She started to sob in broken, hitching gasps, wishing she had listened to their warnings to be careful and aware, wishing she had hugged them one last time before leaving the safety of her childhood home. Her parents had not stopped her, but she’d seen the fear in her father’s eyes when she had left astride Heles all those months ago.
She had been so insistent she needed to go, claiming she was sick of the cloistered embrace of the quiet forest in Mise where she was raised. Her true reasons for leaving them behind, for apprenticing with the sisters in order to take their sacred vows of chastity and service, were her own secret—her ownshame.
She supposed it did not matter now.
She had bluffed to Jada. She had heard the rumors slipping over the border these past months but had willfully cast them aside as gossip. People grew bored in times of peace, and what the whispers claimed was impossible. It had to be. Sheneededit to be.
There had been a slew of horrible storms sweeping across Aren this past year, brought over on howling winds from Arcadia and leaving destruction in their wake. An unusual number of earthquakes had caused widespread avalanches in the more remote mountain districts to the east, some of them large enough to level entire small villages. Nya had reasoned with herself again and again that the strange weather was not caused by what everyone said it was.
That somehow, there was still a piece of the once-mighty god king, Kronos, out there.
Not his own soul, of course.Thathad been destroyed in dragon fire decades before her birth, marked and banished forever with the same symbol Nya had once seen flicker across her father’s forehead on an unusually cold winter night, the same day Nya’s little brother had been born still and quiet.
The mark of a goddess.
Two moon cycles ago, she had finally asked for the truth. According to Jada, the mark that destroyed Kronos was that of the Nyx’s heir, a goddess reborn twice over, who had been killed by Kronos and returned the favor in her second life. The one who had fallen for a demi-god, the lost heir to the fire god, Vulcan, who himself had paid a steep price for taking a god king’s promised bride.
It made sense, she supposed, as hot tears streamed down her blood-stained cheeks where she lay beneath the rubble, that he would seek her. Maybe it was for the best that she died here before they could find her. That way, her parents would be safe—forever broken by her death, but safe. Then again, maybe they didn’t fear the void that came after this world, but rather lives that offered much worse fates.
“I’m sorry,” she mouthed silently, her eyes landing on the slate-hued sky above her.
Her chest was beginning to cave under the stone and debris above Jada’s body. She closed her eyes, her body still trying to fight for oxygen, for life. But her mind was made up. She would let herself fade. Within some small, dark place in her mind, letting herself die felt right.
“There, underneath the rubble.”
The voice was deep and masculine, a little grating at the end of each word, almost as if it hurt to force them out. She knew it was familiar, but for a moment, lost in the haze of pain and looming death, she did not understand why.
“Are you sure, Morgen? No mortal could survive beneath all that pressure, much less live past the initial blow. Which was a bit dramatic, if you ask me. Varax is too damn big for this place.”
“We are not looking for a mortal.”
She did not recognize the other voice, but…
Morgen.
Morgen.
She hardly had the ability to draw air now, between the pressure of Jada’s body and the debris covering them, so when she gasped the words, they were nearly soundless.
“No. Please, no.”
She willed her body to give in faster. Now, before they found her. She would rather die than realize the undeniable truth she had long suspected. She did not want to see his face when he realized it too.
In the end, her body’s will to survive betrayed her. The broken chunks of the temple and debris above her was cleared, and she saw two towering male forms, backlit in the stark light of the cloudy afternoon.
“Move the body, will you, Carus?”
She reached for Jada a moment too late. The priestess’ limp form was already being tossed aside like it was nothing more than a sack of grain. A whimper slipped past Nya’s lips, and the taller of the two men sighed as he kneeled.
She saw it, the moment he truly understood what was happening. She knew he was aware of who she was, so perhaps it was just the shock of seeing her after a year of utter silence.
His entire body froze, his golden-tan complexion paling. Long, dark hair—not black, but a deep shade of brick-red—fell down his back, half of it carelessly knotted into a bun. His jaw flexed, tugging on the faded scar that ran across his slightly hooked nose and down to the top of his upper lip. Their eyes met, and she wanted to scream as the truth she had so naively denied to herself was made painfully obvious.
She had always known he was not mortal, so it was no surprise to see the silver flickers of ether cutting through the brown of his irises. But the bright gold veins lighting them up, the ones she had tried again and again to tell herself were just a deep amber…
There was no denying it now, just as she couldn’t before.
“Problem?” the other man, the one Morgen had called Carus, asked, as if they had not just destroyed an entire holy temple and tossed Jada’s body aside so casually.
