I took a step toward him, my mind a churning sea of confusion. "Kaelen? What...?"
He laughed, a sound that was just laughter, not the prelude to a firestorm. "What do you mean, 'what?' Flynn burned the bread again, and Thane is refusing to let him near the ovens for a week. Elias is composing a tragic ballad about it. The usual morning."
I looked past him. There was a house. A simple, beautiful villa of white stone and dark wood, wreathed in flowering vines. On the porch, Thane sat in a large wooden chair, carefully carving a small wooden bird, a small, contented smile on hisface. Flynn was arguing with him, waving a blackened loaf of bread as evidence, his movements animated and free, not the frantic twitching of a creature trying to outrun the void. And Elias… Elias sat under a willow tree, his back against the trunk, a lyre in his lap, a soft, sad but beautiful melody drifting on the warm air. They were whole. They were at peace.
"This isn't real," I whispered, the words catching in my throat.
"Isn't it?" Kaelen’s voice was a soft murmur in my ear. He was beside me now, his arm sliding around my waist. The warmth of his skin soaked through my simple dress. It felt more real than anything I had experienced in years. "Or is the other thing the dream? The war? The pain? The cage?"
He gestured, and the air shimmered.
A vision bloomed before me. A sun-drenched courtyard in Olympus. Pandora, my ancestor, radiant and impossibly happy, dressed in a gown of woven starlight. She was looking up at a younger Kaelen, a Kaelen whose eyes held no trace of millennia-long rage, only a fierce, protective love. He took her hand, and the assembled gods, goddesses, and mortals cheered. Their wedding day. The future that was stolen, not just from them, but from the world.
The vision shifted. I saw the four Princes, not as beasts or weapons, but as men. Thane, standing in a mortal king’s court, his presence a calming anchor, teaching a child how to mend a stone wall with his bare hands. Flynn, laughing, surrounded by merchants in a bustling bazaar, his quick wit and sharp eyes making deals, building trade, not destroying villages. Elias, in a great library, surrounded by scholars, mortal and divine, passionately debating philosophy, his insights sparking new ages of thought. Kaelen, standing on the deck of a mortal ship, a hand on the captain's shoulder, advising on currents and stars,a guide, not a conqueror. The lives they were meant to live. The good they were meant to do.
"This is what was taken from us," Kaelen’s voice whispered, full of a longing that was an ache in my own chest. "This is what we can have again."
My heart, this illusionary, fragile human heart, felt like it was breaking. The unending fight, the pain, the terrible weight of my duty... it all felt so distant here. The exhaustion I had been carrying for so long settled into my bones. It would be so easy to just... stop. To let this perfect, gentle warmth wash it all away.
"Aria? Darling, are you daydreaming again?"
That voice.
My head snapped up. I turned, pulling away from Kaelen.
A woman walked toward us from the house. She had my black hair, though hers was streaked with silver at the temples. She had my chin. She had my mother’s eyes. She carried a basket filled with fresh laundry that smelled of sunshine and lavender. She wasn’t a legend. She was just… a mother.
"Mama?" The word was a broken, childish thing.
She set the basket down and opened her arms. "Of course, my love. Who else would I be?"
I ran to her. I fell into her embrace, and for the first time in my life, I felt the reality of a mother’s hug. It was solid. It was warm. It smelled of her, a scent I hadn't known I remembered until this very second. I buried my face in her shoulder and sobbed, great, ugly, racking sobs of a grief I had carried my entire life without ever being allowed to name it.
"There, there, my little scholar," she murmured, stroking my hair. "Just a bad dream. It's over now. No more dusty books about prophecies. No more scary stories about gods and monsters. Just us. Just home."
I clung to her, the exhaustion a leaden weight, pulling me down, down into the soft, welcoming darkness of this perfectpeace. My heart, my new, fragile human heart, slowed its frantic pace. The war could rage on somewhere else. The Devourer could eat a world I no longer had to save. I just wanted this. I wanted to stay here, in her arms, forever.
And then I heard it.
It was faint, a discordant note in the symphony of perfection, a hair-thin crack in the flawless blue of the sky.
A scream.
A high, thin, agonizing shriek that slid between the notes of Elias’s gentle melody. It was the sound of something being torn apart, not physically, but existentially. It was the sound of pure, undiluted erasure. It was the sound of the Devourer feeding.
I stiffened in my mother’s arms.
"What was that?" I whispered.
"What was what, dear?" she asked, her voice impossibly soothing. "Just the wind in the mountains. Dinner is almost ready. I baked your favourite bread."
That smell. The rich, yeasty warmth. It suddenly seemed cloying, thick.
The vision around me flickered. For a single, terrifying instant, the lush green grass at my feet became a field of grey ash. The sunlit mountains became the broken, dissolving ruins of Elysium. My mother’s warm, loving face became a cracked porcelain mask, her eyes empty voids.
Then it snapped back. Perfect. Peaceful.
But I had seen it. The lie. The ugly truth holding up the beautiful dream.
