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We should’ve been. But we had one fatal fault.

We loved our family.

Those of us with children—me, Nix, Sanvi, Errol, Eike, Volke, Stella, Cere, Luna, and Rion—would stop at nothing to protect our children. The problem there was that our enemieswereour family. I’d been in the room when Stella delivered Michael and Gabriel. Nix had treated them like his own from the moment they were born. They were Sanvi’s second cousins as well.

Luna, Emja, and Lapsus had been their guards.

All of us had watched those boys grow from babies, to teenagers, to men, and then to rulers.

Those boyswerefamily, and to us, family came first.

If this uprising had been led by strangers, we would’ve set a few people aside to keep watch of our babies, and we would’ve gone on an execution mission. We had no problem spilling blood, especially not to protect the ones we loved.

But how could we spill the blood of our blood?

When we arrived in the Land of Light, finding a place to rest our heads wasn’t difficult. They knew us as royalty here. Though they were Fae, and some of us were Angels, Werewolves, and Witches, we were the creators of their world, and they honored us.

The owner of an inn gave us every room available. She even made room in her stable for Vinion and Ayla, Nix’s pterolycus.

She asked what was wrong. None of us answered. We just asked that she’d leave us be for a while. With no argument, she did so.

We foraged for dinner. It wasn’t difficult here. The Land of Light could never be Morduaine, but it was plenty like it. We’d brought plants, wildlife, and the ways of our people to this empty land. Walking through the forest for berries felt almost just like walking through the one outside my castle back home.

The only difference was the sun.

This one was yellow, and mine was blue.

Oh, how I missed that blue.

No one talked much throughout the day. Mum spoke with the children though. They were a comforting distraction for us all. Their smiles of blissful ignorance, and their cheery banter, and their adorably annoying whining when they didn’t get exactly what they wanted was a shining light.

As we started to the inn with the children, I watched Nix chase after Mirobhail, hoisting him over his head and running through the low-hanging branches. That bubbly, baby giggle floated back to me in a wave of comfort.

But then it ached. I saw that moment, and I was three hundred thousand years in the past. I saw Nix hoisting Michael onto his shoulders and holding him to the highest treetop for the pinecone he’d wanted so badly, hearing him laugh when Nix acted as though he’d drop him, only to catch him a few feet from the ground.

“We’ll do better by them,” Cere said beside me, voice quiet.

“Hmm?” I asked.

She spun her dark brown hair behind her and tied it into a knot at the nape of her neck. It’d been purple once, but it’d darkened with age, much like how I’d gotten a few gray hairs before I made us all eternal.

“Your children.” She gestured to them, and then to Aurora. “Luna and Rion’s. We’ll do better by them than we did with the boys.”

“You believe they are the way they are because of how we raised them?”

“I believe they are the way they are because they spent too much time on Matriaza with Lux in their formative years.” She pulled her lilac cloak in tighter when the evening wind blew. “The past week says it all, doesn’t it? We thought he’d grown. He has, I suppose. But when those boys were young, Lux had so much resentment for you and Nix. He wasn’t a fan of mine either. How much of that did he pass along to those boys? Can we really believe this is purely the product of jealousy?”

“I believe it plays a part,” I murmured.

“If not for Lux ranting about how he was the rightful king at some point or another, Michael wouldn’t have even known he was next in line for the crown. I have no doubt that when that seedling was planted, when he was only a boy, it altered his outlook from thereon. It probably has to do with the fact that you denied him eternity as well, but would you have if not for that sapling of hatred he’d shown back then?”

She made a valid point.

Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael had come to me at the same time asking for eternity. I followed a process for granting it to people. Rafael passed my requirements.

He wasn’t perfect, but he had a good heart. When he did something wrong, he regretted it, and he did his best to make amends. He’d been on the royal guard for Matriaza at that time, meaning he’d killed. There was always a justifiable reason for it, and he always wished he hadn’t needed to.

I denied Michael and Gabriel for the opposite reason. They, too, were on the royal guard. They’d killed. But they found pleasure in it. Not the relief of vengeance when they’d caught a man smacking his wife around, but joy in the power that came with wielding that sword.