There was no going back.
Sixty-Six
Evelina
Sixty Years Later
The throne wascold beneath Evelina. Hard. No matter how she shifted, there was no comfort to be found in this seat—for sixty years, it had felt so rigid. Though she couldn’t erase the pain of the life she had left behind, she tried her best to look forward. To plant a new seed of hope and wait for the day it would blossom inside her—watered by the promise of change.
Evelina felt it the moment Daimon gave his soul to Vidaris. It was a sharp pain that had started in her heart and radiated throughout her chest.
It still hadn’t dulled—she wondered if it ever would.
Zephyr had arrived shortly thereafter without Daimon. She stayed close to the palace and hovered above whenever Evelina would step into the gardens.
But she couldn’t bring herself to look up, to see the wyvern’s saddle empty. Couldn’t bring herself to accept Daimon’s choice, as much as she imagined he struggled to accept hers.
It was too painful to think about.
She convinced everyone that he had died—if he had still been alive, Zephyr would’ve been with him. The Riders were thehardest to convince. But he was their commander, their family. Of course they wouldn’t give up until they knew for certain.
But Evelina knew. Daimon didn’t tell her he was going to become the Lord of Shadows, but she knew from the feeling in her chest, from the secrets he had shared with her. She could feel the loss of him across their soulbond—as if there were a string binding them together, and it had been abruptly cut in half.
Over time, she began to understand why, as the border naturally healed itself of conflict—he must have found a way to use his powers to block the border. He had saved the empire, and nobody could know. Her heart broke as she watched the faces of what was left of the Alpha Fleet grow solemn throughout the years. But Daimon had made his decision, and she would trust him. Protect him. No matter how much it killed her.
She prayed to the moon goddess that her people would have a reprieve from death, but things were far from over.
Years, then decades passed with few fae deaths as they slowly reclaimed what was once theirs. Evelina and Senna garnered more peace, securing more and more land beyond the mountains. Moros had become a ghost, retreating and hiding for the last twenty years, when suddenly, in a last-ditch effort, the unthinkable happened.
Moros used his hate and corrupted Essence to cast a curse along the Zenovia Mountains. No human should have been able to cast such a powerful curse, but Moros found a way. Surely, selling his soul to Vidaris and feeding her chaos, pain, and destruction in return.
There was no physical barrier to be seen, no shudder of darkness or warning that it had happened. Instead, fae became lost on the other side of the border, and those on the edge of the mountains were torn to pieces beneath the weight of the curse. They became lost souls, roaming the Shadow Realm.
At first, they didn’t know what happened. Those on the border simply stopped returning for reports. Evelina and Sennahad sent scouts to the mountains, only for them to return with word that everyone had disappeared.
It wasn’t until they attempted to cross the border that they learned what had happened.
Every fae who attempted the crossing died instantly, suffering the same fate as their fallen comrades. People Evelina had known for years died as the land was split in two, fae on one side, humans on the other. The Valon Empire became two kingdoms—Crea and Penyth.
There were things she’d never forget.
Beautiful, innocent Lyria’s dull, distant eyes as she was lowered into the grave beside her mother and siblings. Lyria had changed after losing the majority of her family, joining the front as a healer in Evelina’s footsteps, right on the border. At first, Evelina was proud—before she realized her sister would never come back, caught in the shadows of Moros’s curse as it spread through the mountains.
Aldric’s gentle eyes glinting out from under thick pools of crimson blood—not only his. He was found under a pile of fae bodies. The look of devastation on Annora’s face that never fully went away, even when she smiled. The way their child, Avery, seemed to know before it happened, tugging at Evelina’s hem the day before and asking when her dad would be home.
“Soon,” she had said, not knowing she was lying.
Wave after wave of loss, scouts uncovering new massacres every day as they trailed the wreckage along the mountains. Bodies piled so high that mass graves had to be dug. What had once been their new stronghold at the border became a graveyard.
Evelina slowly cracked beneath the weight of all the pain.
She honored them the only way she knew how. There was an empty fallow field behind the palace. She prepped its soil for two seasons, rebalancing the land until it was ready for new growth. At first, she planted a seed every time a loss was reported. Butsoon it was uncountable, leaving her to plant handfuls at a time, staining her nails with soil.
It grew into the largest garden in the entire realm. She didn’t think she could take any more loss, her heart squeezing every time she looked out into the Remembrance Garden.
The curse separated her people, leaving behind the hope of reuniting fae and humans. With the border permanently sealed, there was peace, but no justice.
It was as if the war just paused, suspended in the air, hanging like an ax over Evelina’s head. The wyverns, who were supposed to return to their rest at the end of the war, instead stayed by their Riders, as if they could smell impending doom. As much as her people yearned for this to be the end, it couldn’t be over.
