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Chapter Fourteen: Rhea

My eyes open at the deep voice that echoes out into the Middle.

“You cannot tell her any more than that. It will upset the balance of things. You know this.” His voice is dominant and commanding yet beautiful at the same time.

“She will suffer! She is suffering,” she pleads.

“This is her path,” he replies matter-of-factly.

The woman growls, and even though I can’t see her, I feel her presence come closer to me while the male fades into the background.

“Hello, Rhea,” she says with gentleness, despite her argument with the man.

“Who were you speaking with? I’ve heard his voice before, the day I nearly drowned.” The glimmering silver and white flecks twirl around my fingers delicately, their movements like that of a small snake. The woman doesn’t answer, and I have to halt the sarcasm of my own response. “Let me guess, you can’t answer that.”

“I’m afraid not.”

There is a tickling at my ankles, and when I look down, I’m surprised to see my body draped in a silky black and white dress. The fabric sinks into my curves, and I drag a hand down it, nearly sighing at its softness.

“This is new,” I say, gesturing to my body.

She hums in response. “Would you like to see him now?”

My eyes close at her question, and I abandon my interest in the stardust and dress. “No.”

Honey-thick quiet—one filled with only despair—settles in, seeping into invisible corners as it threatens to drown me.

“Were you ever real?” I rasp, lying on my back as I stare up at the infinite sky and changing the subject not so subtly. Flynn’s joke about how terrible I am at that scratches at my heart, the sensation painful, so I banish him from my mind.

“I assume you mean: have I ever lived on Olymazi?”

“Yes. Where did you live? Which kingdom?”

She seems to silently weigh the question before answering, “I can’t tell you.”

I huff out a breath. Of course. I am so tired of hearing how I can’t be told things—how others make decisions for me instead of trusting me to handle whatever truths need to be spoken.

“There are other things I can help you with—other things I can tell you about. You just have to ask the right questions.”

I scoff, shaking my head. “The right questions? How very convenient for you.”

Despite my frustration, there are things I wish to know, but I’m afraid to seek out the answers. Afraid to peek behind the curtain and find out if what is there will be something that helps or hurts. It has been so much of the latter that I’m starting to wonder if I was made simply to suffer.

“Your purpose, Rhea, is so much grander than—” Her words are cut off by the sound of choking. I sit up with a start, looking around me despite knowing that I won’t see her. Only the stars and faraway worlds stare back at me. “The magic didn’t like what I was about to say,” she gasps, clearing her throat multiple times.

“How long are you cursed to stay here?”

“It is not a curse. I chose to forgo my final resting place so that I could be here. And I’ll be here for as long as I am needed.”

That definitely sounded like a curse.

The woman exhales roughly. “If you are going to continue staying in this place, you will have to make a choice. Being here has a cost, both to you and your magic.”

My brows knit together. “A cost?”

“You have very little understanding of all that you are capable of.” Her pause is unsettling, curious in a way that feels like a secret kept. “Your magic is what is holding you here. And though it is nothing but a trickle in the well of power that you might eventually call your own, you haven’t trained at all with it in order to handle visiting here and staying present in your physical body.”

“You said I had expelled some of my other magic before. What did you mean?”

“The magic you possess is two halves of a whole. You have consciously used one and unconsciously used the other. That is what happened in the moments before you came here.”

My palms glide down my dress anxiously. “So, that ancient darkness I sometimes feel, that is a part of me? A part of this magic I hold?”

“It is.”

I freeze as dread trickles into my veins. That magic doesn’t have the same comfort as my healing magic does. That one feels more chaotic, more unpredictable.

“Where did my magic come from? How did I end up with it in the Mortal Kingdom?”

“Unfortunately, those are questions I cannot answer for you.”

I let out a noise of frustration. I expected secrets from the king but never from Alexi. Never from Flynn—Nox—and certainly not from an omnipotent, otherworldly woman who knew all but was unwilling to share. How ironic to sit here in another plane of existence with millions of worlds and stars surrounding me, and yet I can be told nothing of value.

“You are at a crossroads, Rhea. You must decide if you will continue to be trapped within yourself or if you are willing to break the chains that bind you to find reprieve on the other side. This existence—these experiences—are not unique to only you.”

Her last words sting as they settle over me. “You think I’m being selfish.”

“No. What has always set you apart from the very beginning is your heart. The kindness you push to the forefront so easily. The way you care for others. Those are not weaknesses; they are strengths. Give some of that to yourself. You deserve—”

“Nothing. I deserve nothing . Hasn’t that been proven? Over and over again!” I bitterly seethe. “Every time I have thought that way, it has always resulted in something bad. If I was so strong, I would have been able to defend myself against a maniacal king. If I was so strong, I would have been able to heal Alexi in time.” Tears drip off of my cheeks and down into the darkness below me as I bunch my hands into fists, frustration darkening my vision. “If I was so strong , I would have been able to save Bella! I—I would have guarded my heart. I would have let the ice that encompassed it become impenetrable so that I could never know what it is to love someone so profoundly that a betrayal from them feels like I’m being cleaved in two!”

My screams somehow echo out, despite being surrounded by only space, and I feel my magic come to a sharpened point. Looking down at my hands, I watch as glittering black gathers on top of my palms to form what looks like daggers. It calls to me—a dark song, ancient and powerful, beckoning me to flood this magic out into the world and silence it all. Like being lost in the onyx chasms of my mind, I feel nothing and no one as I begin to let that darkness seep from me.

I’m walking a path of solitude, and with each step I take, I feel what it is to be fueled by nothing but anger. And pain. And a sadness so intense it blankets my tongue with its acerbic taste.

You aren’t alone anymore.

His voice comes to me unbidden, and my steps falter.

Let me help you.

My body trembles as I feel him here with me. His warmth and his scent and the way his hands gently cup my face.

There is only you.

A sob rips from my throat as I fall to my knees, the obsidian daggers dissolving into shadows waiting for my command as they writhe around my hands.

I don’t want to know of an existence without you.

I scream out into the unyielding darkness. Into the corners within new worlds and the spaces between stars.

If you’re in pieces, then I want every fucking one of them.

In the distance ahead of me, a small flame ignites, the heat slight but mighty. I reach my shaky fingers towards it, needing to feel that kernel of life within me. Despite the pain, despite it all, I still yearn for that light.

I want you, in any way you can give me. No scenario changes that.

The shadows begin to retreat back within me, slowly. Reluctantly. No. They aren’t retreating. I am calling them back.

I love you. Wholly. Inexorably. In a way that exhilarates as much as it frightens me. With everything that I am or could ever possibly hope to be, I love you.

Relentlessly, I’m pelted with the memories of his words and the moments he spoke them. I see his eyes shining with the truth of each one, and I become undone. I let my grip on my magic release, and like a flame consuming oxygen, everything around me explodes. The shadows disappear, but I know where they’ve gone. Hiding in the darkness within me—always present, always watching. Every time I shoved an emotion into a mental box and locked it away, that darkness grew. Over and over, I had tucked all my hurts—big and small—into the back of my mind because dealing with them, acknowledging the pain they brought and the despair they smothered me with, was more than I could handle.

And then he came into my life. And he begged me to let him in. To help shoulder the invisible pain that he somehow managed to see. There is no rational reason for him to have done that—to have treated me with such kindness and respect and love —unless those emotions were true for him.

Unless I was more than a mission.

I love you.

“She isn’t supposed to be here like this,” that dominant voice booms, his power shaking my body.

“She needs the space to process.”

I love you. I hear his voice again, but it isn’t in my head this time. It’s all around me.

“She is tempting fate. Her magic is—”

“Please. Just a little longer,” the woman implores, her voice shaking.

My ears begin to ring, and my hair rises around me. The last of those shadows pull back into me and settle deep down in my stomach. The sensation is jarring, causing my vision to spin as I collapse onto nothing.

I love you so fucking much.

I scream again, covering my ears with my hands, as the boxes I’ve kept so closely guarded and frozen in time within me rattle and shake. My tears are a turbulent ocean in which I have become adrift. And one by one, those locks burst—lids flying off.

Here—in a space between life and death, past and future, nothing and everything—I become unmade.