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He coughs out blood that paints his lips, but then his gaze locks with mine, showing more strength than I thought he had left. “Y-Your father… took P-Phantom because, together, you all have the… strength to defeat him.”
Of course, we did.Losing my older brother,technicallymy twin brother but older by just a few minutes, was a blow to not only our cause, but to our souls. When my father plunged that moon shard into his chest and changed him, made him his own little minion, the hell we were living in got worse.
I didn’t even know it could get worse.
“Prince Phantom is a good man,” he manages.
Yes, a good man. Unlike me.The idea that I had the chance to kill our father and stop all of this still burns within me. Then, I’d been too soft. People joked that I’d taken after my mother, and I had. I didn’t like war, or death, or fighting. And so, when I had the chance to kill him, I stupidly thought he could still be saved. I hesitated, and everything that came after was my own damn fault.
If only I’d been more like my brother, everything would have been different.
I picture Phantom. He resembles our father more than I do. His long black hair hangs past his massive shoulders in the same way our father wears his. But it’s more than that. The similarities extend to the green of his eyes, the span of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest.
And yet, he never had our father’s cruelty.
Now, seeing him under the Shadow King’s control, it all feels hopeless. This war. This life.Everything.But I would rather die than to let anyone see that weakness inside of me, those tears in my soul, and the worry that constantly flows in my veins. So, I try to hide that now too. I try to just listen and not reflect on all my fears and all the things I’ve lost, no matter how hard it is.
The elder coughs and more blood erupts from his lips. Droplets dot the shirt Ann is wearing and decorate his already destroyed clothes. She ignores it, but I concentrate on one of the little red spots because I need a minute to pull myself together. To focus on this moment and not the crushing weight of guilt and pain that I can’t seem to rid from my shoulders.
His voice comes out soft but strong. “Only the father can remove the shard from the shadow beast’s heart. That is the only way to get Phantom back. To win this war.”
There are words I could say to express the anger his words bring, but I don’t want anyone to know the depths of that anger. Because if it’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that we’ll never get my father to remove that shard. And if that’s the only way, Phantom is lost to us.
Ann speaks, sounding heartbroken, saying what we’re all thinking. “There’s no way the king is going to–”
“No.” There’s force, stronger than the elder’s last speech, but not much above a whisper. He’s waning. Time grows short now. “The ghost man”–he means Rayne– “can enter the king’s body, take control, and remove the shard.”
My stomach flips. Does that mean Rayne would be trapped inside the king’s bodywith the king?Because the only reason Rayne seems to be able to survive in Adrik after dying is because the warrior's soul had already left his body. In this case, the king would still be in his body, fighting for control, and Rayne would lose the safety of Adrik’s empty body.
This plan sounds dangerous at best. At worst, an exchange of one life for another.
As if knowing my thoughts, Ann whispers, “If he does this, is Rayne going to be… will he survive?” For all her strength, the thought of losing Rayne is enough to make her falter, to put a crack in her voice, to make her blanch.
On a shaky exhale, he says, “I don’t know butallwill die if Phantom isn’t freed.” The elder’s voice is less now than even a whisper, but it isn’t really necessary. His message is clear enough. He isn’t talking about only shadow beasts. He’s talking about all the earth’s inhabitants.
He closes his eyes and draws his last breath, leaving us with one more body to bury, and one more impossible task on our shoulders.
THREE
Ann
Dusk stands with a handful of dirt in his hand, looking like a lost little boy. My chest aches at the sight of him.How much more can he lose before it’s too much?He’s breathing hard, and I know it’s not just from the work. He’s just barely keeping it together right now, and I don’t blame him for it. His handsome face is streaked with dirt, and his long, dark hair is tangled around his face. He’s absolutely filthy, as are Rayne and Onyx.
But then, grave digging isn’t clean work.
All of us stare at Dusk as he scatters the handful of dirt on the top of the freshly covered grave. “May you rest in peace with the goddess.”
Onyx works silently to put the final touch on the grave before coming to stand with the rest of us. Next to me, he threads his fingers through mine, and our gazes catch and hold. Those dark eyes of his say a million things. That this is too much. That we can’t keep going this way much longer, but then he squeezes my hand and looks away as he releases me, almost like he doesn’t want me to see the secrets he tries so hard to hide.
And then a strange silence washes over us.
The elder’s grave is marked by a stone with his full name on it, the marking Onyx had put into place. It sits in the center of a plot of about thirty others graves–shadow beasts who have fallen for one reason or another.
It’s gut wrenching to see the graves stretching out all around us. So, few of the shadow beasts were able to escape through the Void to earth before the shadow king took control of them… only to come here and lose their lives instead. Seeing how many of them died in their fight to protect earth from the same fate as their world, makes my eyes fill with tears.
Every one of these men are heroes. Including the older man who went through so much just to give us a way to save our world and our people. Even if what he told us horrified me.
“He was a good man,” Rayne says quietly. Like me, he doesn’t know the customs of the shadow beasts, but he needs to say something, just like me.
