Page 78

It Is Done

All the world feels like it stops in shock. Did that really just happen? Is it really over?

My gaze collides with the turquoise eyes of my bondmate. Reven is still here. Still alive. No more Shadows. No more king coming for us.

He smiles and, tentatively, I smile back. I’m still not sure I believe this is happening.

Except his eyes flash wider, fear darting through our connection. “Meren—”

I look down to see shadow pouring out of me—the power I took from the king through the nymph’s curse.

There is nothing violent or chaotic about it. Instead, the sensation is soft. The cold leaving my body is replaced with a warmth that reminds me of basking in the morning sun rising over the southern dunes.

A thin streamer of dense, smokey shadow forms, like the spring wisdom pole the young people who have reached the age of reason in that year dance around, weaving colors together.

Inside the shadow twinkles a line of sand. The thread that bound me to the king. The shadow swirls over it and around those gossamer grains.

The first time Eidolon and I locked eyes, the curse snapped into place, and he tried to destroy it like this. Obliterate it with his darkness.

I thought I saw my death that day. Suffocation.

And, also like that day, a voice whispers in the air. A woman. Throaty. Faint. A voice I recognize now, because I talked to her before her death. The words of the sand nymph on the day of my birth.

Upon first glance, her power shall be bound with his forever, so that good may balance evil as the goddesses will.

“Balance has been restored,” Allusian announces. “I release you from this curse, Mereneith Evangeline of Aryd.” The goddess reaches out a hand to touch the ribbon of darkness and sand with a single finger.

Wind flows around me, touching no one else.

On this sweet breeze that smells of rain and creosus willows and hope, the sand within the ribbon ripples with hidden golden fire, turning a brilliant red then white-hot in a terrifying, tiny display of my own powers. Like the sun, like my desert, like everything that has made me who I am, the grains glow, dissipating the midnight swirl to a mist, which fades away until all that’s left are the grains of sand that twirl and twist in the air in a glittering dance. Then, one by one, like pearls falling off a string, the sand drops away.

When the last grain falls, so do I.

My stomach pitches into my throat as I plummet from the skies, no longer lifted by shadow.

Then I’m in Reven’s arms and he shadows us to safety. We land on the battlefield amid the fighters who now stand in stunned silence. I place my hand to the glass of my wall and when it goes clear, on the other side Tabra is standing, eyes wide.

She and Achlys step through, looking around the chaos of the battlefield.

Immediately all the soldiers of the Tyndran and Tropikan armies take a knee, throwing down their weapons.

“Good people of Nova!” Allusian’s voice lilts through the air. She’s not yelling, but the lovely sound is close, almost like she’s directly beside us. “Thanks to the courage and will of the Queens of Aryd, we, the goddesses of Nova, have returned to you. Cease your fighting and return to your homes. We will restore the damage that has been wrought, and we shall all find a new way together. I, Allusian, goddess of death and the heavens and the hells, make you this promise.”

Silence and stillness linger. I think because none of us quite comprehends, disbelief clinging to us.

“It’s over!” someone yells from the throngs of soldiers below. Others take up the cry until they are chanting.

Aryd appears and stands before me and Tabra, then Wildernyss appears beside her, looking woozy, but not dead.

I don’t give a shit where the other goddesses have gone. Tyndra’s probably still in her cage.

“Could you feel me?” I ask my goddess. “When I needed you and you would help?”

Her smile is all the answer I need. “Well done, Queens of Aryd,” she says in a husky voice that’s like music in the air.

“Aryd!” A familiar deep voice, smooth now and not gravelly like sand, sounds from off to our right.

A man is climbing through a hole in my wall close to where we are. A man whose face looks sort of like…

“ Bene ?” I gasp.

But he only has eyes for his goddess. Aryd’s expression crumples, and in an instant, they’re in each other’s arms. One thousand years of separation, of pain, of hope and despair, of desperate longing are visible in every caress, every whispered word between them.

I know a little of what that feels like, and I can’t help but sigh at the sight. There will be time to talk to Bene later. For now…

Is it truly finished?

No more hiding. No more running. No more fighting.

I know we have terrible pain to face. Loss. Devastation. But I’ll face it with Reven at my side. With my sister on her throne. With Eidolon and his Shadows no more.

One thousand years of terror at an end.

“We did it,” I whisper.

And everything in me just sort of deflates. Like I’ve been carrying a weight for so long, now that it’s gone, I can’t quite stand up any longer.

I sag against Reven, and immediately his arms come around me. He kisses the top of my head, and I look up into turquoise eyes no longer hidden by swelling, healed in the transformation.

“It’s over,” I say louder.

A gaping hole of this new reality is opening up in and all around me, and I have no idea what to do with it, how to react, how to feel. Because relief feels wrong. We’ve lost too many. But now…now we won’t lose more.

I think I never believed we’d get here. Not really.

His emotions like shifting sands of relief, satisfaction, grief, and even a disbelief similar to mine, what I feel most from Reven is hope. He lowers his head to drop a soft kiss on my lips and whisper, “Yes, princess. It’s finally over.”