I made my way back to our chambers. Ada was curled up in a chair by the window with a book, afternoon light catching in her dark hair.
She looked up as I entered, her smile bright enough to chase away the last of the shadows clinging to my skin. "How was training?"
"Good. Exhausting." I pulled her into my arms. "He put me on the ground four times."
"Only four?"
"I knocked him back three feet once. He pretended it didn't happen."
She laughed. "I'm proud of you for doing this."
"Starlight." I murmured against her mouth, pulling her closer. "You're the only thing that matters."
"I know." She touched my face. "And you're my everything."
I held her close, breathing in jasmine and sunlight, and tried not to think about the strange new weight that had settled behind my sternum during training. The feeling that I'd reached into the deepest part of my power and something down there had reached back.
Not Erlik. Not a spell or a trap.
Something older. Something that had always been in my blood, waiting patiently beneath my mother's suppression for two centuries. Something that had woken the moment I'd stopped fighting my shadows and let them fully in.
The Light Realm had burned children alive and called it mercy. The Light Realm had hunted people like me for centuries. These were facts. I already knew them.
So why did they suddenly feel sharper? More urgent?
Because you finally opened yourself to your full power. Because your shadows are showing you the truth you were too suppressed to see before.
It made sense. It felt logical.
I was fine. Everything was fine.
I just needed rest. That was all.
In the courtyard below, a shadow-finch landed on the windowsill. My shadows reached for it — not gently, not the way they usually moved around small things. The bird startled and fled. I didn't notice. Ada's hand was in my hair, and her light was warm, and I was already falling asleep.
CHAPTER 29
DEATH OF THE LIGHT GOD
Ada
The morning everything ended, it started with Banu arguing with a shadow-finch.
"I am not sharing my breakfast with you," she snapped at the tiny bird perched on the edge of her plate, her silver-blonde hair shifting to an irritated orange. "I don't care how cute you are. Boundaries exist for a reason."
The finch stole an olive and vanished into thin air.
"Unbelievable. Several centuries of magical expertise and I've been outwitted by a bird."
Eda didn't look up from her book. She was a voracious reader, and she was still very young but incredibly intelligent. "Emir says you argue with plants too."
"Plants are different. Plants listen. Eventually.”
I sat on the low stone wall overlooking the bioluminescent gardens, a cup of shadow tea warming my hands. Across theterrace, Hakan and Kaan were walking the perimeter together — not training, just talking, their heads close, Kaan's hand occasionally finding his brother's shoulder. They did that now. Walked and talked for hours, making up for two centuries of not knowing the other existed. Sometimes I caught fragments — shadow politics, old wars, their father — but mostly it was quieter than that. Two men learning the shape of a brotherhood that should have been there from the start.
Hakan was different here. Lighter. Even surrounded by shadows.
Nesilhan appeared beside me with two fresh cups of tea, her golden eyes warm. She'd lived in the Shadow Court long enough that the darkness felt like home, but I caught the way she sometimes tilted her face toward any source of light — old instinct, the light-bearer she'd been before Kaan claimed her. She still had the light magic, but it was merged with shadows now, woven through with something that had changed its texture entirely.
