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ORAYA
My father stood before me.
The room had grown dim and hazy, as if coated in a thick fog. Nothing felt real except for the foggy, gray nothingness.
Foggy, gray nothingness, and him.
I had dreamt of Vincent countless times. But this version of him felt so much more real than even the most vivid of them. The fine details of his face struck me like a knife to the chest—all the things I didn’t realize I’d forgotten, like the slight crookedness to his nose or the way his hair favored the left side over the right. The version of him in my mind was generic, sanded down by months of absence, even as my grief clung to him.
I said, mostly because I needed to remind myself, “You’re not real.”
None of this was real.
Vincent smiled sadly at me.
“Aren’t I?”
Mother. His voice.
“I’m real in every way that matters,” he said.
“You’re a dream. A hallucination. I’ve lost a lot of blood and—”
“I left so much of myself here, in this room.” Vincent’s eyes lifted, as if taking in this place beyond what was shrouded in darkness. “More than I ever had intended to give it. And all of that still remains, even if I do not. Isn’t that real, little serpent?”
It seemed so, so real.
“I’m inventing you,” I whispered. “Because you’re what I want to see.”
He lifted one shoulder in a delicate half-shrug. It was such a familiar movement, it made my breath stutter. “Perhaps,” he said. “Does it matter?”
In this moment, it felt like it didn’t.
He stepped closer, and I took a step back. He froze, momentary pain crossing his face.
“The things you’ve seen here have so tainted your image of me? I meant to give this place all my greatest achievements, my greatest ambitions. Instead, it became a monument to all my greatest mistakes.”
So many mistakes in the end. Never you.
Vincent’s final words flitted through my mind. He flinched, as if he heard them too.
“So many mistakes in the end,” he murmured. “I never wanted you to see this version of me.”
“I never wanted to see you this way.”
And Goddess, I meant it. Sometimes I envied myself from a year ago, who’d known, beyond any doubt, that her father loved her. Yes, it was the only thing she could believe in, but that, at least, was solid, immovable.
Losing my trust in Vincent was more than losing trust in a single person. It had broken something within me, destroyed my ability to put that trust into anyone else.
Pain flashed over his face, there and gone again so quickly, I thought it might be a trick of the light. The idea that this version of him could be a figment of my own mind slipped further away. If it was a hallucination, it was such a perfect one that it might as well be real.
And with him standing right in front of me, the anger that I’d been suppressing for months bubbled up to the surface.
“You lied to me,” I ground out. “My entire life, you told me the world was a cage. But it was you that put me there. You manipulated me from the time I was—”
“I saved you,” he snapped, lurching closer.
Then he winced, as if he had to clamp down on his anger, force it back.
“You kidnapped me,” I choked out. “You killed my mother and you—”
“I did not kill her.”
“Yes you did!” My voice boomed through the room, echoing off the stone ceilings. “You went to Salinae that night knowing she lived there. You destroyed it knowing—”
“I—”
No. I’d had enough of this. “No more lies. I’ve had almost twenty years worth of them. I’m done. Done.”
Vincent snapped his jaw shut. A muscle twitched in his cheek, as if flexing with the force of withheld words.
The room seemed to grow a little more solid, the fog thi
“This magic,” he said, more calmly, “is a living thing. And this, the center, is the most demanding piece of all. I’ve had to come back over the years, feed it more of myself to keep the spells strong. It’s the most important one, and yet the weakest, because I had to get a different sorcerer to help me finish it. After—”
After she left. He didn’t say it. Didn’t need to.
His gaze slipped over his shoulder. The anger was gone. Only sadness remained. Suddenly, my father looked so breathtakingly old. Not the old of wrinkled skin or graying hair, but the old of sheer exhaustion, right from the soul.
“Do you want to see, little serpent,” he murmured, “what memory it took from me?”
No, I almost said.
I didn’t want to see it.
But I’d come too far to turn back now. Swallowed too many lies to turn away the truth.
Slowly, I joined him at the obelisk. I lifted my hand, and laid it over his.
The night is cold, the only heat from raging fires that burn the city of Salinae.
I do not feel either. As I fly over the city, a shell of what it once was, I feel nothing but satisfaction. It has been a hard year. I’ve worn this crown for close to two centuries. Few Nightborn kings—few Obitraen kings, in general—manage to cling to power for so long. I have known this for a long time. But lately, my enemies have been stirring in the shadows. I feel them surrounding me at every party, every meeting. I feel their eyes on me when I am alone in my bedchamber and when I stand before my people.
Power is a bloody, bloody business.
I have gotten soft these last few years.
But the time for softness is over. I need to carve away my weaknesses like rotting flesh. And there is one particular necrosis that I’ve allowed to plague me for too long, because I’ve been weak. Too weak to give up my little fantasies about a woman—a human woman—who scorned me, and the bizarre comfort I got from the idea that she was still alive somewhere, and my shameful commitment to a promise I once made to her.
Lately, I’ve been having dreams. Dreams of her. Dreams of myself, driving my sword through my father’s chest. Dreams of a silver-eyed little boy thrusting a blade through my heart.
I didn’t come to Salinae to kill her.
I tell myself this, though I don’t know why. No previous Nightborn king would hesitate to kill such an obvious liability.
You’re too soft, my own father whispers to me, and I know he’s right.
I don’t need to kill her, I tell myself. I only need to kill the child. The child is the danger. She is inconsequential.
But when I fly over the Salinae human districts, burning and burning with Nightfire, and I land before the pile of ruin that used to be a house, I’m not expecting the intensity of emotion that spears me.
I stare at the house—what once was a house—for a long moment.
I smell no life. I hear no heartbeat. Once, I could sense her from across the room—across the castle—like her body itself called to me, making its presence constantly known.
Her absence now is even more overpowering. A great hole that has opened up in my soul.
Regret, fierce and unrelenting, tears me up.
Three of my soldiers surround the remains of the house, but they haven’t yet seen me. I consider flying away. Every part of me wants to turn away from this wreckage and lock it somewhere I don’t have to think about it.
But the absence of the heartbeat I was looking for made me miss the one that remained. The three Hiaj below were circling something, their interest piqued with hunger.
I can, at least, finish what I came here for.
I land. One of the soldiers is cursing and rubbing his bloody hand.
“A lamb?” he mutters. “More like a viper.”
Then the warriors notice me and hurry to bow. I don’t pay attention to them.
Because by then, I have seen you.
You are a lone flicker of light in an expanse of death. The only living thing in this pile of rubble.
In my dreams, my child is a mirror of myself. It is my own face I see when I think of dying by my Heir’s hand.
But you, little serpent, look so much like your mother.
I kneel before you. You are so very small. Surely small for your age, though I’m not sure exactly how old that is. Time can be strange for vampires. Your mother has lingered with me for so long that sometimes, I can’t remember how long it has been since she left.
You have long, slick black hair that covers your face, and freckles over your nose that blend with the smears of blood and soot, wrinkling as you sneer at me. They make me think of another time, long ago.
But those eyes.
You have my eyes. Silver as the moon, round and full of steel rage. The rage is mine, too. The fearlessness.
I reach for you, and though I can hear in your heartbeat that you’re afraid, you don’t hesitate to snap at me, sinking your little teeth deep into my finger.
I will not lie to you, little serpent.
I was expecting to kill you that night.
But what I was not expecting was to love you so devastatingly much.
It hits me so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, that I don’t even have time to brace myself against it.
You glare at me, like you’re ready to go down fighting even against one of the most powerful men in the world, and I smile a little, despite myself.
It takes me a minute to recognize the sensation in my chest. Pride.
I think of my own father and the way he spent my entire life crippling me out of fear of what I would become. Think of the night he casually threw my newborn baby brother out the window to the demons.
It is incomprehensible to me that my father ever felt for me the way I feel in this moment.
Surely no one ever has.
I ca
From that moment, little serpent, I could not entertain the possibility of killing you.
I’ll do the next best thing, I tell myself. I will raise you. I will protect myself from you by protecting you from a world that would teach you how to kill me.
It can be different, I tell myself, than how it was with my father and me.