Page 24 of Fated or Knot (UnseelieVerse: The Omega Masquerade #1)

24

LARK

T his was not the normal darkness of rest. I didn’t feel the wind, but somehow, I knew I was falling. My mind traveled down.

And down.

And down some more.

Flashes of color and sound whirled by. Snippets of the past…though no past I could remember. They fell around me in a sharp-edged rain, and I felt something from each one. They were all mine, fractals of different times. Times I was loved, times I was victorious, times I was hurt so badly it was a mercy to forget. There were so, so many of them.

I looked down to see a jagged bed of forgotten memories. They awaited my inevitable crash, ready to tear me apart in a buzzing cacophony of everything all at once.

I tucked myself into a ball and braced for impact, just to land in another’s arms. “That was too close,” Kauz murmured. Our bodies rose and fell with the powerful flaps of his wings. The span seemed impossibly huge in this space…wherever we were.

“Kauz, what’s going on?” I asked, clinging to him. “Is this a dream?”

He lifted his head, watching the last shards of memory fall around us. They passed right through him on their way by, and he surged up the tunnel I’d fallen into, keeping me away from their sharp edges. “No, it’s not a dream. I just put a sleeping spell on you, so you’re in the second stage of rest right now.”

I was so wildly confused. But he found an alcove of sorts to land on and sat, dangling his feet over the drop. The details were fuzzy at best, like any dream.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said, patting the space next to him. I eased onto it and leaned into him when he put an arm around me.

He began to explain that we were in my head, watching broken memories get cycled toward long-term storage. They were broken because I’d been forced to forget them by Cymora, who’s always had the power to order me to forget things.

“She must’ve abused this a lot,” I muttered.

“Undoubtedly,” he agreed. “However, you also have to consider the ripple effect of a careless order. You’re told to forget one thing, and you forget every instance of it before or since that order. Take the metalark for example.”

“The what?”

“The purple bird I drew on your arm,” he answered patiently. “You asked me about it several times.”

My brow wrinkled. I couldn’t remember doing that, but I should’ve. I’d admired the purple lark with its star-flecked feathers and traced my fingers over the curve of the ribbon it’d clutched in its claws.

“It’s a metalark, a bird from the dreamlands that you were ordered to forget,” he explained. “No matter how many times I talked to you about the metalark, the moment I said what it was, you would go quiet and forget where you were. I guessed that it might be your full name.”

I glanced down at the basin of memory shards far below us as something stirred. My father’s voice echoed up to us. Kauz tilted his head to listen in.

“Metalark, my baby bird.”

“You’ll fly too someday.”

“Your mother wanted to name you after one of her favorite things.”

“Tweet tweet, little Metalark.”

A baby girl’s giggle. “Tweet tweet!” she echoed.

Glimmers of light shot back up the tunnel past where we sat.

My eyes welled with tears, and my shoulders shook with a sob. I’d forgotten what he sounded like, and the love he spoke with was nearly too much. I couldn’t speak for missing him. What I wouldn’t do to see him again one more time.

I buried my face in my hands, and Kauz pulled me closer. “Sorry,” I sniffed.

He tilted my chin up and tenderly wiped away the tear trails on my cheeks. “You never have to hide your pain from me,” he murmured. He continued his explanation while still cradling my face between his palms. “My brothers forced Cymora to break her vow to you, which is why your memories are returning. It was part of the plan for when we got here. I just didn’t expect the memories to fragment so much.”

“They did? There was a plan?” I asked.

“A rather successful one at that. My father and I removed the silencing band, Fal and Marius probably wrung the fish dry of any moisture left in her, and now you’re on the verge of getting your memories back.”

“The what? They did what?” I was trying to follow along, but there appeared to be a lot I’d missed. “When did you…wait. You all planned this when I was sleeping late, didn’t you?”

Kauz smiled with a bit of mischief. “Aye. Now you’re catching on.”

I was starting to love that look on my favorite Unseelie males. I leaned up and kissed him, glad he was as solid as ever in this corner of my mind. He kissed me back slowly, sighing as we broke apart.

“It may be easier to get started rather than continue trying to explain. We have a lot of memories to cover.” He took in the pit below us again. “It’s going to be hard, but I think the only way to do this is to relive these moments. That way, they’ll become your memories again.”

“So, do I just jump in?” I asked.

“ Nooo , don’t do that. We’ll call individual ones to us. I think I know where to start.” Kauz had a sad sort of smile as he reached out over the pit, and a memory flew into his waiting hand. He held his other palm out to me. “Just remember, I’m here. I’ll be here with you no matter how bad it gets.”

As I took in the shard and the color and sound that vibrated off it, then his offered hand, I had the feeling that this was the beginning of an ordeal. I literally didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I was about to find out face-first.

I put my hand in Kauz’s. I entered the memory he held and was hit with an immediate sense of dread as I watched my stepmother and a teenage dryad enter my room. I watched as an observer, a floating ghost that didn’t know what was about to happen to my eleven-year-old self as she closed a book she was reading for the third time.

“I saw this memory in Cymora’s dreams,” Kauz said. He appeared next to me in a flash of starlight and preemptively put his arms around me. “That is a silencing band. An olcanus designed to suck on your essence until almost nothing is left.”

I trembled in his arms but didn’t look away. Not when I screamed and begged and Cymora watched me writhe in pain with poorly disguised satisfaction.

I remembered how much it hurt to have the band bite into my flesh. The worst pain of my life as it settled in and drank deeply of my essence. I’d keened for hours, calling and calling, but no one came to help me.

My lame foot…was this. We returned to the alcove, and off went the memory, restored to my mind. Dozens followed it. The voices of the fae of Osme Fen, filled with mocking. Even from some I thought were my friends.

“Look at her faking that limp.”

“Is she trying to get extra attention? Hey, Lark! You’re not crippled!”

And on and on. Others spoke about my Unseelie side, asking where my gills had gone. Why was I different now?

I touched my neck, feeling the sealed ridges that hadn’t been there before. What the fuck? My fingers were tipped with super sharp nails too. I pulled my hand back to look at it and screamed, flicking it away like I could get rid of the extra membranes that extended between my fingers.

Kauz looked bewildered. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m—” I nearly barked out “I’m Unseelie!” like it was some kind of horror but caught it just in time. My heart hammered as I twisted to look at my wings. They seemed like their normal selves, except individual pinpricks of purple were starting to form on them. My color was returning!

I was tugged between great unwanted surprise and a surge of excitement, two reactions that did not blend well. I inspected myself for any more changes. Kauz figured out what I was doing quickly, saying, “You’re half nixie, sweetheart.”

“How is this possible?” I mumbled. I stared at my hand, watching the webbing ripple up and down my fingers depending on how I flexed them. If I did this long enough, I hoped to figure out how to get them to recede completely.

“You just forgot,” he said gently. “C’mon. Let’s see if we can find a happy memory.”

We couldn’t. Kauz picked out random memories from the pit. I remembered the day Cymora had sold my aging mare, Meya, after we’d won a third-place prize together at the blossom festival. I’d loved that horse. My stepmother made me forget her, though my affection for horses had remained despite her cruelty.

I’d also forgotten taking long, luxurious swims in the lake. In my younger years, I was a more athletic swimmer than Laurel, who’d been awkward with her mermaid tail. And I was not allowed to be better than her at anything, so Cymora ordered a creeping dread of water into me. No wonder I thought I’d nearly drowned in the lake once. I’d never jumped into the water again.

I wasn’t allowed to be better than Laurel at singing, either. An order had silenced my budding singing talents and trapped my perfect pitch in my spoken voice. Since then, I never felt compelled to sing along when others carried a tune.

“I hate her,” I said heavily after watching that particular memory. There were bound to be more just like it, whittling me down until I was the silent, head-bowed servant my stepmother had molded me into by my adulthood. But I was just tired on a bone-deep, exhausted level. “She just…erased anything about me she didn’t like. Who does that to their stepdaughter?”

Kauz was quiet next to me. He wavered where he stood, looking just as tired as I felt, with bruises forming under his eyes. I followed his line of sight to a cloud of black threaded with silver appearing in the tunnel of memories. It unfurled with the spreading of another pair of bat wings. Thalas flapped them hard as he gained his bearings and circled downward with a string of muttered Serian.

“It must be nighttime,” Kauz mumbled.

I hoped this meant we were going to take a break and sleep. Except, what was this, other than sleep? My head hurt. I was definitely thinking about this too hard.

We made room in the alcove for Thalas, though it was a tight fit when he landed. He drew me in for a tight hug. “You’re Dorei’s girl. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you,” he murmured.

I didn’t quite know what to make of his sudden affection. He was a stranger to me, though I may not have been one to him. Maybe this was buried in my lost memories somewhere, too. Thalas eventually let me go and hugged Kauz next. “And my boy. You were absolutely right. This is an emergency.”

“What’s been happening?” Kauz asked.

Thalas sighed heavily. He didn’t answer until we negotiated the small space and ended up on either side of him, with an arm and a wing around us. It still seemed strange to be pressed close to him like this, and I was too rigid to relax. “Too much for one discussion, I’m afraid. I caught the end of an interrogation yielding results that’ve left your mother nestbound. The grief and rage she’s feeling…” He shuddered. “I’m glad she’s resting. As should you both.”

Thank the stars , we were going to take a break.

“I’ll help repair your mind while you dream, Metalark. You will have to stay asleep until your memories are fully restored,” he continued. “And Kauzden, your body is too depleted to continue on here for much longer.”

Kauz lifted his chin. “I’m not leaving Lark to do this alone.”

“Then rest,” Thalas answered and gave him a little nudge. The other winged fae disappeared in a puff of essence, and I whimpered at how quickly he’d been dismissed. “I’ll guide him back to you once you rest as well. Do you remember me, Metalark?”

“Maybe not like you remember me, Your Majesty,” I answered.

He blew out a scoff. “I hope you never feel the need to call me that again. I’m going to give you a very specific dream so you remember your first trip to Serian.” His gaze down at me glimmered with a constellation of gentle stars. “You were three. But trust me, no one in my pack has forgotten you.”

Before I could ask how that was possible, or how I could’ve possibly made such a strong impression almost two decades ago, he nudged me too and sent my mind into the relief of dreaming sleep.