Page 53 of A Flame of the Phoenix (An Heir Comes to Rise #6)

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Faythe

A therius landed on the hills in Farrowhold that held so many of her childhood memories with Jakon. Humans nearby ran from the flaming bird and screamed as if they were under threat. Faythe couldn’t pay them any mind.

She sprinted through the Eternal Woods, knowing from Izaiah’s thoughts this was where Jakon would be. The familiar sight of the waterfall clearing burst within her for a second before she was darting past trees again, letting the branches cut at her hands and cheeks.

Stumbling past the tree line into the temple clearing, Faythe’s world stopped for a beat of broken time.

Jakon was down on one knee before a simple gravestone. He didn’t look back to see her, continuing to twirl a bluedrop by the stem between his fingers as she approached. Faythe’s tears fell uncontrollably, but she couldn’t sob.

This image felt so morbidly wrong.

So untrue. A dark, hideous lie.

They were supposed to be together. All three of them. An unbreakable bond until the very end.

“These are her favorite. Did you know that?” Jak said.

Faythe could hardly recognize his voice. It belonged to a shell of her best friend, who’d been hollowed out by the deepest grief.

“No,” Faythe confessed.

That realization cut her deeper. One of many things Faythe had neglected to find out about Marlowe, and now she would never get the chance. The thought was inconceivable, and now so many small pieces she wanted to know about her friend skipped through her mind. So many things she’d wanted to do with Marlowe screamed with severed endings.

Faythe’s eyes fixed on the dull gray headstone, and the monotone started to steal all the color from her world.

“I brought the first bunch here. Then they started to bloom themselves,” Jak said.

The area around the headstone was covered in the delicate bluedrops.

Sorrow plummeted Faythe to her knees short of reaching Jakon.

He went on, “I couldn’t bury her for days…thinking if you just came back in time…maybe it wasn’t too late to bring her back.”

The broken pieces of Faythe’s heart turned to ash in her chest.

“I don’t have that power,” she choked.

Finally, Jakon turned his head to look at her, and his cold brown eyes were as painful as a knife to her flesh. They were rimmed red and hung with dark circles. In all their twelve years as friends, Faythe had never seen him come close to this absolute devastation.

“You came back,” he said, harsh with resentment. “You died, and you came back stronger . How is that fair?”

“It isn’t.”

Jakon’s jaw tightened. He wanted to lash out at her, and part of Faythe wanted him to. She would let him weigh the blame for Marlowe’s death on her shoulders if it could relieve his pain even a fraction.

Instead he was so calmly cold, and that was worse than anything.

“I don’t want to see you right now. Because I don’t want to blame you, but I can’t help it. Looking at you…it’s like I don’t know who you are anymore.”

“You don’t mean that.” Faythe broke her first sob. “I can’t lose you too.”

Jakon stood, turning fully and looking down on her with the intensity of his grief.

“I remember your mother saved me from the illness that took my parents. The memories started coming back after you died, and I think…I think I died for a moment with you that day.”

The revelation stunned Faythe, confused her, but she listened.

“Your mother brought me here, but the yucolites always demand a price. Mine was to protect you. It’s all I can think about now—how our friendship was always a duty. How I was always destined to you from that day, maybe even before then. Your mother took my memories of that day. I can only think it was so I wouldn’t try to rebel against the idea. It made our friendship seem like a choice, not fate.”

Faythe felt herself crumbling where she kneeled. The ground softened beneath her, and she wished it were her buried six feet under. Not Marlowe. Not the kindest, most gentle friend Faythe had ever been granted the privilege of having in her life.

Jakon’s unfeeling stare became too much. In her cowardice, Faythe bowed her head.

“It was a choice. I love you, Jak. You’re my best friend—nothing changes that.”

“The worst part is…I love you too. For some reason, it feels like a betrayal to Marlowe’s sacrifice, but I can’t sever the love I have for you, and she wouldn’t want me to. I can only bury what I don’t want to feel for you under my grief.”

“Please don’t leave me.”

“I can’t. Even if I wanted to. Duty…fate…choice…I don’t know what it is. I don’t really care. But I need you to promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“I’m coming with you when you go to kill Malin.”

Faythe forced her eyes up. Jakon’s expression hadn’t shifted a fraction. Then he reached down a hand, and Faythe didn’t know how many pieces she could break into before she would fall apart beyond being able to mend herself back together and keep marching on.

“Tonight,” Jakon added.

The determination in that word crafted her grief into rage. Faythe wouldn’t be able to do anything else knowing Malin still lived after taking Marlowe’s life.

Accepting Jakon’s hand, she rose carefully, as if every movement were fragile around him and she’d become utterly terrified to lose him too.

“Tonight,” she agreed.

Faythe wanted to embrace him, but as they stood there, his tension alone pushed her away.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t with you,” she whispered.

Jakon’s jaw tightened, and Faythe braced for the resentment that flashed in his eyes.

“No. You weren’t there as she stared bravely into the face of her death and did not waver. You weren’t there as your cousin snapped her neck in the heat of his rage, as if she meant nothing. My wife, your friend , was murdered, and you weren’t there.”

Faythe whimpered sharply. “We’re going to make him pay.”

“Death and more death. Yes, I want him to pay, but in the end, it doesn’t change nor heal anything. She’s gone… Marlowe is gone, and she’s never coming back.”

What broke her more was how emotionless Jakon stayed as he spoke. How alone and in agony he’d been in the thick of his grief to have not shed a single tear now.

He broke her stare. “You need stop by the Greens’ mill. Then I’ll meet you back on these hills to go to Rhyenelle.”

With that, he slipped by her, heading through the trees and leaving Faythe in the heart-wrenching silence this place now held.

Faythe turned back to Marlowe’s grave.

Marlowe’s grave.

The sight, the reality she stared at… Now she was alone, Faythe let herself drown. Unrelenting agony surged up—a tide that dragged her under. Despair gathered in her knees, buckling them again, sinking her into the scattered bluedrops as tears blurred her vision, spilling unchecked.

A hollow ache clawed at her chest as if her heart were tearing itself open piece by piece. She gripped the edge of the gravestone, fingers pressing into the cold stone as if it might anchor her, keep her from slipping away entirely. But the sorrow was relentless, pouring through her, filling every empty space, until she was nothing but pain—a vessel for all the words left unsaid; all the moments they would never share.

Faythe couldn’t stop wondering if Marlowe knew she was going to die. If she’d been burdened with that possibility through her ability as an Oracle.

“Oh, Marlowe,” Faythe choked. “We need you.”

Faythe had seen the spirit of Freya, Reylan’s lost love, at her grave before. Yet now, Faythe wanted to see Marlowe so desperately, but her friend didn’t come. A scream tore from Faythe’s throat in place of her friend’s greeting, which she tried so hopelessly to summon.

Was it because of what Faythe had done in breaking the Death Ruin? She’d seen Aurialis briefly…had watched the Spirit of Life dissolve and leave her.

What had she done?

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you.” Faythe could hardly squeeze out words from her tightening throat. They were all meaningless anyway.

Faythe would carry this failure as the greatest of her existence for the rest of her days.

When her tears ran dry, Faythe’s sight cast toward the temple as she rose slowly. A clam started to take over her. One of icy detachment, which she would need to move a step beyond the gravesite of her dearest friend.

She couldn’t get inside without her sword, Lumarias, needing the Riscillius stone in the pommel to see the hidden symbols on the doors. Her fists clenched at the absent weight at her side. She wondered if she’d even be able to retrieve her sword, which had been taken from her in Lakelaria, with Marvellas still dominating the island.

She would retrieve it. Lumarias was more than her sword—more than the key to enter the Spirit temples. Now, above all, it was a token of Marlowe, who’d crafted the blade with her brilliant blacksmiths’ hands. Faythe had to carry her friend to the end of this war.

Marching up the steps to the temple doors, Faythe didn’t know why she wanted to get inside. Why she jammed her fingers into the crack where the doors met, straining to pull them apart until her brow beaded with perspiration and her muscles tightened in protest, her scream tearing free as her magick surged to the surface. Gold essence blasted from her palms and splayed over the stone, rebounding off the structure in powerful waves.

Her efforts weren’t futile. She felt the web of thin cracks splitting at the velocity of her magick. Faythe attacked, with the magick of Aurialis still left within her.

With one final push, the stone gave way. The resistance against her faltered, but she caught her balance before she tumbled in like the wall.

Panting, Faythe’s boots crunched over the debris, entering the temple now in ruins at the front, with only the back wall and partial sides still intact. She wandered in until she stood over the symbol of Aurialis on the floor, staring down at it with such anguish and resentment she could hardly contain it.

Faythe thought of what the primordial of Death had said. How he’d made her question whether Aurialis was ever on their side at all, or if she was just another self serving entity who wanted to win against her sister Spirits and was using Faythe as her pawn.

Using all of them.

“Haven’t I given enough?” Faythe’s question wouldn’t receive an answer, but her mind was spiraling with her own conclusions. Those words repeated in a scream of anguish as she kneeled, slamming her palm, charged with the Spirit of Life’s power, to the symbol that matched her palm. Both glowed brightly, connecting like a fuse that exploded the world around her.

Faythe was no stranger to these experiences that took her mind from her body and transcended her soul. They reminded her how fragile her world and existence were. How inconsequential everything was in the vast expanse of the infinite web of universes.

Though not to her. This world was hers, and she was not giving up on it while she had her friends to protect.

“Fall one, fall all,” Faythe choked, returning to her own time and body with every inhale that defused the currents of power she’d connected to within Aurialis’s symbol. “Did I fail?”

More answerless questions. No one was coming to liberate her torment.

All she could do was remember her destiny. Something Marlowe believed in so powerfully she’d let it guide them all. The vicious hands of war spared no pure heart, and when it came to eradicating her enemies, all who stood in her way, Faythe gave hers over to the unfeeling dark.