Slimy sickness crawled up his throat. They’d both been used by Kol and these lords. No more than mere puppets in some cruel master’s game.
“Why do you stay here, Anniliese?”
She adjusted her shoulders. “Because there’s nowhere else for me to go.”
He understood. He truly did. To feel so trapped by where you were that you gave up all hope of ever being free.
“I’m leaving,” he murmured. “I can get you off the castle grounds. From there, you could go anywhere. South. North.” He paused. “West.”
He prayed to whatever god would listen that she wouldn’t hear the tremble of nervous fear in that last word.
Anniliese was quiet for a long moment before tilting her head up to the sky.
“I thought about convincing you not to go,” she said. “But I think that would be pointless.” She sighed, a long, sad sound. “It’s curious. In my time here, I’ve seen true horrors. Kol is twisted and broken and corrupted, but…I don’t think he was always evil. And I think he’ll remember that before the end.” She lowered her gaze, and Andrian was surprised to see her eyes lined with tears.
“Why?” he asked. “Why do you stay and endure it? After everything…why?”
Anniliese smiled, but it didn’t meet her eyes. “Because the sun is too beautiful to be bad. Too warm to cast so much darkness. Whatever has taken root in him is not natural, and what’s worse is he knows it, too. We can all feel a change coming, but I don’t think it’s the kind he’s after.” Something dark glintedin her eyes, flames bobbing in her irises, something broken and angry and vengeful peeking through in the gentle lift of her lips.
“I want to witness it when the change strikes him down.”
Andrian tightened his jaw. He felt it, too; a shifting at the very core of the world. He told himself it was Mariah, that it was the grace and essence of two goddesses contained within one mortal body causing a change in the world.
A quieter part of himself whispered that it wasn’t that simple, and he knew it.
He turned to go. There was another crunch on the destroyed bushes behind him. “Wait.”
Andrian glanced back. Anniliese held out a hand. Something small and circular glinted in her palm.
“I spend a lot of time in these gardens. I found this one night amongst the ashes.” She swallowed, a shadow passing over her face. “It belonged to Lisabel Salis. I think you should have it.”
The world beneath Andrian tilted, his shadows recoiling within his skin.
He slowly stalked to Anniliese, hardly daring to breathe. He took the delicate band from her with an unsteady hand, holding it up in the moonlight.
The silver metal gleamed, twisting together like woven vines. It was simple and elegant. But what stole the air from his lungs and settled like a punch to his gut was not the band or the two small diamonds in the set.
It was the brutally familiar purple-blue stone they framed, shaped like a falling star.
“Tanzanite,” Anniliese whispered, a knowing smile on her lips. “I asked the blacksmith. The Salis wedding band is set with tanzanite.”
Mariah had to have known, all this time, and she’d never said anything? Never mentioned that his eyes didn’t just remind her of a stone her father told her about from his travels tothe Everheim Mountains, but that very stone was set into her mother’s wedding band?
Gods, what the fuck kind of curse had he called upon himself to deserve this? To know this love, but know he could never be anything but her most dangerous threat?
With a tremor to his hands that he couldn’t hide even if he tried, Andrian carefully slipped the ring into his shirt pocket, the weight resting above his heart. He met Anniliese’s gaze with a ragged breath.
“Thank you.”
She simply nodded, gathering her robes in her hands. “Tell Mariah good luck. If anyone can beat Kol, it’s going to be her.”
“I’m not going to Mariah?—”
But Anniliese was gone, vanishing like a wraith back into the darkness.
Andrian steadied his breathing, turning back to the looming forest beyond the gardens. With a final, longing glance up at the moon, a single fleeting moment to mourn all he’d lost before he’d even had the chance to truly know it, Andrian slipped away from the darkness of Khento and toward the mountains of his mother’s homeland.
Long ago, before gods walked the earth, the continent was rich in language—different tongues spoken from Onita to Leuxrith to Vatha to Kreah. But before the First War, when turmoil began rumbling between the gods, a single, common tongue emerged. The old languages faded from frequent use as the conflict spread.
