Blake
“Will I ever see her again?”
Lexa moves with me through the dark, our bodies falling into the shadow of manor houses that sprawl throughout the neighborhoods resting against the palace walls. The layout of this city is so similar to Moonrise that I’ve found it more than disorienting sometimes, like whatever ancestor of the sitting king stole the design from the Firestone Queens, trying to recreate the kingdom they forced to ash.
“Chessie?”
She gives a tight nod, refusing to meet my eyes. I know what she’s asking–for me to look into a future that’s so unstable and shifting with every second that passes. I can only give her the truth I know in my heart. “Silas loves her, but he’d let her go. When this is over, when I’m able to get you home, Chessie can decide if she’s staying with him or going back to Eastonia, but Silas will not allow her to aid in the battles taking place here. I think… you agree with him on that.”
Lexa nods again, but her eyes are distant, focusing on the smoke-lined horizon.
It was easy enough to get here. Lexa’s healing is going better than I expected. A few extra doses of healing drafts, some herbs, and my powers blocking her pain, at least for a while, have made it possible for her to walk beside me, chin held high, a belt laden with a variety of weapons weighing down her hips.
“You can’t shift,” I warn after a few minutes of reflective silence, but she only narrows her eyes, squinting into the ravaged street where the riots took place two days ago. Since then, the king has cloistered himself and his loyal courtiers inside the tall, alabaster and marble wall surrounding the palace, trapping those that live closest to the palace itself and the arena in an area similar to the Glade.
And the Glade?
“It’s burning.” Lexa stops dead in her tracks and turns to me, hazy orange light filling her irises. “You didn’t tell me.”
I ignore her, checking the harness and shifting dress Chessie spent the last day mending, not that it matters now. “You cannot shift, Lexa. You’ll risk ruining all the work I’ve done. You tore every muscle in your back and shattered your ribs. I need you to remember that. If you shift again, reopening the injury, you could die. Look at me.” I grab her face, looking down at the features we share. She looks so much like Uncle Ryan, and I know, as her eyes meet mine, she’s seeing my father looking back down at her. I wonder what those men are thinking right now, but I scrub the thought from my mind as quickly as it came. “Do not shift. No matter what happens. I can’t save you this time. I need every ounce of energy I have to send a message to Maeve.”
She shoves me back a step. “And what about Hannibal? I thought you came here to face him, to finally kill him.”
“I might not need to.” I look over her head at the palace, at the magical shields shimmering against the thick layer of smoke drifting toward the sky. “I think he’s very old, Lexa. Extremely. I think I understand what he needed from me and what he wanted me for. He’s not as powerful as he lets on. He can’t do what I can.”
She stares at me, her eyes narrowing in a silent command to elaborate. I lean forward, double checking her knife belt. “Don’t shift. Promise me.”
“No.”
I grind my teeth. “You’re just as stubborn as me, it seems.”
“What are you going to do, Blake?”
Die. Most likely.
“Promise me something.” I reach down, gripping her fingers and squeezing before she can pull out of my grasp.
“You’ve already made a blood oath to Maeve that she has to kill you if you come back. Don’t think I don’t know or understand what you’re about to do, Blake. If you’re going to ask me to tell Marianna you love her and that you’re sorry, save your breath. I won’t do it. Do it yourself when you get home. Fuck a blood oath, Blake. You’re a god. You get to decide.” She shoves me, giving me a glimpse of her renewed strength. It’s enough to settle my stomach.
“Do not shift.”
“Don’t fuck up whatever you’re planning to do.” She snarls and stalks into the darkness in the direction of the palace, of the arena.
I have an hour, tops, to finish this.
The king doesn’t have his shields up anymore. Fae guards are battling against the rebels–some of their comrades, even–trying to find their way through breaks in the wall. I watch Lexa approach, watch a crowd of rioters drift apart to let her pass. She’s granted access without a fight because the king has been waiting for his champion for days. I don’t have the luxury of simply walking through the fray. I spirit, grimacing as my powers lurch, sending me catapulting through space and time. It’s fascinating, really, how different it is here compared to in Eastonia and Crescent Falls. We’re blessed back home. The Goddess’s gifts are rich in comparison. Here, whatever gods they worship left long ago, and the natural magic of the kingdom has nearly run dry. Even my stars are quiet, too exhausted to chat. I open my eyes and scan a dimly lit hallway somewhere deep in the palace.
Kaleb gave me a crude layout of this place. I’ve been able to map it myself over the weeks, slinking through the hallways dressed in guard uniforms, keeping my head and eyes down. Hannibal knows what I look like, and I know for a fact I haunt his dreams because I’ve been trying to dig into his head, find his power with mine, but he’s impossibly shielded. Whatever power the king siphons from his loyal subjects, he gives to Hannibal. How, I have no idea, but I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with that vat of crystals I saw in Skye’s dream.
The thought of my daughter nearly brings me to my knees.
I miss her. I miss them. I’ve been trying not to let their memory render me useless. I have a job to do, I keep telling myself. I will come home a better man, even if Maeve has to strip every dark part of who I am from my bones until I’m nothing but… but what I should have been for them in the beginning.
Even if it kills me.
I’ve given so much of myself to my family. I let the darkness eat me alive. I put so many of them in impossible situations, and now I have to end it.
I have to end the man dead set on ruining everything my family rebuilt.
Hannibal is waiting for me, his eyes locked on mine as I step into that wide, circular room from Skye’s nightmares. I close the door behind me with a soft click that echoes, bouncing off every curve, and settling my body like this moment is simply a meeting back at the palace in Moonrise, a thirty-minute block in my calendar.
Hannibal’s eerily young face hasn’t changed a bit. His icy hair and even colder, nearly white eyes are the same, and those eyes crease as he smiles warmly, saying by way of greeting, “I thought we’d meet again.”
The crystals in the vat twinkle like stars as he speaks–in rhythm with his voice, I realize. He’s connected to them somehow.
He notices me looking, and that strange smile widens. “Do your kind have alchemists? They built this for the Firestone Queens so long ago. It’s how we siphon and use the natural gifts of the land, you see. Faeries are tied to the seasons, the elements, and sometimes, the cosmos. Our powers are determined by those sources alone, but if we keep everything in one place, it makes certain fae more powerful than others.” He taps the side of the basin with a dead kind of smile. “Alchemists made this. Do you know of any left in Eastonia? There were so few to begin with.”
“You would know, given that you spent a very long time in Eastonia.”
“Not as long as you believe, and not long enough to study your people like I wanted to. I assume you came here to kill me, Blake. Before we begin, I’d like a moment to explain myself.”
“I don’t need an explanation.”
“I think you’ll find it necessary,” he replies, his long, spidery fingers curling around the rim of the crystal basin, the wrinkled skin hanging off the bones the only sign of his true age. “Since you and I are so similar.”
“We are not.”
“Because you’re a shifter,” he smirks. “Filthy creatures. Smart, some, but otherwise bags of bones and blood with every brute, violent tendency our kind evolved past long, long ago. I find it odd you pledge such allegiance to that part of yourself when you have all of this to play with.” He motions to my body like he can see the mystic side clearly. “But, I digress. My hatred of your people comes from centuries of being on the losing side of our great war against the Goddess, I suppose.”
“Were you alive for that?”
“Barely,” he admits with a soft smile. “I was a child, if you can believe it. Oh, your people, your Firestones, alchemists, and mystics who aided in the war were vicious. Some fae took your side, of course, remained in Eastonia after the end and the veil fell, my parents included.”
I startle but keep it contained.
“Ah, yes, I was the son of traitors, scooped up after my parents failed to return and trained to be what I am today after my gifts were discovered. I’m the only one like me left here, you know. The only one like you.”
“Then the mystics are descendents of the fae?”
“No. You and I are simply chosen vessels for the prophecies of our shared universe. But you are a shifter, and I am fae, and therefore, our gifts, our visions, they contrast.”
“You want a war. You want fae in control. You want the shifters as slaves. It doesn’t matter what you say because you’ve ignored the truth. Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve told your king, has been a lie. He didn’t know Lexa would win. You saw it, didn’t you? Refused to believe what your own gifts were telling you?”
“A full-blooded shifter has never won the games and never will. She won’t survive the final Trial.”
“The final Trial has already ended. She is the champion.”
Something flickers behind his eyes–his powers… waning. I squint, noticing the harsh lines visible on his skin, the way his eyes are glazed, glassy, like he’s…
“You’re dying, aren’t you?”
Hannibal’s mouth barely moves as he replies, “Your precious Firestone Queen is quite powerful, but it was your great-uncle’s final blow that’s been slowly draining me. I’d hoped, by now, that we’d be in Eastonia, that I could rebuild myself in the forges, but no. Those Shadowsyngers have always been the bane of our existence.”
I narrow my eyes. This is not how I thought this would go. “You’re talking about Ryatt?”
“Is that his name? Powerful beast he is.” He braces his weight against the basin as the crystals flicker, dimming. “I thought it would be your queen in our way, but it’s him. It will always be him.”
He trembles, knees bent, and sinks against the basin. Panic rushes through my body. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to end this. He wasn’t supposed to go gracefully into death.
“What do you mean?”
“The sword of shadow,” he snarls, that boyish look evaporating. “He nicked me. That’s all it takes. With the right alchemist, just one… cut… is all it takes.”
I lunge, grabbing him by the shoulders, and his powers tear into mine. I see visions and images of a war, of a childhood that doesn’t belong to me. I try to pull my hands away, but I’m trapped in place as he bleeds his life into mine, forcing me to see it, to remember.
“That’s what we wanted. One single family. We never found them,” he says gravely. “Your Shadowsynger hides them well. You don’t know about them, do you?”
I get a sudden, startling image of the castle in Veiled Valley, of a couple I don’t know in fashions so ancient I’m sure I’m seeing memories from the Great War. A man decked completely in the armor now buried in that cave system where Ryatt found the sword of shadows as a teenager, before he even knew what he was. Aris, too, went through the ascension, taking a journey into those caves, and found the same mask I’m seeing, the same wrist armor bedecked in glowing jewels.
Their ancestors.
Another man checks the armor, his fingers bending the metal and adjusting the jewels with just a touch of his fingers.
“I wanted to be remade,” Hannibal whispers. “Only an alchemist can do it. My king wanted all the power. Only an alchemist can trap it. I tried to find them in your memories the day I took you, but you didn’t know, did you?”
My vision goes red–blood red–and I see Lexa in the arena, her hands bloody and eyes full of tears as she looks down at Kaleb, dead. Dead by her own hand.
“What have you done?” I gasp, shaking him. “What have you done?”
Hannibal Archnis dies in my arms, his body crumpling, turning to ash.
A roar of applause cuts through the silence that follows, coming from the direction of the arena.