Daemon spun at the voice, familiar and yet so long unheard that he questioned his own memory. But there he stood—his father, as tall as ever, just as young, just as imposing.
Had his smile always been so bright?
Daemon frowned. “Fodur.”
“Son.” Amusement danced over Fodur’s strong features. “It’s been a long time.”
Where had he even come from? Were there paths that came this far up the mountain, through the bank of clouds?
His father chuckled. “All these years, and you still expect me to behave like a human? You know by now that I’m not, Sigmann.”
Daemon winced at the name. And, figuring if his father had found him here, he wasn’t likely to vanish in the next second, Daemon lowered himself to a seat on the ledge, looking out over the sky. Was that Fodur’s natural domain? “I haven’t answered to that for a very long time.”
“Because you embraced a name never meant to be yours. Why were you so quick to accept what they told you? To think Elyon would abandon you so completely?” Fodur sat too, close enough that Daemon caught a whiff of the fresh air wafting off him—a stark contrast to the smell of the mountain.
Daemon dragged in a slow breath. “I don’t know. I didn’t know, I suppose. How this existence could be anything but the evil they said it was.” He turned his hand palm-up, where his Awakening mark scored it with white flames, and called an actual flame overtop it.
Fodur watched with a smile. “Fire brings life as surely as water, air, and soil. Without the volcanoes, Fjordlandi would be a barren wasteland, too cold to sustain life. You’re part of that.”
Daemon closed his fist. Looked over at the features he hadn’t seen in a hundred fifty years but could never forget. “I’ve failed the Giver. Failed the family he sent me to lead. You’d have been better off Awakening Thorin.”
“Elyon’s will cannot be circumvented by your failings, Sigmann. He knew which of you would cry to him first. He knew how long you’d forget him in Helviti. He knew how you would struggle—and he knew you would end up here, ready to listen.” His father, gaze set out over the clouds too, drew in a long breath. “It is so strange, this form. In my natural state, my will isperfectly aligned with Elyon’s, my mind fully capable of grasping his ways. But the moment I don human flesh, with it comes all the complications. The limitations of understanding and yet the love so tangled up in the unknown, the love that requires faith in what is unseen.”
Daemon stared at his father’s profile. Perhaps Perla chatted easily about such things, about the seraph she called grandmother, but two weeks hadn’t been sufficient for him to wrap his mind around it. “We thought you were a revolutionary.”
Fodur flashed him a grin. “Who says I’m not? Look at your homeland, son.” He stretched out an arm, and a stiff wind blew, parting the clouds enough that Daemon caught a glimpse of Reykstoll Harbor to his right, the plains rolling out beyond the city before him. “Fjordlandi is desperate for revolution. For a return to its proper order. I thought, in my human form, that you or Thorin would be the one to bring it, that when you felt the fire in your veins, you would use it to displace King Axel. I thought that, much like Queen Arden, you would take your place and your throne.”
His throne? Daemon’s chest went tight. “Then I have disappointed you. Disappointed the Giver.”
But Fodur laughed. “Impossible, Sig. There are many paths you could have taken. Elyon knew which you would choose, though he did not share this knowledge with me, not then. Now, though, now I have seen. You could have taken the throne a hundred fifty years ago—and if you had, then it would have been Nik ruling now, Kyrja rising up to Challenge him and the system you’d have put in place, that legacy he’d have inherited. Those two are the ones meant for this time.”
“Nik ruling.” Daemon gazed out over the land, wondering where Nik even was. He’d sensed him here and there since that first burst that said he was back on land and had called up itsheat. Enough to know he was traveling, but he hadn’t tried to pinpoint him. “Where would I have been?”
“Gone.” Fodur said it easily, but Daemon’s attention snapped back to him at the word.
“Gone?”
A nod as easy as the word. “You’d have lived your story. Lost your throne to the one you call Elianne in a Challenge. It was always going to be Nik here, now.”
As a young man, the thought of ever living to his current age would have been so baffling that he’d have thoughtOf course I’d be dead before now. Today, though? Today the thought of a world in which he’d already have died chafed like new, unbroken leathers. “Elianne would have beaten me?” He heard the disbelief, the arrogance in his tone.
Fodur laughed again. “For the sake of her son, you’ll find that woman can do many things beyond what anyone—herself included—thought her capable of.” He looked over, met Daemon’s eyes. “The path you chose has left your story yet unlived. But your days are not yet up, Sig. It’s time to stop hiding in Helviti. To trust your family to do the work you’ve trained them to do. To pursue what Elyon wants for you.”
Beneath them, the volcano rumbled with its constant churn of life, new rock melting, other hardening, magma pulsing through its veins like blood through a body. Throughhisbody. This mountain had been Daemon’s heart for so long… “What is that? What does Elyon want for me?”
An enigmatic smile curved his father’s lips. “You think I can just tell you that, when everyone else in the world must seek it for themselves? I’ve given you a might-have-been. The what-will-be is up to you.”
Frustration burbled like lava. “You’ve told me I could have had a throne but that now I can’t, because it’s no longer my time.”
An arch of thick gold brows. “Do you want a throne?”
“No! I just…” Daemon heaved out a sigh, fist clenched around his mark. “I don’t know what I want.”
“And that’s what you need to discover. Start here.” Fodur swept an arm out to encompass the land before them. “What do you want for Fjordlandi?”
That was the easy part. “Security—for all the Fjordic people.”
“Including the Fjorders?”
