The need to make Moros pay for what he had done lived in Evelina’s heart, even as her kingdom moved on—desperate for peace. She threw all her focus into finding him, into working with the Riders to hunt him down. They used the aerial fleets to search for him, flying as close to the border as they could, before the pull of the curse threatened to snatch their souls from their bodies.
After so long searching, many assumed Moros had died in his last cruel sacrifice to the shadows, and they moved forward. With so much to mourn, the fae instead rejoiced. For all the lives lost, the lands were healthy again; they had, in their minds, won the war.
Where before Evelina felt the decaying land over her body with endless sores and aches, she now felt lighter, less burdened. But there was a cold deep within she could never shake. No matter what people thought, she was certain Moros was still out there.
The curse left the darkness in Crea to fester, leaving Penyth closer to peace than they ever thought they would be. Flowers grew where bodies were buried; the scent of rotting flesh turned to fresh, dewy air.
Any remaining humans trickled out of the cities and hiddeep within the forest—or perhaps found some last portal magic to escape over to the newly formed Crea. Like them, Evelina yearned for a time everyone else was eager to leave behind. She could not rejoice in the separation of her people and everything they could not recover.
In her bones, the pain was gone. But in her heart, it only kept growing.
They had lost so much to Moros’s games of power, and Vidaris’s hand in aiding him. The many soldiers, civilians, fleets—her mother and siblings, friends and colleagues. Droves upon droves of bodies even an immortal could not fathom.
And Daimon. He had done so much to save them, forever bound to the Shadow Realm—an eternity for what only came to be twenty years of relative peace.
Sixty years flew by without a change to Evelina’s golden complexion or in her heart. She blinked and summer froze into winter. She woke up one morning and realized winter had melted away into spring.
Daimon was her first and only love, but it was Senna who had been by her side. And as she saw little, lonely Avery grow up, Evelina held on to a secret wish.
One day, her heart couldn’t contain it any longer. Snowy days melted into warm, sun-filled ones. Her sense of hope was slowly returning, even as her pain stayed nestled in the deep corners of her heart. The morning she decided to tell Senna she was ready to start a family, she found him sitting beneath the Mother Tree, flipping through pages of a novel. The room was quiet save for the handful of Woodland tending to the shelves.
“Senna,” she whispered, her longing clear in her voice as she sat beside him.
He gave her his gentle attention as he always did, his warm brown eyes absorbing every layer of intention between them. “Yes, my queen?”
“I wish to have a child.” She took a deep breath. “With you,” she added, tears in her eyes. “My king. The one who has been by my side a thousand moons and more.”
They both wanted a family, wanted to find a seed of hope in the darkness that surrounded them. Their friendship was strong. Immovable. And a part of them wondered if they could ever be more.
For a short time, they tried to be more. There was a love that she had never experienced between them. It was gentle, soft. The kind of love that made her feel warm and safe. It was what she dreamed of a marriage being. But beyond comfort and solace, they would always long for the love left behind. For the Riders their hearts still sang for.
But for all they had lost, it was enough. And in time, they found that they had already been blessed by Eurydice.
Finally, there was something to live for beyond duty or honor. For the first time since the shadows took Daimon, she felt that seed of hope begin to take root—and blossom.
Sixty-Seven
Daimon
The days bled togetherin a haze of chaos and pain. Daimon’s routine consisted of ushering souls through the Shadow Realm and into the Vale when Vidaris was ready for them. He had yet to step foot in the Vale—as his father had carefully instructed him to avoid it—but there was a connection between him and Vidaris nonetheless. The power inside of him tugged at his gut, pulling day and night to unite with the darkness of the Vale.
He couldn’t get away from her. She was everywhere. She might have been caged within the Vale, but her darkness filled every inch of this wretched place. His tower of nightmares was a never-ending pit of decay, and he feared the day he stopped seeing it that way.
He had spent over sixty years trapped within the confines of the Shadow Realm, stuck within the empty walls of the obsidian palace. He was a king who ruled an empty court. To some, the king of the dead.
A tug at his chest had his feet pulling him out of his castle and into the forest. His connection to the Goddess of Vengeance gave him safe passage through the mountains, a place nobreathing being could safely travel through without the goddess’s permission.
These lands were an in-between, a foot in the living realm while the other was firmly planted in the Shadow Realm below. To feed the constantly rotating wheel of life and death, a being of both worlds was tasked with shoveling the lost souls into the layers of the Vale.
Daimon still didn’t know much about what it was like in the Vale—though that was likely where his soul was headed one day. All he did was bring the lost souls to where the veil was at its thinnest, an icy black pit that rested at a cavern’s edge through a wide tunnel. It was nestled next to the castle he slept in, leaving him with unfortunately easy access to it at all times.
A scream tore through the trees.
It took him weeks to get used to the sounds that came from the Wailing Woods, a thicket of twisted, rotting trees that surrounded the castle for several miles. Now he was numb to the constant stream of cries and pleas for help. Creatures from the Vale could slip into the Shadow Realm, torturing the souls that plagued these lands as their own personal toys.
It filled his days with a never-ending stream of helplessness, of snatching souls that were trapped there and bringing them to Vidaris. She liked for them to wait in the Shadow Realm, to feel decades of pain there while anticipating how much worse the Vale would be.
He didn’t have a choice now. His shadows were wilder—more bloodthirsty. They would seek out the lost souls, eager to bring them pain and drag them to their fate.
