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“Her first born, yes,” she continued, beginning to wring her hands together as though it would give her the strength to continue. “I told you Luna chose me after my mother died, but I wasn’t entirely honest. The reason Luna chose me was because Star left. Star was my true soulmate.”
“She left you?” I shook my head. No. There was no way a Dragon would willingly leave their soulmate; I knew that now. The way their souls connected with ours, the way they loved so fiercely…
Star’s pain had been gut wrenching, as though there was a part of her missing. There was no way.
“I was just a child when I began training for missions, but Star was an adult Dragon already, and we connected. She chose me,” Evie answered instead, her gaze lost somewhere in the past.
The hint of a smile almost took over her lips, almost.
“I learned to ride with her, to fly with her, and accompanied my parents to several successful missions with her. I led the hunt for food for our people, and even scouted for escapees from the Hollow. It wasn’t common, so I didn’t always find people to bring back, but sometimes a few would make it out. I would rescue them and bring them to whatever our hideout was at the time.”
I understood that, because it was the excuse she and Kingston used when I first arrived here, and my friends Edward and Charlotte had been rescued that way too. However, it amazed me that Evie was leading those kinds of missions back then, surely surrounded by her guard on every trip, but still. From what she and Kingston shared about that time, she couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.
Except, she was a twelve-year-old in a world where you had to be a warrior to survive, not a child.
The wringing of her hands became harsher, until she squeezed them together, turning her knuckles white. Tentatively, I took a few steps closer, feeling her distress and wanting to be there for her. Whatever was coming next was not something she wanted to recount.
“When the next battle arrived, I asked my parents to let me join them. I could fight too, my aunt and Kingston were training me, and I had my own spear and everything. But of course, they said no. I was just a child…”
Evie shook her head, understanding the risks that had made no sense to her back then.
“I got ready anyway. I put my armor on, grabbed my weapon, and went to Star, begging her to take me to them. To join the fight. Begging her to help me protect them because something inside urged me to. I think in my very core I knew. I sensed that I would never see them again. But if I was there too, fighting alongside them, nothing bad would happen. If I was there, I could protect them… Star refused to take me.”
Tears glistened in her eyes, but the muscles of her jaw hardened, and she looked away from me.
“When my aunt returned, wounded and bleeding, when she told me my parents would never come back, I…” She shook her head again, swallowing the emotion that strangled her voice. “I blamed Star.”
Shit.
My blood became cold with her confession. With her guilt. With the pain she had carried in her heart since she was that twelve-year-old who believed she could have saved her parents, if she’d only been there. My heart tore with the realization of the true weight Evie carried on her shoulders all this time.
Not only the weight of a kingdom and the future of its people, but that of believing that her parents’ death was her fault.
“Evie, you were just a child,” I repeated her own words, hoping she could understand the meaning in them, and closed the space between us. My hands gently rested on her arms. “Your whole world had just been ripped wide open; the floor pulled from under you. You were trying to deal with it… needing to make sense of it. Needing someone to blame.”
“I broke her heart,” she admitted in both pain and anger, her harsh gaze boring into mine. “Star was my soulmate, and I told her it was all her fault. That if she’d only listened to me, taken me to the fight, we would have been able to save them. I yelled at her with gut wrenching sobs and my aunt’s blood still staining my skin from when she’d held me. I shouted at Star with all the hurt and all the rage inside me and told her my parents died because of her. I told her to leave, and that I never wanted to see her again.”
She bitterly wiped the tear that dared to fall from her eyes, and pulled out of my hold, forcing herself to regain her composure.
“And she did. She left, and I never saw her again… Star never came back.”
The pain Star and Evie felt burned through me, and what hurt me the most was that they had both been victims of Raithian’s cruelty. Nothing more. How could an innocent child deal with so much horror without accidentally hurting herself or those around her? How could her Dragon, who deeply loved her, help her other than giving her soulmate what she wanted? Or perhaps, what Evie needed, space and time to heal.
Except, it was clear neither of them had recovered from what happened. Evie wouldn’t even let herself cry.
“You can let go, you know? It’s okay not to be okay. You can allow yourself to feel that hurt, it is the only way to move past it, to truly heal—”
“Braxton…”
Evie sighed, glancing at me like I’d never truly understand. As though it wassweetthat I thought she had that privilege, or naïve for believing she could have that luxury. Perhaps she was right.
“I can’t allow myself to ‘feel the pain’, not because I don’t want to heal from it,” she confessed, “but because I have fought too many evils, witnessed too many horrors, lost too many loved ones…” Her expression sobered, logic successfully extinguishing the emotion wanting to escape her. “If I allow all of that to take over, Iwillcrumble, and I fear I will never be able to stand whole again.”
She attempted to walk towards the door, but I held her hand, stopping her. “Evie…”
Turning towards me, she offered a small smile. “I love you, and I appreciate you wanting to care for me, but my feelings are not what matter right now. I cannot afford to focus on myself. There is too much at stake, too many people depending on me.”
I wanted to argue, damn it. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she could let go and I would be there for her, but even as the emotion left her eyes, I still saw the tempest that she fought every day. I couldn’t pretend to know what she felt, not even when I had seen my own share of horrors.
