enes hadn't balked down at whatever order she'd given, and it took me all my months of training to hide the clenching of my jaws, the tightening of my bones, the sourness in my mouth as her stares trailed to us. To the six rumored Windreapers. And just like the Dark General had done, her eyes rested on my shimmering hair, on my skin and the visible ink on it.

There had been no recognition on her face, not even a whisper of a memory. Good. She would remember me as days passed, she would remember my face, and the one beneath it, because it would be the last face she would ever see. The last face any of them would see. I would make sure of that.

Sédil and Dier had remembered her as much as I did, their souls and auras hissing at the edge of their memories. And my huntress had been livid as she eyed the First Female from behind me, as that day in the training yard flashed again and again and again in front of her eyes.

A knife and a strike and blood. A tangle of moments and memories.

She'd been there, she'd been the one who'd taken care of me after the assault. She'd seen the hatred in her eyes that day.

Clair had known all along, just like her prince had.

Sédil was wise to bite down on the words curling on her tongue. To swallow that burning sourness. I did the same. And through my magic, I reached them, both my huntress and my brother, telling them that I remembered, too. That my magic hissed the way theirs did, pleading to be released. To snap bones and bounders. To avenge.

But we did not let it free.

Instead, I held Claire's eyes, held their hardness and sharpness, as she barked another order at Yenes.

This time, he obeyed. Gritted teeth and clenched jaws, but the Dark General still barely nodded at the soldiers spread all around the hall, every here and there, mute as statues. Even when they closed around us, circling me and my court, they did not emanate a sound. Not even the rattling of all the steel they wore echoed in my ears. They were warriors bread to spy, to guard. To assassinate. They were the warriors I would lay hand on once I obtained Claire's rank—them and their master.

The First Female and her male equivalent standing on the edges of the dais took one step back, their movement smooth and coordinated, and for a heartbeat, they felt and looked like a reflection, an image cast by a window looking to another, opposite world. The training it must have taken to master such abilities...Claire and the dark-eyed man might as well have been training since the day they could bear a sword's weight.

The rest of the personal guards at Lysithea and Blake's command descended only one step. And kneeled.

Darkness erupted.

Thick, heavy smoke curled around us, dancing across the massive halls. The watery red and grey lights flickered, swallowed by that heartbeat of nothingness, by that momentary void. And then that emptiness dissolved.

And as though born from that very darkness, Lysithea and her son emerged, seated on their thrones, the smoke still curling around their feet, their thrones, their every command.

A wild beast freed of any physical chains.

Through my magic I studied it, that smoke, the power it contained. The destruction it could cause. The knowledge did not warm my bones and heart.

Because it had been the same magic, the Black Smoke, that had infested the majority of Arelesia. The same magic my very father had fought, the one he worked relentlessly for weeks to heal all the dying soldiers and citizens—men and women and children. None were spared. Even then, the loss was massive. Suffocating. It destroyed our resources, contaminated our seas, killed our people.

And there had been no antidote past my parents' magic, none discovered until now.

Should Blake unleash that smoke once again, we would lose armies in mere heartbeats. Armies we did not own.

The guards rose, but I did not care. Did not study them. Did not memorize their features. Did nothing but stare at the prince.

At those red eyes.

At Blake.

My world caved in. Everything I knew, everything I felt and tasted and breathed centered around him. Onhim.

And for a heartbeat that did not end, I was at the Norm. I was in his room, in his arms as we danced under warm lights at the Fire Festival. For a heartbeat, everything was but a memory, a flicker of the past. A warm, tingling sweetness licking my bones. My blood. My soul.

The world was mute. And dark. And he was the beacon. The lulling power, the force that held me by the hand, that guided me in a dark and star-flickered universe.

I yearned. And hated myself for it. Hated how I still remembered the third-year student with warm, amber eyes. Hated how I still remembered the gentle hands, the engulfing embrace, the bright, contagious smile.

Hated how I still saw him in my memories, instead of the wicked prince kissed with darkness.

But the man sitting opposite us, he wasn't him. Wasn't the one I had come to care for, the one I met under the shade of a tree.

He was the Blake I'd seen under the volcano. The Blake that did not mind coaxing every agonizing scream from my throat. He'd enjoyed it, every moment he inflicted pain on my body—how my lungs had begged for air, how my bones had almost snapped. He was the Blake that had tasted my blood and wished he could feast on my body.

He was the Blake who had destroyed my home. The one who wrecked our lives, who ruined our Norm, who spilled my people's blood.

And he was the one who would pay for it. Even if it still destroyed me, seeing him now, here on this throne.

I had prepared myself for this moment—had thought I did. But nothing was strong enough to shield me from that wave of memories—of pain—that crashed down on me. That swallowed me. That pulled me down, so down I could not see. Could not move. Could not breathe.

It suffocated me. It wrecked me. It killed me.

The way my heart clenched, the way it ached—it killed me. The silent feelings came pushing through the surface, seeping from their tomb, from that locked prison containing all that I refused to face. To acknowledge.

But I still swallowed those feelings and memories—choked down on them. Still hid the searing heat in my eyes, in my heart.

I held his stare.

Held that cold, brutal ferocity in it.

I eyed him the same.

An unbroken queen and not only a mere Cohar. I was power. I was queen. I was Death. And I would not bend before him.

I was the power that would end him, the strength that would burn all this darkness. I was the Chosen who would cleave this world and start it anew.

And he was nothing but my prey. The obstacle in my course.

So I stood with a mightiness that could bring mountains down, chin high and eyes hard. And allowed him to study me.

To study my runes, my hair, my eyes. My powers.

And I studied him, too. The dark magic hissing in his blood, wrapping his aura. The strength in his bones and muscles, the body bred to kill armies all by his own. The face that looked older than it had done a few weeks ago. The sharpness of his jaws, the furrowing of his brows, the red, simmering irises.

He is not the Blake I knew.

His eyes were still on me when I gave Lysithea a glance. The Queen. The one I believed had been my arch enemy since the day I came back to this world. The one I believed was behind every atrocity I had seen and heard.

She was nothing but the pawn in her son's game. The servant to Dearcious's every whim.

It would be a mercy if she succeeded. If she was the one to survive, to end the prince forged from her blood.

But it was a fool's hope, clawing at that wish.

There had been a feeble rattling, a sound meant to catch our attention. And it did, even though we only spared a glance to the guards who enclosed us even more. A circle of steel, monitoring and studying and assessing how we stood, how we so slightly inched toward each other, how we breathed.

And Claire, who still stood on the dais, closest to Blake, took us all in one sweeping stare, her eyes forged with an iciness colder than Rimelia's highest lands.

"Bow.'' Her order glided over the smooth, glinting marble, over the stone beasts, past the high-arched windows. It met a deafening silence.

A heartbeat passed.

Then the other.

Then Sédil's booming voice echoed around—through—us. It was cold. Mocking. Vile. It was the voice of the huntress who breathed vengeance instead of air. I took no move to silence her laughter, even when I noted the hardness of Yenes's face, the step that Claire took forward. The magic swirling at her fingers.

We had not obeyed, had not bent to the Queen and Prince. Lysithea had seemed irked to the bones at how stoic we'd been, how we did not grovel at the edge of her throne like all who had been before us.

And Blake, he was still staring. Still pinning his whole attention on me, on the supposed Cohar, devouring me with his eyes and following every trail of ink marking my flesh. Reading them, even from eighteen feet standing between us. His eyes seemed to darken a shade. And a feral sort of darkness seeped into his aura, tainting it, swallowing it, like ink in water.

I barely turned to face my Second, catching her mind through that ever present bridge my powers created, and seeped my magic around us ever so feebly, our manacles decaying until they were nothing but ash raining on the floor. Then I turned to the First Female who already was down the stairs, storming her way to us, her magic a flare of night-licked winds behind her.

A foreign power shot through the air. And the red and grey colored glass rained on us, shards exploding as that magic flicked from one arched window to the other in a mere heartbeat.

It had been fast, so fast even the dispersed guards had no time to react, so fast that by the time Yenes raised his sword and Blake and Lysithea had risen from their thrones, the First Female was already on the ground, face pressed to the glass piercing her skin.

Night-forged strings wrapped her limbs, numbed her magic, feasting on it. Sucking it. Pulling it out, tether by tether that shot back to its origin behind me. To the Huntress.

When I faced her back this time, her face was blank. Serene. But her soul was wild—delighted. And Leyath—Rhiannon—could not conceal her smirk. The Mistress of Strings. For all the weapons she excelled in wielding, strings remained her favorite, deadliest arsenal. I'd heard, back at the Ether Castle, how she had come to master this spell, how strings spouted from her fingers like cobwebs. She could have her enemies wrapped in instants, her magic seeping to every nerve, every fiber, until she possessed full control. Until her preys were nothing but marionettes swaying to her tunes.

Little had ever come close to understand this magic created by the Fifth King's—Gavin's—spy, some coming as close as deciphering its content, how the power pulsated. But none had been capable of fully fleshing it out, of adopting and ameliorating it. None until Rhiannon Prelius came into this world. And that bit of pride merged within that smirk, that bit of indication she willingly showed, I knew it was her who taught the Countess all she now knew.

"We do not bow." My words were perhaps addressed to the First Female, to the remaining fourteen guards who were a word away from slitting our throats, more than they were to the Queen and her son. They knew, both Blake and Lysithea, just how many rules granted us freedom from the crown. To not bow. To not obey. A tribe living by its own rules and traditions, freed of any chains. The Queen did not particularly look pleased, but mighty rulers before her had not interfered with Windreapers before. And she was no fool to do the opposite.

Claire growled, her snarl so similar to the one back when her wooden sword went flying. That same feral wildness in it. It truly had been a shame, losing her weapon. A trained guard against an amateur princess.

I only looked down at her, at how her body was curled and wrapped, her strengths fading, oozing out of her. A bit more and she would start coughing blood. Even perhaps vomiting it.

I wondered if I should go to that full extent, allowing my huntress's magic to destroy all the mightiness she wore in her posture, in her armor. Her blood would come up to her mouth, copper and iron drowning her senses, and perhaps I wanted her to feel this way, to taste what she'd done to me under the blaring spring sun in that open class.

It would take a bit more squeezing, just a bit more, to have all her bones snapped at once. To have all her powers lunging at Sédil, mixing with her own.

But it would be such a clean, merciful death.

So I raised my hand.

And the strings receded. Unwrapped and shot back to its owner, hissing around their holder like snakes before vanishing. All of it as fast as they had surged.

Claire's strength came back to her like an arrow hitting aim, spreading within her, coiling and trashing as she pushed herself up, picking the shard clinging to her skin.

Blood trickled from under her left eye, yet she did nothing to wipe it away. The First Female only snarled more.

And Sédil only smiled back at her.

But it was the prince's movement that had us all turning to stare at him, the way he reclined in his throne, his crown made of bones and fire and darkness perfectly hugging his scalp gleaming with another worldly hue. Something that was amiss in the twin one crowning his mother.

The hand that had been rubbing his jaws ceased its movement, and it had not been the eyes of a mere prince looking at me at that moment.

No. It was a warrior and a king and a power that had provoked war on this world eight thousand years ago.

"Speak.''

Indeed that voice, it was not Blake. Not the friend I had in the Norm. Not the sound I had listened to for hours.

And it was not even the one I heard under the volcano, in the Eye of Lamera.

It was darkness given sound, it was a cold, guttural growl laced with an unholy ferocity.

It was Dearcious speaking.