eyes started to lighten as his emotions changed.
“The only way to stop it.” He stepped closer, his presence a shadow I could feel in my bones.
“If there is a true joining of blood, where blood and souls connect as one. That is the only promise written in old Varethym scriptures. But you, Tilly demonstrated that there was no connection there. This is why we had to use the seance of divination to find you and then sacrifice you quickly.
“You never gave me a chance,” I shot back.
But the words scraped out of me with more ache than fury. For a heartbeat, something inside me buckled — a quiet, splintering collapse I refused to let him see.
Was this about me, or was it about his people, the women, the children he kept mentioning? My stomach knotted, an involuntary twist I didn’t understand, as if some part of me felt the sadness buried beneath his anger. I hated that it pulled at me, that it made me wonder what he had seen, what he had lost, what horrors he carried alone because prophecy demanded it. I didn’t want to feel anything for him, especially not sympathy or understanding, but something in me shifted anyway. I held my breath, forcing my face to stay hard, but inside… inside I wasn’t as untouched as I wanted to be.
“I didn’t fit your expectations. It’s sad, really. That this is all you exist for.”
His expression didn’t change, it was still.
“Careful, Tilly,” he murmured. “You’re mistaking purpose for choice.”
I stepped toward him, refusing to bend,
“You don’t scare me anymore, Fionn. Not when I finally see what you are.”
“Now you're starting to think rather than react,” Fionn said. “If you think I wanted this, you understand me even less than I feared.”
“You try to live in control. That’s the saddest part. You’ve lived so long under prophecy that you have no real control left.” My breath hitched, but I didn’t look away.
“That’s why you hate the Marked, why you hate me, isn’t it? Because we are the one thing you think you can control. It's easier to hate than love, because Vareth turns you into a monster and forces you to kill us. And who would want to live knowing they had killed someone they loved?”
“Control has nothing to do with it. I end what must be ended.”
Suddenly I thought of the others.
“What of your brothers?” I asked, thinking of Cillian. “Are they safe? What happened?”
“I had to leave them to the Gatemen. The battle was far from over.”
I remembered the sight of Cillian surrounded by the Gatemen, fighting for his life.
“They could be dead. How could you do that to your brothers?”
He looked into my eyes, his cold blue gaze piercing.
“What type of man would I be if I let you die at the hands of the Gatemen?”
