Nevander isn’t here. Seren will have to be enough.
Except he may not be. His anxiety creaks through sea-soaked wood. His bones strain with it, more painful than Gevain’s next bruising kick.
Gevain is losing control, but Seren’s empathy isn’t enough to destroy him. As Gevain drops to his knees, seizing Seren’sthroat, Seren needs more power. He reaches, searching, yearning, for something that will reach back.
“Stop this,” Gevain spits, fingers digging into Seren’s throat like iron nails. A streak of blood glitters beneath his nose. “I have lived sixty times your meager life. You cannot best me.”
There. Beyond the veil of Gevain’s haven waits the power Seren has shied from. The dance of stillness. The anchor of sunlight. The endless song of knowing. Seren gasps as Gevain and Tansy and the haven become insubstantial. He sees himself reflected in incandescence.
Nevander warned him. Lysandra, too. Summer’s royal gift is too immense to wield without the crown. Fae can only speak truth, but truth is rooted in belief.
And Seren believes he doesn’t need a crown, nor anyone else’s permission to seize power. He doesn’t intend to seize it at all.
He’ll ask instead.
“What do you offer?” Seren asks through Gevain’s bruising grip.
Gevain must think the question is for him. He says something, pressing harder, but Seren can’t hear it. The true answer arrives not as words, but an idea.
Sovereignty. Power. Weapon and respite.
Seren’s next trembling words are silent. He’s dizzy, his air cut off, as he asks,What do you seek?
Light and dark. Silence and song.
Balance.
A question follows the answer. Summer asks, not quite in words, what Seren will give.
Nevander would advocate caution. Careful negotiation, defense against unforeseen consequences. But Seren doesn’t want to protect himself alone. He wants to protect Nevander, Tansy, Harmony, and everyone he can. So, he offers something he never valued before, but it’s the best thing he has.
Himself, in service to Summer, in service to balance, as long as he lives.
Light blazes so bright Seren can barely see. Agreement rings like a bell in his heart. The bargain is struck. Seren is king, and Summer sings,Come home.
Salt air and incense scatter. Sea and courtyard vanish. Warm earth cradles Seren’s back—before the force of magic lifts him.
Breath floods his lungs as a wall of power slams Gevain away. Tansy swears, a high fragile litany. Through the blinding light, Seren catches one glimpse, unchained but still bloody, before Tansy falls away.
No, Tansy isn’t falling. Seren is rising, born by magic past the towering trees. Past the pale palace walls. His back burns with the stretch of unused muscle. New bones hook not into joint and sinew but the very core of Seren’s magic.
Feathers darken the edge of his vision. Wings the blue of evening shadows, iridescent in the sourceless light.
Not long ago, Seren was shocked by a change of hair color. The revelation of wings simply feels right. This is him.
This is his realm.
His wings move, but the power lifting him belongs to Summer. Seren sees more than the forest and rivers unrolling beneath him. He stops a hundred feet above ground. Two hundred. Everything is so close and so distant at once.So clear and so hazy. The physical becomes translucent, revealing the heart and veins of Summer itself. He can’t see it with his eyes, yet it shimmers. He can’t hear it with his ears, yet it hums.
The heart has veins. Leylines. As soon as Seren thinks the word, his awareness rides them like a leaf upon white water. Images batter him. Pixies swarming blue-white trees. Dryads with bark-like skin, looking up from their forest camp. Sinuous scaled creatures darting into underwater tunnels. A rabbit nursing her young. A hawk breaking a vole’s neck. A seed sprouting.
Seren feels traces of foreign magic, rare and difficult to grasp. A blurred glimpse of a red-crowned tree. A white-furred fox donning a gray glamour.
Summer places a word in Seren’s mind: orphans. These are creatures of Autumn bloodlines, or Winter, or Spring. Born of those caught in Summer when the other realms were lost. They too belong to the balance.
Seren’s sense of wonder grows brighter than the light. The wonder isn’t his own. It belongs to every being in the realm who witnesses him and is astounded.
This realm is wondrous, and Seren belongs. He’s wondrous, too.
