Page 67

Evelina

Sixty Years Later

The throne was cold beneath Evelina. Hard. No matter how she shifted, there was no comfort to be found in this seat—for sixty years, it had felt so rigid. Though she couldn’t erase the pain of the life she had left behind, she tried her best to look forward. To plant a new seed of hope and wait for the day it would blossom inside her—watered by the promise of change.

Evelina felt it the moment Daimon gave his soul to Vidaris. It was a sharp pain that had started in her heart and radiated throughout her chest.

It still hadn’t dulled—she wondered if it ever would.

Zephyr had arrived shortly thereafter without Daimon. She stayed close to the palace and hovered above whenever Evelina would step into the gardens.

But she couldn’t bring herself to look up, to see the wyvern’s saddle empty. Couldn’t bring herself to accept Daimon’s choice, as much as she imagined he struggled to accept hers.

It was too painful to think about.

She convinced everyone that he had died—if he had still been alive, Zephyr would’ve been with him. The Riders were the hardest to convince. But he was their commander, their family. Of course they wouldn’t give up until they knew for certain.

But Evelina knew. Daimon didn’t tell her he was going to become the Lord of Shadows, but she knew from the feeling in her chest, from the secrets he had shared with her. She could feel the loss of him across their soulbond—as if there were a string binding them together, and it had been abruptly cut in half.

Over time, she began to understand why, as the border naturally healed itself of conflict—he must have found a way to use his powers to block the border. He had saved the empire, and nobody could know. Her heart broke as she watched the faces of what was left of the Alpha Fleet grow solemn throughout the years. But Daimon had made his decision, and she would trust him. Protect him. No matter how much it killed her.

She prayed to the moon goddess that her people would have a reprieve from death, but things were far from over.

Years, then decades passed with few fae deaths as they slowly reclaimed what was once theirs. Evelina and Senna garnered more peace, securing more and more land beyond the mountains. Moros had become a ghost, retreating and hiding for the last twenty years, when suddenly, in a last-ditch effort, the unthinkable happened.

Moros used his hate and corrupted Essence to cast a curse along the Zenovia Mountains. No human should have been able to cast such a powerful curse, but Moros found a way. Surely, selling his soul to Vidaris and feeding her chaos, pain, and destruction in return.

There was no physical barrier to be seen, no shudder of darkness or warning that it had happened. Instead, fae became lost on the other side of the border, and those on the edge of the mountains were torn to pieces beneath the weight of the curse. They became lost souls, roaming the Shadow Realm.

At first, they didn’t know what happened. Those on the border simply stopped returning for reports. Evelina and Senna had sent scouts to the mountains, only for them to return with word that everyone had disappeared.

It wasn’t until they attempted to cross the border that they learned what had happened.

Every fae who attempted the crossing died instantly, suffering the same fate as their fallen comrades. People Evelina had known for years died as the land was split in two, fae on one side, humans on the other. The Valon Empire became two kingdoms—Crea and Penyth.

There were things she’d never forget.

Beautiful, innocent Lyria’s dull, distant eyes as she was lowered into the grave beside her mother and siblings. Lyria had changed after losing the majority of her family, joining the front as a healer in Evelina’s footsteps, right on the border. At first, Evelina was proud—before she realized her sister would never come back, caught in the shadows of Moros’s curse as it spread through the mountains.

Aldric’s gentle eyes glinting out from under thick pools of crimson blood—not only his. He was found under a pile of fae bodies. The look of devastation on Annora’s face that never fully went away, even when she smiled. The way their child, Avery, seemed to know before it happened, tugging at Evelina’s hem the day before and asking when her dad would be home.

“Soon,” she had said, not knowing she was lying.

Wave after wave of loss, scouts uncovering new massacres every day as they trailed the wreckage along the mountains. Bodies piled so high that mass graves had to be dug. What had once been their new stronghold at the border became a graveyard.

Evelina slowly cracked beneath the weight of all the pain.

She honored them the only way she knew how. There was an empty fallow field behind the palace. She prepped its soil for two seasons, rebalancing the land until it was ready for new growth. At first, she planted a seed every time a loss was reported. But soon it was uncountable, leaving her to plant handfuls at a time, staining her nails with soil.

It grew into the largest garden in the entire realm. She didn’t think she could take any more loss, her heart squeezing every time she looked out into the Remembrance Garden.

The curse separated her people, leaving behind the hope of reuniting fae and humans. With the border permanently sealed, there was peace, but no justice.

It was as if the war just paused, suspended in the air, hanging like an ax over Evelina’s head. The wyverns, who were supposed to return to their rest at the end of the war, instead stayed by their Riders, as if they could smell impending doom. As much as her people yearned for this to be the end, it couldn’t be over.

The need to make Moros pay for what he had done lived in Evelina’s heart, even as her kingdom moved on—desperate for peace. She threw all her focus into finding him, into working with the Riders to hunt him down. They used the aerial fleets to search for him, flying as close to the border as they could, before the pull of the curse threatened to snatch their souls from their bodies.

After so long searching, many assumed Moros had died in his last cruel sacrifice to the shadows, and they moved forward. With so much to mourn, the fae instead rejoiced. For all the lives lost, the lands were healthy again; they had, in their minds, won the war.

Where before Evelina felt the decaying land over her body with endless sores and aches, she now felt lighter, less burdened. But there was a cold deep within she could never shake. No matter what people thought, she was certain Moros was still out there.

The curse left the darkness in Crea to fester, leaving Penyth closer to peace than they ever thought they would be. Flowers grew where bodies were buried; the scent of rotting flesh turned to fresh, dewy air.

Any remaining humans trickled out of the cities and hid deep within the forest—or perhaps found some last portal magic to escape over to the newly formed Crea. Like them, Evelina yearned for a time everyone else was eager to leave behind. She could not rejoice in the separation of her people and everything they could not recover.

In her bones, the pain was gone. But in her heart, it only kept growing.

They had lost so much to Moros’s games of power, and Vidaris’s hand in aiding him. The many soldiers, civilians, fleets—her mother and siblings, friends and colleagues. Droves upon droves of bodies even an immortal could not fathom.

And Daimon. He had done so much to save them, forever bound to the Shadow Realm—an eternity for what only came to be twenty years of relative peace.

Sixty years flew by without a change to Evelina’s golden complexion or in her heart. She blinked and summer froze into winter. She woke up one morning and realized winter had melted away into spring.

Daimon was her first and only love, but it was Senna who had been by her side. And as she saw little, lonely Avery grow up, Evelina held on to a secret wish.

One day, her heart couldn’t contain it any longer. Snowy days melted into warm, sun-filled ones. Her sense of hope was slowly returning, even as her pain stayed nestled in the deep corners of her heart. The morning she decided to tell Senna she was ready to start a family, she found him sitting beneath the Mother Tree, flipping through pages of a novel. The room was quiet save for the handful of Woodland tending to the shelves.

“Senna,” she whispered, her longing clear in her voice as she sat beside him .

He gave her his gentle attention as he always did, his warm brown eyes absorbing every layer of intention between them. “Yes, my queen?”

“I wish to have a child.” She took a deep breath. “With you,” she added, tears in her eyes. “My king. The one who has been by my side a thousand moons and more.”

They both wanted a family, wanted to find a seed of hope in the darkness that surrounded them. Their friendship was strong. Immovable. And a part of them wondered if they could ever be more.

For a short time, they tried to be more. There was a love that she had never experienced between them. It was gentle, soft. The kind of love that made her feel warm and safe. It was what she dreamed of a marriage being. But beyond comfort and solace, they would always long for the love left behind. For the Riders their hearts still sang for.

But for all they had lost, it was enough. And in time, they found that they had already been blessed by Eurydice.

Finally, there was something to live for beyond duty or honor. For the first time since the shadows took Daimon, she felt that seed of hope begin to take root—and blossom.