“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Father spat.
“Malin Ashfyre.”
Father recoiled as if it were a blade I’d thrown.
“What the fuck is going on?” Drystan hissed at me, glancing between us.
“Where did you hear that name?” Father asked, so cold and lethal.
“All that matters is that you’re a shit awful father, and we’re not the first to disappoint you.”
“That child died.”
“No. Your ruse was almost perfect. Your own brother was to be the next king, but you were nothing, a prince that wouldn’t amount to anything. It drove you mad. Enough to fake your death in battle, to abandon your life and son and seek out the one with the greatest power in the land. My mother. You saved her from a tragic fate only to turn on her the moment she gave you a son prophesied to have even greater power than she. So you stole me away in the night, crossing realms with the idea that you and I would conquer another realm together. Because mother would have always reminded you how powerless you truly were. Always lesser, just like with your brother.”
I didn’t expect the emotions that crashed into me as if I were a rock braced upon a shore of vicious waves. I’d always had Nightsdeath to rise me above before I could drown, turning pain to anger, and it’s how I knew to survive.
Now… I didn’t know what to do with these feelings that were so hideous I wanted to claw them from my chest. I didn’t want to feel betrayed or sad—so fucking sad. I wanted to reach for the rage that had once been so easy to let take over, inflicting all I felt inside on the world outside before it risked killing me instead.
“How do you know all this?” Father asked; the vacancy in his voice told me everything I’d experienced had been real. Everything I had impossibly discovered during my curse was the truth.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, my own voice reduced to a pitiful whisper.
In some ways I related to how Astraea felt as her lost memories were returning. I harbored memories that lingered like threads of a dream—vivid but uncertain—from that month I was cursed into a deep slumber and my conscious mind projected across realms to protect itself. Or because of another meddling entity.
But it didn’t matter because I had no desire to ever walk through that mirror. Everything in me, every fiber of my being, belonged right here with my Starlight.
“What I learned is that blood does not mean loyalty,” my father said darkly.
“You’re right,” Drystan said, equally as resentful. “It’s not our blood but our actions that make us stand by each other.”
In those words, I thought the fraying bond between Drystan and me mended a few threads.
Our father looked at us like we were the biggest disappointment he’d faced.
He said, “It’s just about time. The twelfth hour of a full moon. I didn’t need you here, but I guess it is fitting you should bear witness to this world-changing event in our history.”
“Now would have been a good time for you to unleash that frightening side of you,” Drystan said to me.
Nightsdeath wasn’t a magickal ability and would have served well here.
“Too bad we’re stuck with just this frightening side of me,” I said.
Drystan skimmed his eyes over me. “Fine. Do the other thing then.”
“Not possible. It seems magick is warded off in here.”
“You’re too late to stop this.” That call came in the voice of my father but his lips didn’t move.
A flicker behind him drew my attention to his reflection in the mirror. To my horror, itmoved,turning around slowly while he stayed exactly where he was, creating an eerie illusion that there were now two of him.
“As if one wasn’t insufferable enough to look at,” Drystan said, unsheathing his blade with an added curse.
“Nothing can stop me now. My prize for my work here is that I will become the King of the Gods.”
His arrogance had truly decended to new levels of utter stupidity.
“No crown you wear will ever transform the coward trembling beneath it,” I snarled.
