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Remember to live and that you will die.

Memento vivere. Memento mori.”

This is the first poem I recite in many years that does not carve itself onto my skin. And the lack of pain feels euphoric, healing as a cooling rain. In the distance, as if through water and wind and over a great stretch of land, I hear the tolling of the bells.

Dawn has come.

Dawn

LONAN

It has always been about the girl.

I have spent my life seeking power, being taught to covet it—my brother’s throne, the Darkness my father wields, the secrets Vesper holds.

I don’t fucking want it. I want her. I would burn the Light, destroy the Dark, end every nation on this damned continent to keep her. It’s irrational. It’s dangerous. I don’t care.

I am no savior, no white knight. I would let all of it, every throne and crown, Imaelhain and Gault, Light and Dark, good and evil, sink into the sea to keep her.

I watch her fall, and my heart falls with her.

I’ve spent years protecting her, but when it came to this moment, in her hour of need, I could do nothing. She’s so courageous, and I am so tired of her courage. I’m tired of the way she sacrifices. Over and over. For everyone. Like she doesn’t expect to be actually chosen. She bleeds herself dry for those who would not bleed for her.

There has been a levee against my worst impulses for far too long. My teacher taught me how to keep the Darkness at bay, how to hold it in control. Just disastrous enough for his ends. Just enough of a nightmare to become a legend.

I have released it on his command. But I am done obeying anyone other than her. Part of me wants to resist, wants to scream like a child as she tears down the last of my barriers.

I have never allowed the Darkness to completely overcome me.

But it has always been about this girl.

Once he wielded me, and I submitted. Now she is the commander I choose.

So I unshackle the Dark in my heart—all the rage, all the pain, all the yearning for someone to claim me as theirs. All of it pours from me like slick, black oil. These are not the small, snakelike shadows he’s seen before. This is the Dark that consumes, that razes armies, that utterly destroys.

I am sworn to protect her, or may my life be forfeit. He never expected me to choose the latter.

He thinks I belong to him. But I have always belonged to her.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Death is a sharp, endless sting. I feel the life drain out of me. I feel the curse uttered from my own lips take its toll. My Light contracts, my life with it, fluttering with the failing pulses of my newly repaired heart.

“Bring her back.” The voice is low and menacing. My heart awakens at the sound, like a dragon lifting its head from a long nap. That voice gives me breath, gives me life, for just a moment.

“She has sealed her fate,” says another voice in response. I know that voice too, but my brain is foggy. I am connected to these people, this world, by threads.

There’s a flash of crimson. It ruptures the Dark.

And then a new Darkness, more wicked than the last, more alive and ardent, curls around the other. It swallows it like a fiendling swallows its prey.

“You cannot turn your blade on me, boy. I made you what you are. I gave you the Dark. I can take it.”

“Then try,” says the first voice.

Lonan. I remember his name; like an ember in dying fire, it flares to life. Lonan. Lonan. Lonan.

It becomes the chant of my heart, the thing tethering me to life. I feel death dragging at my heels, drowning, devouring. But that word keeps my heart alive. Lonan.