Page 30 of Dreams and Dragon Wings (Clean Fairytales for Adults #2)

Benevolence

T he sweet smell of decay chokes my senses, drowning out all else. It is so potent that I cannot even smell Aurelia’s intoxicating scent.

Aurelia .

I spring to my feet before my eyes even finish flashing open, my inner dragon roaring. Aurelia. Where is Na’therya ?

I cannot see her. I cannot smell her. I cannot sense her.

The bond between us is… gone .

Pink roses surround me. Everywhere I look, there are pink roses. Wilting roses. Rotting roses. They droop on their vines and drip their blackened petals underfoot.

Where the roses end, the thorns begin. Thorns as thick as my thighs and twice as long. Walls of thorns that rise far overhead, nearly blotting out the sky.

“Dear Weaver,” I whisper under my breath as I stare up at a strange, new heaven filled with dark green clouds and the crackle of lightning. “Where am I?”

“Oh, look, he’s awake,” Brisa’s voice sounds from just behind me. “Finished with your beauty sleep, then, Theryn’kai ?”

Some small sense of relief cuts through my confusion as I whirl around and find myself face to face with both Brisa and Glorana. At least I am not alone in this bizarre place.

“Where are we?” I ask.

Brisa throws up her hands and loudly proclaims, “Nowhere!”

But Glorana is quick to point out, “One is always somewhere , sister. We just do not yet know where that somewhere is.” Adjusting her spectacles, she adds, “But if I were to make an educated guess, I would say we are trapped in some sort of dreamscape.”

“Dreamscape?” I echo.

And suddenly, it all comes rushing back.

The storm. The river. Aurelia. Malice. His sleeping curse.

I bare my teeth in a bestial snarl as I slowly turn about again and survey my prison. Finally, I recognize it.

It is Aurelia’s childhood garden rendered in nightmarish proportions.

Glorana is speaking again. I try to listen even while I hunt for a way out, but it is hard to focus on her words while she waxes poetic on her various hypotheses.

The old apple tree is now a grotesque snarl of blackened limbs, standing nearly as tall as the walls of thorns. But any hope of climbing it dissipates in the next moment as I realize that when I reach for the branches just above my head, they seem to keep growing further and further away.

I growl to myself and reach out with my mind, hunting for threads of Earth that I might weave into something useful, like a ladder. I freeze when nothing at all rises to greet me.

There is no magic here.

“… and then I realized we must be trapped in the mind of some utterly deranged individual. Like Malice,” Glorana finally finishes.

“I’d wager we’re trapped in my mind, actually,” I absentmindedly correct as I return to pacing the perimeter, looking for any weak points in the brambles. “This is one of my memories. Or some version of it, at least.”

Brisa stares at me. “Where in the world did you come by a memory like this ?”

“It is the garden where I first met Aurelia seventeen years ago,” I briskly explain. “But it never looked like this in real life.”

Glorana blinks once. “Well, one would hope not.”

I sigh and drag my fingers through my hair while I continue to hunt, seemingly in vain, for a break in the thorns. Everywhere I look, there are more—an endless sea of thorns waiting to impale us on their wicked points.

Cold tendrils of despair grip my heart.

Where is Aurelia? Where is Velda? Are they trapped here as well?

Or are they somewhere else… with him ?

As if in answer to my questions, a sudden voice cries out in the distance. A voice that stops my heart and sends it racing all in the same breath.

“Bene! Bene, where are you?”

Aurelia .

I rush toward the direction of her voice but am forced to stop when I nearly run headlong into the thorny walls of my prison.

“Aurelia!” I shout back. “Aurelia, I’m here!”

Brisa is beside me in the next moment. “What’s wrong, Bene?”

“Do you not hear her?” I snarl, frantically hunting for an opening in the perimeter once more. “She’s here.” Despite my best efforts, Malice’s curse must have struck her, too.

My inner dragon rages. I must find her. I must protect her.

Suddenly, the thorns before me writhe. They shift. A sliver of green-tinged light spills through the opening.

I dive through without a second thought.

“Bene!” Brisa’s voice echoes behind me as I race down a narrow corridor cutting through the brambles. “Wait!”

The ground beneath my feet rumbles, and I chance a look backward just in time to see the way behind me collapsing. Like waves, the thorny vines roil toward me, driving me onward.

I stretch my legs and run faster. I push harder. Just up ahead, I spy a glimpse of golden hair flitting around the next corner.

“Aurelia!”

I veer to the right, but not quickly enough. The thorns behind me slash across my left arm in passing, rending fabric and flesh. I bite back a scream as pain explodes down my bicep like liquid fire.

Even here, there is pain.

But more importantly, there is Aurelia.

“Aurelia,” I gasp, stumbling deeper into the clearing I have found amongst the brambles. She stands just before me, her face buried in her hands.

The quiet sobs escaping her are a fresh knife to my heart. But her scent does not tempt me. I cannot smell her over the stench of rot hanging in the air. My Shade does not awaken and whisper dark desires to my soul.

A small blessing in this accursed place.

“Aurelia, please,” I whisper, begging. Pleading. “Please, don’t cry, na’velar . I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. This is all my fault. I should have told you—”

“You should have,” she shouts, raising her head to glare at me. Tears streak her cheeks. Fire flashes in her eyes. “But you didn’t. You didn’t tell me anything. You let me live a lie!” Her lips tremble. “It was all a lie. Even when you called me your queen.”

I shake my head. “No.”

“I am nothing to you,” she whispers, retreating from me. “I am not your Therya’kai .”

“No, please… please listen to me.”

But with every step I take, she retreats further. She refuses to listen. She refuses to let me draw near.

“Please,” I beg again, my fingers stretching toward her. If I can only reach her. If I can only explain . “I thought I was protecting you, but I was wrong . I was so very wrong. I should have told you everything from the very start.”

“You should have,” Aurelia softly agrees, still backing away from me. “But it’s all right now, Bene. Malice has told me everything.”

My heart stops cold. I freeze in place. “Malice?”

“Yes,” she breathes, drawing to a pause as well.

When next I blink, her appearance shifts.

Gone is her tattered pink silk gown. Gone are the tears staining her face.

She now stands before me, tall and proud, draped all in glittering black with a crown forged in mockery of the Corona Ignis burning on her brow.

Green flames instead of white dance in time with her words.

“He has told me everything,” she reiterates, her voice husky and low. “About all that I am. About all that I can be.” Drawing in a deep breath, she exhales, “About his plans for the world. Our world. Tomorrow, we march on the Aerie.”

I shake my head. “No. You cannot trust anything he says. Malice is a liar. He appeals to your Shade.”

Pride . That is the burden all Jewels must bear.

Desperate, I warn her, “He will lead you astray, Aurelia.”

“And after that, we march on the human realm,” she says, ignoring me. “The world will bend to the will of my Theryn’kai .”

A bitter laugh explodes from my throat. Nonsense. She is speaking utter nonsense. Malice must have her bewitched. “Malice will need the Corona Ignis before he can claim that title.”

Aurelia purses her lips, looking like a petulant child rather than the elegant woman I know her to be. “I suppose you’re right. We will simply have to wait for you to die, then.” An almost shy smile curves her lips. “But in the meantime, he can still call himself my Theryn’fey. ”

Her words sting in a way I refuse to acknowledge. She is not herself.

But when she utters, “And with my gift, we will rule… forever ,” I can keep my feelings masked no longer.

Anger ignites within me as I shout, “Malice!”

The image of Aurelia dissolves at once, leaving only my uncle standing before me, his laughter booming in my ears.

“That took you long enough,” he taunts, swiping his fingers beneath his eyes as if to brush aside tears of mirth. “But I suppose critical thinking has never been your forte, my dear nephew.”

My jaw tightens. My hands clench.

His lips curl into a sneer, as if I disgust him. “That is the trouble with people like you, you know. People who try to see the good in everything and everyone. It makes you gullible. Weak —”

I smash my right fist into his jaw, cutting him off.

Just as I hoped, he staggers backward, clearly feeling the blow.

“The Great Weaver calls us to be discerning, Uncle,” I correct him, a shred of guilt plucking at my heart as I massage my now sore knuckles, “not doormats.”

I should not have struck him, even though he deserved it. I should not have sunk to his level. My father raised me better than that.

Suddenly, Malice is gone. The clearing is, too.

I am back in the garden, standing next to the grotesque apple tree, with Brisa and Glorana flitting around me, both fretting.

Glorana observes, “You seem to be bleeding, Theryn’kai .”

Brisa flings her hands into the air. “Wonderful! We can bleed here.”

The prickle of eyes upon me draws my attention upward to where Malice now lounges on a sofa fashioned from more sickly green clouds, well beyond reach.

He frowns, his gaze flicking between my aunties. “Were there not three of you?”

Brisa bristles and shoots toward him like a blue hornet. The air around him ripples when she harmlessly connects with the invisible barrier now protecting him from us.

Glorana, though, blinks and then points to herself, Brisa, and me individually while slowly and loudly explaining to him, “There are three of us.”

Malice’s frown deepens.

I slice the blade of my hand through the air and call out to him, “This is between you and me, Malice. Leave the rest of them out of this. My godmothers. Aurelia.”

He barks out a laugh. “Now, why would I do that? I get to torment you, claim my throne, and receive the gift from the last living Jewel.”

“She will never give it to you,” I hotly deny.

Malice leans forward, his gaze sharpening as he whispers, “You mean because she does not know she has it. Because you never told her.”

I fall silent, unable to protest that. My uncle is right.

Even when I opened my mind to Aurelia, I did not tell her everything.

I could not.

Because there are simply some things that should be said in person rather than penned in a letter or poured into one’s thoughts in the midst of a life-or-death moment.

Like my love for her.

And the true reason behind the first Jewel War—the reason kept from all of our history books. The reason Friedemar desired her so. The reason Malice desires her now.

The reason my own Shade hungers to consume her soul.

In my silence, Malice smirks. “That is what I thought.” But then his expression hardens.

“If you truly loved her, as you are so fond of reminding yourself, you wouldn’t have left her helpless.

You would have trained her in the weaving arts.

You would have told her what she is and how to guard her gift.

You would have taught her all she needed to know to navigate this life. ”

A smile quirks at the corner of his mouth, revealing a glimpse of his sharp canines as he taunts me further: “You would have taught her how to defend herself against me .”