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Chapter Thirty

H yrax motioned toward the table, his hand brushing lightly against my back to guide me forward. “Sit. There’s much to discuss. Caldrius, leave us.”

“He stays,” I snapped, the authority in my voice surprising even me.

Both men stilled, turning to look at me with mirrored expressions of shock.

Caldrius’s lips curved into a wry smile, and he inclined his head in acknowledgment before taking a seat at the table.

Hyrax raised a brow, clearly intrigued, but he followed suit, summoning food with a lazy wave of his hand.

The rich aromas of roasted meats and spiced wines filled the room, but my stomach churned.

I stayed rooted where I was, every muscle taut, barely trusting myself to breathe.

“I want answers, Hyrax,” I said sharply, the tension in my voice cutting through the air like a blade. “No more half-truths or skirting the questions. I want the truth. Now.”

Hyrax didn’t rush, slicing into the meat on his plate with maddening calm. “I suspect you already have many of the answers you seek. You know how you arrived on the bridge that day?”

The bridge. The memory surfaced, jagged and raw.

That wasn’t the day I’d lost my memories.

It was the day my memories began .

It was the day I’d been created.

“Did you know I’d control the Veil?” My voice rose, sharp and demanding. “Was that the plan all along?”

Hyrax chewed slowly, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “That was a surprise, actually. One moment I was pouring magic into you, and the next, you were gone. The Goddess of the Veil has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

The words hit me like a blow. Goddess of the Veil.

I, Theadora Moore, was the Goddess of the Veil.

Except that wasn’t even my name. Moore belonged to a man the world had assumed was my father because the truth was too impossible to imagine: that Hyrax, God of the Dead, had a daughter.

“Why now?” I demanded, my voice trembling with barely contained fury. Hyrax had taken Mortals for lovers before, that’s how his Descendant lines had come about after all. But he’d never fathered another God in his millennia of life. Why now?

Hyrax sighed, setting down his fork, shadows flickering over his face. “My wife is very ill, Theadora. She has been my companion for a millennium, and soon, she won’t be. It was her idea, actually, for me to create you.”

I stiffened, my stomach churning. “Pasnia’s not my—”

“The Goddess of Madness cannot have children of her own,” Caldrius interjected, his voice calm yet cutting.

It was the first time he’d spoken since I arrived.

He, too, hadn’t touched the food Hyrax had summoned.

Instead, he sat perfectly still, his fingers tracing the rim of his wineglass as his dark eyes stayed locked on mine.

“So how did you—” My voice faltered as the pieces fell into place, each one more horrific than the last.

Each God had a signature weapon, accessible only to them.

Except for Hyrax’s Bident .

While the other Gods might not have been able to wield its power, I had felt its magic course through me in the Hyrax Archives. It had mingled with my own power, familiar and intimate, like it recognized my magic.

Because it had.

“Ciclopia’s final two beasts,” I murmured, working through the revelation aloud. “Tyron and Eckna. When Tyron died, you used one of his bones to fashion the Bident. There’s no record of what happened to Eckna, but after all this time…”

Hyrax’s expression didn’t shift, but his attention on me was suffocating.

“…the beast died a little over a year ago. Didn’t she?”

Hyrax leaned back, his smile faint, but satisfied. “You are as brilliant as I hoped.”

Rage bubbled beneath the surface, threatening to boil over. “You created me out of the bones of a monster?”

Hyrax waved a dismissive hand, as though my anger was trivial. “There are worse origins, my dear.”

“This is insane,” I muttered, pacing away as my fingers clawed through my hair. The walls seemed to close in, the horror of it all spinning out of control.

A hand landed on my shoulder, and my power lashed out instinctively. The force of my power sent Caldrius sprawling backward, crashing into the table before he recovered with startling ease. He raised his hands in mock surrender, his dark eyes steady on mine.

“You should have told me!” I shouted at him, my voice raw with betrayal as I pointed an accusatory finger at him. “All along you knew, didn’t you? You let me trust you while you lied to me!”

Caldrius stepped forward, his voice low and even. “You never would have believed me. You had to get here on your own.”

My hands shook with the force of my anger – the sting of his betrayal. “I trusted you!”

Hyrax sighed, his tone dripping with impatience. “Thea, you’re being too hard on the boy. He was essential to your creation, after all.”

The air seemed to still; the room frozen in time as his words sank in. Slowly, I turned to Hyrax, dread pooling in my stomach. “What?”

Hyrax gestured toward Caldrius with a lazy flick of his hand. “His sketches were invaluable to shaping you.”

No.

Oh gods, no.

That’s why Caldrius had always looked at me with such familiarity, why his gaze lingered too long, tinged with something I didn’t want to name. He had told Hyrax what I should look like.

He told Hyrax to make me look like someone he had once known.

Someone he had once loved.

My stomach churned as I turned to Caldrius, the silence stretching between us like a chasm.

“I look like her, don’t I?” My voice trembled, my hands balled into fists at my sides.

I didn’t dare look away from him, begging him with my eyes to deny it, to insist it wasn’t the truth.

Caldrius’s lips tightened, his jaw clenching as his fists opened and closed. He didn’t answer.

“Do I look like your wife, Caldrius?” I screamed.

He avoided my gaze, clenching his fists so tightly the knuckles were white. “Visually, yes. You bear a resemblance, but I assure you the similarities end there.”

None of it was real. He wasn’t my friend. He never had been.

I was just a replacement for the woman he lost.

Magic surged within me, too angry on my behalf to stay silent, and a crack echoed through the room as the floor split apart.

All this time. I’ve been living with a stolen name. I’d been looking in a mirror and seeing a stolen face. Nothing - nothing - about my identity was my own.

“Thea-“ Caldrius stood, as if making to come towards me, and I snapped.

Power surged through me, wild and violent. The throne of bones shattered, plates clattered to the ground, and Caldrius was hurled against the far wall with a force that cracked the stone. The air rippled with heat and fury as the room trembled around me.

“Theadora!” Hyrax bellowed, standing abruptly.

“I’m not letting you out of the Underworld,” I hissed, my voice like steel. “I’m not letting either of you out. And when I find Pasnia, I’ll drag her back here myself, and all three of you can rot for eternity.”

“Pasnia’s in the Mortal Realm?” Hyrax’s voice was barely a whisper, his sharp gaze cutting through the chaos.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My tears blurred my vision as I summoned a portal, the golden thread blazing to life before me.

Without another word, I stepped through, leaving their lies and betrayal behind.