Page 30

Chapter

Thirty

EIRA

My entire body hurts, and though I slept, it doesn’t feel like I did. My father is dead, and the world is carrying on as if nothing happened. The stars went down and the sun came up.

I’m now an orphan.

The dawn burns without any fanfare. No trumpets of fate. Just pale gold filtering through the broken sanctuary dome, laying long shadows over the stone.

Tears well in my eyes again . I can barely move. My mind has gone over the events a million times. I could’ve done a hundred things differently, and Einar would still be here. Not dead.

My neck and legs ache from where I’ve curled beside him all night. His face is unusually peaceful, touched with ash and light, his blade laid across his chest like an old promise finally kept.

I press my forehead to his, whispering the words I couldn’t say last night. “I’m sorry. I wish we’d have found another way. Thank you. I’m not ready, but I will make this mean something somehow.”

My sword is silent and without a glow at my touch. If the curse is broken—like it feels it is—then the sword’s magic may never work again.

I rise and take in my father one last time before I bury his blade in the dirt beside the sanctuary stones and build him a cairn from the shattered remnants of the altar. When that’s done, I can avoid his burial no longer.

I place a stone on him. Another, then another.

Harek appears at my side and adds more, his presence a steady thread in the silence. When he finally does speak, after my father is hidden beneath the rocks, his voice is low. “He would’ve wanted you to keep going.”

“I know.” My voice cracks, and I don’t dare say more.

He takes my hand in his and leads me around the sanctuary to the edge of a cliff. Something about the building catches my attention. Somehow, it seems less in ruin than before.

But that’s impossible.

Yet the marble has an iridescent glimmer. And I would swear the stones are healing themselves. That can’t be. Can it?

“The city is still beautiful.” Harek’s voice pulls me from my thoughts.

“Look at the sanctuary.”

He gives me a funny look before complying, then his brows lift. “The building is fixing itself.”

I wasn’t imagining it. Grief isn’t stealing my sanity.

Harek squeezes my hand. “Perhaps the entire city will return to what it looked like when we arrived.”

That almost seems like too much to hope for. I wish Einar could see it.

A fresh wave of pain washes over me, and tears blur my vision.

Harek pulls me into his embrace and holds me tightly. I let him comfort me, and he feels like home. He runs his palm over my hair. “I miss him, too.”

A tear lands on my scalp.

We stand in the quiet for a while. After I’ve sobbed, we sit at the edge of the cliff, our legs hanging over the hill where the sanctuary overlooks the valley. The birds return slowly, cautious against the lingering weight of magic. Smoke still clings to the leaves. The scent of blood is faint now.

“I only had a handful of weeks with him. And most of that time, we were training to fight each other.”

Harek puts his arm around me. “You got to know him, and he got to know you.”

My throat tightens. “He believed in me, even when I didn’t.”

“I always have,” he says. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

I glance at him, but he’s looking toward the valley, where the path winds down Mirendel’s wilderness.

Where war still waits.

The wind shifts.

I straighten. My grief doesn’t fade, but it settles for now. I’ve been through this before—still am going through it—with my mother. The pain of losing her is still fresh, and now I have this added onto it.

None of this can be in vain. I won’t let it.

Harek rests his head on mine, and we sit in silence for what could be hours, or just moments. His voice breaks through my shattered thoughts. “I hate to ask, but are you ready to head back? Sapphire and Vash have already flown overhead three times now.”

As much as I want to stay here until the rawness of my father’s sacrifice goes away, that isn’t an option. We need to check on the dragons and Mirendel itself.

We walk away. Leaving feels like tearing away pieces of myself.

I turn back once to see the pile of stones we built over Einar’s body.

They’re pale gray against the dark earth, carefully chosen and fitted together with the kind of precision he would have appreciated.

Each placed with purpose, with love, with the weight of everything we couldn’t say while he was alive to hear it.

Harek’s hand rests on my shoulder, steady and warm. “He would have liked it here. Overlooking the valley. Close enough to the sanctuary to feel the magic, but far enough away to have peace.”

I nod, not trusting my voice. The cairn looks so small from here, just another arrangement of rocks in an ancient landscape.

But I know I’ll carry the image of it with me forever—the way the light caught the edges of the stones, the single wildflower Harek found to place on top, the sound of our breathing as we worked in silence to give Einar the honor he deserved.

The sky overhead is a bruised blend of silver and soft blue, still bearing the scars of last night’s magical storm. But the bruises are healing, fading from the violent purples and blacks of the curse’s breaking into something of recovery rather than destruction.

The city doesn’t feel hostile anymore. Just tired.

Harek walks beside me in silence, his boots finding their rhythm on the familiar path.

But it’s not an empty silence—it’s full of shared understanding, of grief that doesn’t need words.

Occasionally he glances my way like he wants to say something, his mouth opening slightly before he thinks better of it and looks ahead again.

His hand grasped around mine speaks volumes our words can’t.

We’ve shared many silences over the years. This is one of the most poignant. In the space between our footsteps, there’s a conversation happening. A recognition of loss, of change, of the strange territory we’re navigating together.

“I keep expecting to hear his voice,” I say eventually. “Telling me I’m walking too fast, or that we should have taken the eastern path instead.”

Harek’s step falters slightly. “He always did think he knew the better route.”

“He usually did.” The admission comes with a smile that feels like it might break my face. “Remember when he insisted we could cut through Thornweld instead of going around? We spent three hours untangling ourselves from brambles.”

“And he spent the whole time explaining how it was still technically faster.” Harek’s voice carries the ghost of laughter, but it’s shadowed with something deeper. “Even when we had to stop to dig thorns out of his dreadlocks.”

“He was so proud of that shortcut. Used it in every argument for days afterward.” I pause, feeling the weight of memory settle in my chest. “The ‘Thornweld Principle,’ he called it. Sometimes the harder path is the right one.”

The words hang between us, and I can see Harek processing them, understanding the deeper meaning. Because that’s what Einar did, isn’t it? He chose the harder path. The one that led through sacrifice, through his own death, to save something larger than himself.

The thought hits like a punch to the gut.

“He was too smart for his own good.” Harek’s quiet voice pulls me from the fresh wave of pain.

“And too stubborn to admit when he was wrong.”

“And too loyal to let anyone else pay the price for his decisions.”

We walk in silence for a while, lost in our own memories.

I find myself thinking of a dozen small moments—the way Einar would hum under his breath when he was concentrating, how he always checked his weapons twice before a fight, the particular expression he got when working through a problem everyone else thought was impossible.

The farther we go, the more the world feels changed.

Not just in the obvious ways—the absence of the curse’s influence, the way the magic flows more freely through the air—but in the quality of light filtering through the leaves, the way my own footsteps sound against the ground, and the rhythm of my breathing, no longer constantly adjusted for the presence of something hungry and watchful in the back of my mind.

Even the magic in the air has settled, now brighter than the wild surge that accompanied Einar’s sacrifice.

Not hollow as the dark magic was growing in the land.

It feels warmer. Restored. Whatever was broken is healing now.

Remade into something that can exist without constant feeding, without the sacrifice of innocent, good lives to maintain its power.

I reach for a good luck pendant beneath my tunic.

It was my mother’s, and the silver disk is warm against my palm, warmer than body heat should make it.

When I was a child, she told me it would protect me when she couldn’t.

I used to think she meant physical protection—a charm against blades or claws or the dangers of the wild.

Now I know she meant something else entirely.

Protection against becoming something I couldn’t live with.

Protection against losing myself in the pursuit of power or vengeance or the simple, brutal mathematics of survival.

The shield and its message call to me. I can’t read it. Not now, but soon I need to decipher the message. Decide my next steps. The truth of that settles into my bones, heavy and inescapable.

Einar didn’t just die to break the curse.

No, he died to give me a chance at something better.

A chance to be more than a weapon, more than a mysterious hybrid, more than the thing the curse made me.

And that chance comes with responsibilities.

With the need to defend not just myself, but the possibility of a world where others don’t have to make the choice Einar made.

We crest the final ridge before the trail bends back toward the main part of Mirendel, and the view spreads out before us like a promise.

The valley is green and gold in the afternoon light, the river running clear and bright between banks that no longer whisper with hostile magic.

In the distance, I can see the spires of the city, whole and unbowed despite everything that’s happened. Bright again.

Smoke curls faintly on the horizon—not the black, choking smoke of destruction, but the thin purple and orange threads.

Patrols maybe, carrying word of the curse’s end to the far reaches of the kingdom.

Or preparations for whatever comes next, the practical work of rebuilding that always follows the dramatic work of breaking.

“They’ll expect answers,” Harek says quietly, following my gaze toward the city.

“I’ll give them the truth.” My words feel like a vow. “I’m done hiding.”

The curse appears to be gone, and I’m still here.

Still me, despite everything. Capable of choice, of love, of the kind of sacrifice that means something.

Maybe that’s enough. What they need to see—not perfection, but someone who’s been through the worst of it and chosen to keep fighting for something better for everyone.

Harek glances at me, something cautious behind his eyes. He knows me well enough to hear the determination in my voice, but also well enough to worry about what that determination might cost.

“And what happens when the truth isn’t enough?” he asks. “When they want someone to blame for all the loss? When they decide that the easiest thing is to make you the monster?”

I stop, the weight of his words settling around me like a cloak.

Because he’s right to worry. People need simple stories, clear villains, obvious solutions.

The truth—that the curse was both enemy and part of the natural order, that breaking it required sacrifice from those it claimed, that the world is more complicated now rather than less—that’s not the kind of truth that brings comfort.

“Then I give them something stronger,” I say, and the words feel like they’re coming from someplace deeper than thought, someplace that’s been waiting for this moment to speak. “Hope.”

Harek nods, his expression thoughtful.

Because that’s what Einar saw, wasn’t it?

Not just the possibility of breaking the curse, but the possibility of what comes after.

A world where people don’t have to choose between becoming monsters or victims. Where the next generation grows up knowing that even the darkest magic can be overcome, even the most ancient evils can be defeated.

Where someone like me—someone marked by darkness but not consumed by it—can stand as proof that redemption is possible.

“Hope,” Harek repeats, and there’s something wondering in his voice. “You think that’s enough?”

“I think it’s what he would have given them, and I think it’s what I have to offer.”

We walk again, our steps falling into sync as we begin the final descent toward Einar’s home. Now ours.

Ahead of us, the city waits with all its questions and demands and desperate need for something to believe in. Between them, Harek and I carry the weight of what we’ve experienced, what we’ve lost, what we’ve learned about the price of freedom and the responsibility that comes with survival.

It’s not the ending any of us would have chosen, but it’s the beginning we’ve earned.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s enough.