Total pages in book: 222
Estimated words: 213974 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1070(@200wpm)___ 856(@250wpm)___ 713(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 213974 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1070(@200wpm)___ 856(@250wpm)___ 713(@300wpm)
I stumbled, nearly tripping. “What?” I laughed.
Her stare was serious. “I just wanted you to know that. You matter to me.”
The smile slipped from my face. Did she know about the sleeping aid…? My chest turned to ice. How could she? Feeling my face warm, I shook my head. “Did this Phebe write in this book to tell you that?”
“Oh, yes. Most definitely.” She grinned, the hem of her gown snapping at her ankles as she began walking.
I remained where I was, palms damp. My chest clamped down—
My chest.
I saw tiny Jadis nestled against my chest, she and Reaver sleeping soundly. The image of them dispersed like smoke, replaced by flashes of Aios and Bele. Ector’s smile. Saion’s deep laugh…
Ash and I in the sweet-pea-smothered passageway of the Garden District before I knew it was him.
“I did not ask for your help,” I’d spat.
“But you have it nonetheless.”
My heart stuttered, and then I found us here, at this very lake, my head resting in his lap, his fingers a light touch on my arm. I thought maybe I’d fallen in love with him even then. I just hadn’t known. If I had…
The memory faded into a more recent one. I saw Ash and me at the coronation, looking at the golden swirls on our hands.
Ash had leaned back, one of those rare, genuine smiles on his face as he surveyed the crowd. “The Fates are capable of anything.”
“Liessa? Sera?”
The voice jarred me from the whirling memories. “Don’t leave me. Please.”
It was Ash, but he sounded different. Raw. Terrified. I’d never heard him so scared. “Please,” he pleaded. “Fucking Fates, I can’t lose you. I can’t…I love you. I do. Fates, I do. I fucking love you. How can I not? How can this not be love?” He screamed to the elms, or at least I thought he did. I wasn’t sure if it was him or if it only came from my mind. “I love you, even if I cannot. I’m in love with you.”
Then I wasn’t there.
I wasn’t anywhere but in death…
I love you.
Death wasn’t silent.
Or peaceful.
It sounded full of feral rage.
I love you, even if I cannot.
Death was a roar of fury and agony, the sound of a soul shattering.
Of a heart breaking.
I’m in love with you.
CHAPTER FORTY
I floated in the quiet darkness.
There was no pain. No happiness. No fear. No excitement. There was no sense of anything. I was just there. Who or what I was no longer mattered.
I was just an it.
A thing like every other living creature. A collection of differently shaped pieces meant to turn to ash…
Ash that would return to the earth, enriching the soil and providing for the life the lands gave birth to.
But the darkness wasn’t entirely silent. There was a distant hum. A whisper. A name being called. Begging. The far-away plea tugged at me.
Seraphena, child.
I stopped floating at the louder echo. That of a…soul. One I knew, because I had been something before I was nothing—someone who made up the collection of uneven pieces. I’d had a name.
Open your eyes, girl. The voice came again—an old, worn voice that belonged to…to…
Odetta.
She was a part of the cycle now, just as I was, right?
No, child, you’re not.
I cracked open my eyes. A pinprick of light appeared in the darkness, becoming a shade of swirling sapphire. Light sparked at its tail, and emerald shot out, wrapping itself around the blue. Rich brown followed, and then the three lights spun around a dark center.
In that center, there was a…a past. The past. A beginning of everything. And it started with a blast—an explosion that left small, throbbing lights behind as the raw energy rippled out, creating barren lands and mountains where there was nothing but emptiness before.
Those small, throbbing lights were stars—bright, brilliant stars. And after a time, they fell to lands no longer barren. Some fell where great winged creatures ruled while others fell to lands separated by sweeping bodies of water to the west and to the east. And those stars buried themselves deep in the ground—ground that eventually healed from their impacts. Soil that sprouted saplings, which grew into strong trees that fed what was buried deep beneath. Stars that were fed and nurtured and grown from the roots of the trees they’d given life to. Stars that stayed beneath the surface until they too were as strong as the trees, till they rose from the soil to walk as…
Ancients.
I saw them, their ever-changing eyes full of their beginnings as warmth sparked inside me. That warmth filled all my different-shaped pieces as I saw a fire in the flesh, one that created the Primals. Crackling heat flooded my limbs as I heard the names they were called, both here and beyond, in unfamiliar lands full of towering cities and steel beasts.