The question pierces through my confusion. My son, who has only known this man as a monster in a cage, is asking about his well-being. I look at Eoin, at the profound weariness in his stance, and I do not have an answer.
I settle Lyren back down, murmuring assurances until his eyes grow heavy again. Once he is asleep, I rise and force my trembling legs to move. I walk toward Eoin, my footsteps unnaturally loud in the deadened cavern. He does not turn as I approach. He simply stares into the murky water, as if seeing the ghosts of his entire race reflected there.
“What did you do?” My voice is a raw whisper, filled with a horror and an awe I cannot process.
“I removed the choice,” he says, his own voice rough and hollow, devoid of its usual formal cadence.
I stop beside him, staring at our faint reflections in the dark water. The sheer, irreversible finality of his actions washes over me. “The choice? You… you have just damned your people. All of them. Why?” The question is a desperate, ragged thing. “You are their enforcer. Your duty… your entire existence was to find that cure.”
“That existence is over.” He sounds ancient, weary. “My duty is no longer to the Matriarch.”
“Then who is it to?” I demand, my voice rising, laced with a hysterical edge. “To me? The woman you called an ‘anomaly’?The son you called a ‘specimen’?” I throw his own cold, clinical words back at him, needing to understand, needing to break through the wall of his sacrifice.
He turns his head then, and the sight of his eyes makes my breath catch in my throat. The cold, analytical light is gone. The possessive fire is gone. In their place is a profound, ancient sadness, a weariness so deep it seems to hold the weight of all his ten thousand years. The apathy, the shield he has hidden behind for so long, is gone forever. I am looking at his true soul for the first time, and it is utterly, devastatingly broken.
“I was wrong,” he says, the two words a confession of unimaginable weight. “The logic was flawed. It did not account for… you.”
His words, the simple, selfless truth of them, are the final blow. The walls I have spent five years building around my heart, the walls of hate and fear and a desperate, burning need for vengeance—they do not just crack. They crumble to dust. They are washed away in a sudden, overwhelming tide of an emotion so terrifying, so powerful, it leaves me breathless. All the hate, all the fear, it is all gone. And in its place is this raw, aching, terrifying thing that feels so much like… love. A love born of violence and survival and a shared, terrible loneliness.
He sways on his feet, a subtle, almost imperceptible loss of balance. The ritual has cost him dearly. Before I can think, I am moving, my hand reaching out to steady him, my fingers closing around his forearm. The skin is cool, but the muscle beneath is hard as stone. He freezes at my touch, his entire body going rigid, his head snapping down to look at my hand on his arm.
“You are a fool, Eoin,” I whisper, my voice thick with unshed tears. I do not pull my hand away.
He gazes at me, and I see the conflict in his eyes, the confusion. He has spent his entire existence in perfect control, and now, for me, he has thrown it all away.
I let go of his arm, but only to raise my hand to his face. My touch is hesitant at first, my fingertips barely grazing the cool skin of his cheek. He flinches, a subtle, almost imperceptible reaction, as if he is unused to a gentle touch.
I let my palm cup his face, my thumb stroking the sharp line of his jaw. He is real. This is real. This impossible, selfless, monstrous, beautiful man is real.
He does not pull away. Instead, a shudder runs through his entire body. He leans into my touch, a slow, deliberate surrender, his eyes closing as if the weight of the world, the weight of his choice, is simply too much to bear. He is a fallen god, and in this moment, he is giving himself over to my mercy.
I look at his face, at the long, silver lashes resting against his pale skin, at the lines of exhaustion and pain etched around his mouth. At last, I see him without the filter of my own trauma. I see past the monster and the violator and the captor. I see the sad eyes from Lyren’s drawing. And in the proud, sharp lines of his face, I see an echo of my son.
A single, hot tear escapes my eye and traces a path down my cheek.
“He has your eyes,” I whisper, the words a profound, absolute truth that seals our fate.
24
EOIN
Her touch lingers on my skin, a phantom warmth that defies the growing cold of the dead cavern. As she drifts back to sleep, Lyren nestled beside her, the full weight of my choice settles upon me.
It is not a thought, but a physical sensation. A hollowing. I feel the psychic backlash from corrupting the Wildspont, a profound and absolute silence where a connection to my people’s future used to be. For centuries, the hunt for the cure has been a silent, driving imperative in the back of my mind, a subconscious link to the survival of my race. Now, that link is severed. The silence it leaves is deafening.
I watch them sleep in the faint, flickering light of the fire. The equation I have just solved plays over and over in my mind. On one side: millennia of Vrakken existence, the faces of friends lost to The Fading, the future of an entire species. On the other: this one human female and the child she bore me. I have damned my race for them. By every metric of logic, the choice is insane.
As I look at the fierce, protective way her arm is thrown over our son, at the silver of his hair mixed with the dark silk of hers,the choice feels undeniably, irrevocably… correct. Not logical. Not rational. But the only choice my soul would allow.
Lyren stirs, a small whimper escaping his lips. His face is tight with the memory of a nightmare—the battle, the flight, the terror.
Before, I would have remained still, observing the specimen’s distress as a clinical curiosity. I do not do that now.
I move to his side, my movements silent. I do not know the human art of comfort, the soft words or gentle lullabies. I know only the Vrakken instinct to shelter. I kneel and extend my wing, the vast, leathery expanse of it unfolding to create a small, warm cave of darkness around him, shielding him from the dying light of the fire and the cold ghosts of the cavern. Beneath my wing, his whimpering ceases. His breathing evens out. He settles into a deep, peaceful sleep, secure in the shelter of his father. The fierce, primal protectiveness that floods my being is a feeling more potent than any power I have ever wielded. It solidifies my decision with a finality that leaves no room for regret.
When the first, pale light of dawn filters through the curtain of the waterfall, I know what I must do. They are weak. They need sustenance. This is my new mission. Not a grand, sweeping objective from a Matriarch, but a simple, tangible purpose.
I slide from the cave, my wings catching the air as I fly through the waterfall and into the crisp morning. I spend hours foraging, my ancient knowledge of the wild, long dormant, now rising to the surface. I find a clean, cold spring bubbling up from between two rocks. I gather sweet, nutty-tasting roots and a patch of crisp, edible moss. It is a simple, humble act of providing, but as I hold the cool, damp moss in my hand, I realize it feels more meaningful than any mission I ever completed. More real than any cold, logical victory.
