Page 5

CHAPTER

FOUR

Oralia

The dappled morning light danced across the veins of gold marble in the throne room. I tracked its slow progress toward my feet at the bottom of Typhon’s dais over the hours I stood there.

Unending streams of soldiers entered the throne room, carrying with them crates of offerings from the outlying regions of Aethera, from Severa to the Western Reaches and the Eastern Shore, all under Typhon’s rule. “Gifts of goodwill,” they repeated again and again as they uncorked wine and tugged open barrels of grain. It was a ritual I’d seen more than once in my time in Aethera growing up, but now I experienced it with fresh eyes.

The soldier currently standing in the center of the receiving circle appeared haggard with smudges of gritty dirt on his golden-brown cheeks, and he panted as he placed the crate before him and bowed.

“Fruit, my king, from Severa.”

Typhon hummed, flicking his fingers, and the soldier opened the lid. Bright red apples and smaller boxes of berries caught the waning afternoon sun. This was the fourth crate from Severa. They had also supplied grain and meat. I couldn’t help but wonder how they could afford to send so much.

“This is a smaller offering than last,” Typhon mused, chin resting on his fist.

The soldier cleared his throat, brown eyes flicking to Caston and away again. “They have offered all they can.”

Fear fluttered around the boy—I couldn’t truly call him a man. This was someone who was nearing adulthood, perhaps nineteen or twenty, and soon, he would learn if he had inherited magic from whichever parent had made him a demigod. But for a boy, a demigod, he was not so foolish as to not realize the danger lurking in the space between him and his king.

Typhon pursed his lips, assessing the boy as I did, before he nodded, dismissing the soldier with a wave of his hand. Golden armor creaked as the soldier’s shoulders dropped. Without a word, he grabbed up the crate, bowing so low the rough wood skimmed the tops of his boots, before backing up a few paces and rushing out of the room.

“Perhaps those in Severa should be reminded to whom they serve. They grow lazy. I should send you there instead,” Typhon said softly, leaning toward Caston standing on his right side.

From the corner of my eye, I was able to make out Caston raise a shoulder and drop it. “They are working hard, Father. Last season, they gave double what you asked. It must count for something.”

Typhon hummed again. “Perhaps…perhaps.”

Nausea crawled through my stomach, and I swallowed back the acid threatening to rise. I did not know how I could have been so foolish for the first years of my life as to believe the god seated above me was anything other than a monster. For so long, I had mistaken his cruelty for compassion and the cracks in his facade as merely signs of worry for his people.

“You may approach.” Mecrucio’s voice rang out across the throne room from the other side of the dais, his chocolate curls wild after the long day.

Hollis was the next to step into the gilded circle, but he did not hold a crate like the rest. Instead, a small black box rested between his hands, the corner of his mouth tilted up in a satisfied grin.

“The offering, Your Grace.”

Slowly, he lowered to his knees, sliding the box onto both palms and lifting it overhead. When it caught the light, intricate markings found their relief: star-like blossoms and tangled vines dancing together across the lid and sides. Typhon froze, mouth popping open before he rose to his feet, bright wings flaring wide.

The smile breaking across his face was blinding. This must have been what had enraptured my mother in the beginning, if there had ever been a courtship before she had found true love in my father. But I could see the glimmer of the timeless god he pretended to be, the skin he tried to wear but did not fit. Quickly, he descended the steps of the dais. White feathers slipped across my throat as he passed, swirling the skirts of my gown.

“They have accepted?”

Hollis nodded. I’d heard whispers that he had left shortly after my first morning back in Aethera on some business for Typhon. Usually, it meant he’d been sent to find a weakness in the mist of Infernis. Though perhaps with the way through already found, he’d been sent elsewhere.

“And the other half?”

“The other half is waiting on your signal, Your Grace,” Hollis answered.

Typhon lifted the box reverently, staring down at it for so long the silence grew thick. Mecrucio rocked onto the toes of his boots, brows furrowing together, and even Caston looked confused.

“You all may leave us,” Typhon murmured, not lifting his gaze from the box.

My knee slid to the floor with a practiced curtsey while I pressed three fingers to my brow along with everyone else in the room. Drystan’s warmth curled around my shoulder as he approached, guiding me with a gesture toward the double doors leading out into the palace.

In front of me, Aelestor and Mecrucio exchanged a look before the former chanced a glance over his shoulder at me. I hadn’t seen the God of Storms much in my time back in Aethera, save for the chance meetings in the halls or at Typhon’s table. But we had not spoken, not when the animosity between us had only broken weeks ago in Infernis when I returned his mate, Josette, her memories.

“Oralia.” Typhon’s voice boomed, echoing across the marble and shivering the leaves of the gilded trees set into the walls. “Stay.”

I caught the worried look passing between Aelestor and Mecrucio as I froze. There was the barest shimmer of alarm in Aelestor’s eyes before he disappeared down the hall, followed by Mecrucio. I moved back toward the circle in the center of the room and lowered to my knees the same way I’d done for two and a half centuries.

“This meeting is not for you,” Typhon said.

Caston stood stubbornly between us, armor shining in the afternoon light, his rose-gold skin flushed. A muscle fluttered in his jaw. “What is it you need her for, Father?”

My adopted brother had been present for each evening I’d been questioned, speaking up in moments of uncertainty or strengthening my responses. Discomfort skittered across his heart the same as mine, it appeared. He did not want me alone with Typhon any more than I did. From the way Drystan hovered at my shoulder, it was clear he felt the same.

Typhon’s voice dropped low, though his face betrayed no hint of emotion. “I have told you to leave, Caston. I will not ask again.”

The rose gold of Caston’s cheeks flushed brighter, but he bowed all the same, backing a few paces before turning. His eyes caught mine, widening until I could see the entirety of his irises, before he was gone in the next heartbeat.

I was alone with the Golden King, save for Drystan. Alone with the god who had murdered my parents. Alone with the god I had come back to destroy. Yet my hands did not shake, and even the discomfort I’d experienced only moments ago smoothed. My magic hummed as if it could sing to me the way Ren’s mother, Asteria, had from her prison within the first kratus tree when I’d been small. A prison Typhon had put her in.

“I never told you about my father,” Typhon mused.

“No, Your Grace, you did not.” Though I knew enough of his father from Ren, who shared the same lineage. The god who had grown hungry for power—who had lost himself to it in the end.

When I looked beneath my lashes, it was to find Typhon standing at the base of the dais, weighing the black box in his hands. A strange sort of energy threaded around the room, ominous and fearsome. He flicked it open with a snap , and I blinked in confusion. There was no weapon within, nothing so outwardly menacing. Merely a dark metal ring. The band was crafted of two snakes woven together and on top sat a bright red gem. And yet the temperature of the room grew colder as he slipped it onto his index finger.

“My father was a brilliant god”—he extended his hand, admiring the ring—“though a short-sighted one. He created merely to control and consume and nothing more. But in the final years before he found his end, he began to fear Renwick and his magic. He regretted giving the gift of dominion over Infernis to him after it took too much of his magic to maintain on his own.”

At the mention of Ren, my pulse flared. It was the first time Typhon had referred to him as anything other than the Under King . When Typhon’s gaze slipped to me, there was an approximation of understanding there as if I’d been a soldier in the same war. But it was odd, not a perfect fit.

“Death is not merely a weakness, Oralia. It is the great equalizer on a battlefield. And as you have now seen with your own eyes, my half brother has no such leveler. He is a threat, a plague upon the world which spreads without end.”

Typhon took a step closer, snapping the box shut. My confusion and fear washed across my face for his benefit while I pushed away the shadows threatening to curl around my shoulders like the snakes on the strange ring. Beside me, Drystan stiffened, and I caught the barest twitch of his hand toward the pommel of his sword.

“He taught you control, didn’t he?”

I blinked, the corners of my mouth turning down. “No, Your Grace, the Under King did not.”

He clicked his tongue. “Morana, then.”

Shaking my head, I opened and closed my gloved hands in front of me, my neck aching as I craned it up to look at him. “I do not know who that is.”

Morana, the God of Night, the powerful and terrifying timeless god whom Ren used the formal mother for in the old language— maelith . The god who’d taught me how to listen to the whisper of my magic and not to fear it.

The heavy pounding of my heart sounded in my ears alongside Ren’s steady one.

Typhon loomed over me, face in shadow. A rough hand shot out to grip my chin, sizzling fire spreading across my skin. A scream tore from my lips, ringing through my ears, as his magic tore through my veins. It was a burn I knew all too well, the sunlight he wielded, the power his father had created in his image at the beginning of the world. Ribbons of it wrapped around my throat with my shoulders, pinning my arms into place.

With each breath I took, I pushed my shadows down. Some small intuition told me not to fight—I would survive this.

“Show me your power,” Typhon demanded.

Corrosive tears slipped down my cheeks, another scream rang around the sickeningly gilded hall. I shook within his hold. My skin bubbled and blistered beneath his burning touch. Metal scraped against metal, another cry deeper than my own echoed across the marble, and the pain vanished in an instant, leaving in its wake a humming through my skin and ears.

The haze of my vision cleared as I panted, hands spread wide across the floor, before the same cry sounded again. Drystan laid sprawled at Typhon’s feet, sword tight in his hand, a wreath of flame around his neck, tightening with every breath. And as the Golden King tortured the only person in our entire cursed world I’d ever loved as a parent, those gilded eyes were fixed on me.

“Show me or he dies.”