Their head pivots, ever-so-briefly distracted from the Morpheus sphere. Optical processors blink and whir. “Yes, Kori?”
A wicked smile curls my lips. “We’re going on another adventure.”
CHAPTER
6
ADRIA
Idon’t know how many sleeps it’s been since the burial, but I still feel the blood on my hands, sticky and viscous, whenever I dream. My claws at Father’s throat, my voice an animal bellow.I won’t let you make monsters of us all.If I must become a monster to stop a legion … so be it.
But I only ever meant to undercut their twisted dreams, not snuff out their very lives.
The strength granted by the Diakópsei was more than I could’ve ever fathomed, more than my merely mortal frame could contain. I tried to silence my father’s voice, and beneath my tremulous grip, I felt the last breath shudder out of him. Raised a hand to stop my mother from also charging the asteroid, pushed her back with the barest reserve of my newfound might, only to feel her skull splinter in my palm like a boiled eggshell.
I set out to stop my parents from committing mass murder. In the process, I murdered them both.
Every time I dare to sleep, I replay the fractured, terrible moment. I wake sweat soaked, wings rigid, spine coiled to spring, like a child whoimagined a spirit lurking in the shadows. My radiation-mutated dog, Russ, is the only one who dares to stay close, never once recoiling from the awful sounds my mouth has learned to create.
The Elysians demanded Isek’s execution immediately upon his overcharge. But Isek was a child, unable to bear the breadth of his newfound power, a plausible threat to everyone around him. Perhaps he could’ve been calmed, trained, his impulses contained—but as the Elysians saw it, that would never have outweighed the risk.
Meanwhile, my first act upon overcharge—even with my vision overtaken by azure, even overcome by power clearly never meant for mortal flesh—was to fight off the soldiers my parents sent marching on Elysium. Without me, the place would have been ash by the time the timekeeping torch burned low once again. Without me, the nightfolk army would’ve collectively seized the asteroid’s power and immediately wrought needless warfare in the Daylands, too.
So I may be an apostate to Elysium—an aberration, an abomination, who dared to look upon a stony god with an unveiled face. But it was my hands that guarded the Depths’ mouth, my jagged teeth that tore through what soldiers were unwilling to fall back, my blasts of gifted energy that blinded anyone else who dared make a run for the Diakópsei’s chamber. So Elysium is content to call me a dark disciple. A redeemed sort of demon.
I should not exist, but if I didn’t, neither would they.
It was not a clean battle. The blood lingered under my clawed nails for too many washings, the dust and rubble in my lashes and eyebrows and the wild, increasingly overgrown curls of my hair. The soldiers fell back. Some, stubbornly loyal to my parents even after witnessing their last stand, fled to recoup, needing a new leader. Others, seeing that I had stopped a needless march on the sunlit lands, laid down their weapons and pledged allegiance at my feet.
Somehow, as my world descends into chaos, my first ally is the cloistered cult that my parents, and their parents, for generations back,made every effort to avoid. It is, in fact, Er, who witnessed Isek’s execution, who tells me with tremulous breaths that after sifting through the carnage, clearing collapsed tunnels, and honoring the dead as best they could, they found one body unaccounted for.
My uncle Azarii, his cell unlocked from the outside. By whom, nobody seems to know.
In the following sleep cycles, my scouts report scattered outposts appearing beyond our fortress proper, taking full advantage of the near-total darkness beyond the torch’s reach to scurry away and regroup. When will the remaining rebels attack? Where? In what numbers? The details elude my regiment, but one name appears with terrifying certainty in messages from the front: Azarii, their proud leader.
Ever the fanatic, Azarii reportedly cares little that by overcharging myself, I singlehandedly saved Elysium (and likely the Daylands, too). By drawing the Diakópsei’s unfiltered glory into myself, I committed a mortal sin in his eyes. And I slayed my own parents in the process—something Azarii once attempted himself, but still finds is excellent propaganda to rally a rebellion.
Despite my stated goals of peace, despite sending soldiers to aid Elysium in locking down the Diakópsei, despite my desperation to never allow another overcharge … according to Azarii, I cannot be trusted to lead the Shadowlands. So, in a cruel twist of fate, my parents’ loyalists side with the man who once sought to personally usurp them. He promises them that only by overthrowing me—the ultimate symbol of violence and slaughter—can the Shadowlands see peace.
No one calls to invade the Daylands anymore. Nevertheless, in the name of peace, we are killing one another.
There is no coronation for me. There is no need of it. I returned to the fortress, caked in crimson, gleaming azure, battered and bruised and gasping for air through my own horror—even more powerfully built than I already had been, my body screaming, visibly racked with spasms of heretofore unfathomable power—and with soldiers carryingmy parents’ mangled bodies in tow. My word was immediately law, written in spilled blood.
The soldiers who didn’t defect to Azarii swore their loyalty to me, on their knees before their new lord, heads bowed low in deference. Among them, General Isek, whose son I utterly failed, whose trust I will never deserve.
Accessing the Diakópsei is again forbidden, as it always ought to have been, with a constant rotating guard of both Elysians and my own allied soldiers placed over it. Isek leads the guard himself. I do not tell him of the sounds, the blood. Out of shame, and to my shame, I don’t even tell him that I was present as a witness, that I could’ve stopped everything before a child paid the price. But when I finish explaining, Isek knows enough of what became of his son. He vows that never again will anyone recklessly touch the Diakópsei on his watch.
My army sees my suffering with every breath I take. They believe, wholeheartedly, that I would only ever have become this—only ever have done what I’ve done to the very people who made me—as a desperate act to prevent further atrocities.
My scouts report that somewhere beyond the fortress, in his speckled rebel camps, Azarii tells his rebels, by the light of their little campfires, in furtive but furious whispers, that I have merely become that which I swore to destroy.
I bury Father and Mother without ceremony or fanfare, maybe a quarter mile from my fortress, surrounded by an overgrowth of charred, leafless trees. The torch’s cyclical light casts strange, ever-shifting, spidering shadows through the dead branches. To cement my rule, my parents are formally branded as traitors to our people, reckless warmongers rather than wise guides. No one else is allowed to see the grave site. I visit alone, too enraged to cry, too grief-stricken to slash the titles from the headstones.
Why was a child’s life not enough? Why was my body, mutilated by raw, boundless strength, not enough? Why was it not enough when Father fell and ceased to breathe? Why Mother, too? Why by my hand?
Why was this the price of preventing a planetary war between light and dark?
I barely close my eyes anymore. When I do, it’s beside the graves: twin metal tablets, severe in their simplicity, utterly identical save for the engraved designations ofFatherandMother.Time passes, uncertain, in eternal nights unbroken by day. I lose track of the torch’s lighting, burning, and relighting. My own heart burns within me without relent. When I eat, it’s often followed by sickness. When I sleep, it’s always followed by nightmares.
