Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

Iwalked towards the palace with my heart thumping to a steady rhythm and my breathing slow.

A calm had fallen over me the moment I’d set out for this place.

I hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. I had no more room left in my heart for words of condolence and grief, and I couldn’t tell them goodbye honestly anyway. I had some friends I would miss, and I hoped Imra and the others would continue to run the clinics without me, but this was not a task I could turn from.

Revenge wasn’t something I had indulged in often, but I couldn’t let this moment pass. I couldn’t allow that wretch of a man to keep his throne and his life after disregarding hers so easily.

My sister had been beautiful in all the ways that actually mattered, but he had only cared about the way she looked and how he wanted to use that beauty for his own desires, to bend and break it, destroy and devour it.

The pale blue dress I wore hugged my figure and skimmed against my thighs, the movement of the fabric revealing the curve of my breasts and flashes of my legs as I strode toward the royal palace, walking straight between the still pools where I knew beasts to reside. No fear touched me. Death was the least of my concerns now, my one and only duty the sole focus of my thoughts.

The guards watched me approach, one of them glancing to the sky as if noting the late hour, but none of them said a word until I was standing right before them.

“What’s your business here?” the most senior among the four asked, his gaze slipping over my body before returning to my face.

No recognition coloured his features nor any of the others, and though I wasn’t surprised – the royal court was huge and I attended as infrequently as possible – I was relieved.

My lips parted on the words I needed to utter to gain entry to this place, but I stalled, feeling the weight of many eyes suddenly upon me and glancing over my shoulder as if I might spot the gods all crowded close, eager to find out what I might do.

“It’s a beautiful night,” I muttered, buying myself time as my pulse picked up a notch, the reality of what I intended sinking into me. Fae couldn’t speak an untruth. It wasn’t possible. And yet Herdat had offered me the gift of the words I would need to gain entry, so I had to assume that was what she meant. The power to deceive with the words I spoke.

“It is,” the guard agreed, his eyes not moving from me. “And you should tell us what brings you out in it at such a late hour.”

Whispers began at my back and my skin prickled with apprehension, my mouth drying out at the thought of speaking a lie.

It couldn’t be done. There was no way. And if the weight of the air all around me was anything to go by, the gods didn’t want me to attempt it either.

But as I considered my options, weighed this choice and what the alternative would require, I lifted my chin.

My sister was dead. There was nothing in this world or the next which could be stolen from me now, so either this would work, or it wouldn’t. Either way, I had come here with the intention of killing the man responsible for the end of my truest love, and I wouldn’t be turning back.

I felt a brush of ruinous fingers across my lips, a breath of sin in my ear and a weight of darkness settling on my soul as I solidified the decision within myself.

Herdat had felt it. She knew. And she had unleashed the seal on my lips, allowing me to speak as I willed, truth or lie, honesty or falsehood.

It had never been done. The gods had forged us in their idea of perfection, creating creatures of purity with the gifts of their own blessings. There had long been whispers of our corruption, of how in the millennia which had passed since our creation, the Fae had begun to rebel against the controls put on our existence, the price set for our immortality. We had rebelled in small ways, evading answers instead of speaking plainly, keeping secrets and committing sins. Skills intended for the protection of our kind had been turned into weapons of war. Affinities for seduction and beauty had been twisted into tools of manipulation. Games were played, rules broken, laws changed. We weren’t the creatures we had been when we were created, and I had heard more than a few murmurings of the gods’ discontent on that fact.

They had never intended for us to seek out the darkness in this world, but with each act of immorality, wickedness, and depravity, we fell from grace.

Once, our kind never could have contemplated the act I was about to commit, but here I was, ready to break one of the cardinal laws of our race.

Fae cannot lie.

“The emperor has need of me,” I said simply, the words rolling from my tongue like a sip of finest wine, their poison tasting so sweet that none of them even noticed it as they swallowed. “He asked for me to join him in his bed chamber.”

Silence echoed in the space that followed my lie. An implosion of all things which we had been and might have become. It was like every god in existence sucked in a sharp breath and the world was robbed of oxygen for it.

My lungs stilled in my chest and a deep purr seemed to echo from the centre of the universe itself as Herdat’s power swelled around me.

Carioth was laughing and Saresh was bellowing my name as if it were a curse, while Luciet began to scream and scream and-

I blinked and a veil seemed to lift from my eyes. One which stole the knowledge of the gods and their reactions from me, leaving me standing there, staring blankly at the four guards. They gazed at me in expectation, seeming not to have noticed the cataclysmic change which had taken place in the fabric of reality itself.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “Did you say something?”

“I…asked if you know the way?” a tall guard near the back repeated, and I realised he had already spoken the words once. No questions beyond that, no suspicion, or accusations. I had told them a lie and they had no reason at all to doubt me. Fae couldn’t lie, so I had to be telling the truth. It was incredibly simple and utterly terrifying.

“Oh, no, I don’t.” I admitted, and the corner of his mouth twitched with amusement, his gaze moving down my body briefly before landing back on my face.

“You excited?” he teased, and I had to fight the inclination to sneer at the idea of truly bedding the emperor. I would though. I had realised that when I’d set out on this plan. If I reached his chambers to find him awake, and I couldn’t easily strike, then I would do whatever I had to. If that meant bedding him before I killed him, then I could endure it. Though the mere thought of it had me wanting to scream and scream until my throat ripped itself raw.

“I am,” I agreed, letting them think what they wanted of that. I was excited though – excited to drive my blade into the black heart of the beast who had hurt my Aalia.

“Come. I’ll show you the way.” The guard jerked his chin, then set off into the palace, and I ignored the looks I gained from the others as I followed him.

We walked in silence, passing into the deeper parts of the palace which I had never so much as glimpsed on my few visits to this place in the past.

I chewed on my bottom lip as I followed him, wondering if Aalia had seen these same corridors when she was brought here. Had she walked down them willingly or been dragged by force? Had she fought this fate or accepted it, thinking he would get what he wanted then let her go? Or had she been smuggled in through some secret entrance? Brought in like the ugly secret she was always intended to be.

He’d killed her to hide the truth, and surely he wouldn’t have allowed many witnesses to his crimes? But I doubted the emperor had taken her body out into the city and dumped it himself. So at least some of the guards in this place had to be complicit in his atrocities. I wondered if the male I was following was one of them. Maybe he’d helped cover it up or had hidden other horrors in this pretty palace of corruption.

I didn’t know.

But all I did know was that Farish’s eternal reign would come to an end at my hands, or I would give my life in the attempt to end it. No more would this tyrant play god with the lives of his subjects.

We headed up a narrow stairway, Herdat echoing my steps, the touch of her darkness within me somehow letting me know that we were going the right way. We passed several more guards who ignored me entirely before I was led into a huge private living area. The candles had burned down low and no servants lingered inside, but I could see two heavy doors beyond the richly furnished sitting room.

“The emperor’s bed chamber is on the right,” the guard informed me, a taunting smirk on his lips. “No doubt he is eagerly awaiting you.”

“It will be one of the most memorable nights of his life,” I agreed, my gaze remaining locked on that closed door as the guard backed away and shut me inside.

I released a slow breath, counting to one hundred to be certain the guard had gone, his footsteps receding beyond the door, then I slowly pulled the dagger from the sheath hidden in the folds of my dress.

I took a step forward, then another, the feeling of the gods’ eyes on me present once more, though I felt Herdat closest of all, her dark power disturbing the embers in the fire as I passed it, making them swirl out before me like a herald announcing Farish’s fate.

The voice inside my head had been notably silent throughout this, but I felt the attention of that fractured part of me fixed on my actions now, like she was watching, cheering me on, wanting this too. The pieces of me reunited in this most powerful need for revenge.

My fingers burned with some untold power as I silently turned the doorknob, letting myself into the extravagant bedroom, the four-poster bed sitting proudly at its centre.

A fire burned in there too, the flames flickering rapidly as they felt the touch of darkness creeping close.

“Pay me in the blood of an emperor,”Herdat’s hungry purr rattled through my head, but I pushed her out, not wanting her needs and desires to cloud my own. His death was mine alone. Let her feast on his pain and his blood, but I would be the maker of his demise in its entirety.

The knife warmed in my hand, the metal humming with an anticipation of its own. I stepped across the tiled floor quietly, relishing this moment before the end of him, where he was at my mercy and knew nothing at all of his oncoming death.

My heart was racing now, thundering to its own beat as a darkness filled me in a way I had never known before. I hadn’t ever experienced hatred like this, nor craved retribution or vengeance in the way I did now as I stood over his sleeping form, the knife gripped tight in my fist.

I inhaled deeply, savouring his last moment on this earth, then I struck like a viper from a pit.

The dagger slammed through flesh and bone as it pierced his back, the force it required far more than I had anticipated. My knees hit the bed as I ripped it free again to the glorious chorus of the scream which sprung from his lips.

Farish lurched away from me, but I was faster, lunging after him and striking again, the blade catching on his ribs as I slammed it into him, and I wrapped my free hand around the hilt too so that I could use the fullness of my strength.

He choked on his own blood, screaming again, and oh how beautiful that sound was, how fucking blissful and freeing.

A noise of utter ecstasy escaped me as the power over life and death consumed me, and I raised myself up above him, tearing the blade free once more. An arc of blood sprayed across the room, coating my dress and skin with its hot splatter, and I grinned like a demon who had just been anointed in sin.

Farish threw an arm out towards me, bellowing for his guards while I countered the blow with a slash from my blade, spilling more blood onto the pure white sheets and embracing the darkness as it swept in to fill the holes which had been torn through my soul in the moment of my sweet sister’s death.

“Do you know me?” I cooed as I shoved him down onto his back thrust the dagger into his chest.

I looked right into his eyes as he screamed again, this pitiful, desperate noise from a man who claimed to be so much more than those he ruled over. Where was the eternal emperor now? Where was his unquestioned power and the loyalty of his dear subjects?

“Do you know my sister?” I hissed the more poignant question, snatching the blade free before stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.

This fury in me had no beginning and no end. The bloodlust could never be matched nor sated, and yet I wanted all I could claim of it.

I didn’t care what that made me. What he’d made me. Because I had come to collect this debt, and I would relish every god-sworn moment of it.

Farish bucked beneath me, and I moved to straddle him as I slashed at the arm which tried to throw me from him.

He was striking me, his fists pounding against my skin, but I could hardly even feel it. His desperation to live on was nothing to my ruinous desire to annihilate him, and my knife sank into his flesh over and over and over. I cracked right down to the centre of my being, and I began to grin like a wolf with a fawn between its paws.

“Aalia was worth a million of you,” I spat, stabbing again, blood flying, screams ringing. “She was all that you could never hope to be. So much better than all of us. And you should have left her alone.”

I could feel Herdat standing in my shadow, the cold whisper of her breath on the back of my neck as she watched and relished in this act. Her power slipped into me wherever it could, this obsidian darkness which stained me from the inside out, coaxing laughter to pour from my throat, a wilder smile to spread across my face.

His screams were perfection in their desperate, pathetic need for salvation which wasn’t coming. The guards were likely sprinting for us right now, but I was already dressed from head to toe in his blood, the sheets-stained scarlet with it, and there would be no bringing him back from this.

As if that thought had reminded me of what I was, my Affinities flared within me, the healing magic which coursed through my veins throbbing like a reminder of what I had been born to do. I could likely save him. Even now, as he lay beneath me, his screams fading and his thrashing growing oh-so-weak, I might have been able to draw him back to me if I were to use those gifts the way I had always done before.

But I wouldn’t use them. Probably not ever again. Let him suffer and die at my hand. Let him fucking beg. And he was begging, sobbing and snivelling through the blood, pleading for his pathetic life as I leaned down and drops of red fell from the tendrils of my dark hair.

“Admit what you did,” I whispered, the dagger lodged in his chest, likely puncturing his heart. “Tell me what you did to Aalia.”

“I killed her,” he choked out, blood spraying from his lips to coat mine as I leaned in so close I might have been going to kiss him. I licked the drops of it away, tasting his death on my tongue and relishing the sweetness of it.

“I admit it,” he gasped. “I’m…s-sorry. Please, just stop. Stop-”

“Stop, stop, stop,” I mocked, footsteps pounding through the room beyond his bed chamber, guards so close and yet too far. “Did she beg too? Did she beg you to let her return to her family? To her twins and her husband? To me?”

“Yes,” he panted, and I sneered down at him, letting him see exactly what kind of monstrous creature he had created in me with her death. “I’m sorry. I’m so-”

“Let Herdat burn you,” I cursed him. “Let her feast on your rotten soul until it is corrupted beyond recognition. Let peace never find you. And let you remain lost beyond the gates of the Garden for all of time, lingering in madness and chaos.”

I ripped the blade from his chest just as the door was flung open behind me, swiping it across his throat with a blow so savage that it half decapitated him.

Herdat moaned with pleasure as his death swept through the room like a wave of pure energy, right into her destructive grasp. I fell back onto my knees, laughing wildly with the empty triumph of his demise.

The guards were yelling and screaming in panic, grabbing me and tearing me off of the bed, my dagger lost among the bloodied sheets and left there with his corpse while I praised the gods for aiding me and laughed that hollow, endless laugh.

I didn’t fight them, barely even noticed them as the reality of my victory sank into my bones and I was left with the gaping hole of nothingness where all I’d once loved and lived for had been.

“Take me,” I implored Herdat, her power billowing around me as she drank in the death I had offered her and feasted on every scrap of it.

I saw her then, her horrifying form emerging from the shadows in the corner of the room, the candles guttering the moment my gaze met with her terrifying presence, the guards all shrieking in alarm as they were left blind in the dark.

Her clawed hand found my jaw and she lifted it, the lips of the goddess brushing with mine as she spoke straight into my mind.

“Ask me for more and it shall be granted.”

Light blazed before my eyes and a vision shuttered into me, one where I accepted her offer and allowed her power to flood through me in its entirety. She showed me the eternal throne where Farish had built his kingdom, except instead of the tyrant king sitting upon it, I was there, dressed in blood with a crown of bones on my brow.

My eyes were dark and empty, a cruel smile lifting my lips as I looked over my empire, my riches, the Fae all set to serve me however I pleased. The path to that throne was nothing but ash and bone, death and carnage, but she showed me how I would delight in it. How I would be set free from my grief if only I accepted her offer.

My body was humming with the thrill of the death I had just dealt out, and the ache in my soul was desperate for reprieve, for the grief to be gone.

“It will all be ours. Say yes and bring about the Age of Ruin. Say yes and set yourself free.”

Power rose within me as I considered it, this dark, tempestuous sea of destruction which could be mine so easily. With that one word. Yes.

But as my lips parted on that answer, as I let myself consider an eternity of power and freedom from the pain in my heart, I heard that screaming girl again. The me who wasn’t quite me. She didn’t want to be free of the pain, she didn’t want to forget. And as I forced my thoughts onto my sister, I saw her there, standing in the Garden, smiling at me softly, her hand reaching out as if to touch me.

She was all I wanted. Not a life of riches and power, or darkness and fury. Her. The girl who was so lost to me that all I really wanted was to join her in death.

“No,” I said simply. Easily. Because it was easy to choose death in that moment. Where I could see her waiting for me beyond the confines of this world. I had seized the justice she deserved and that was the only wish I had remaining for myself here. So let death take me. Let it take me to her.

Herdat snapped towards me with a defiant snarl, but a deep power resonated through the air and my eyes widened as Luciet burst into being before me, her skin coated in leaves and flowers, the goddess of healing. She cast an energy which seared my flesh before the two of them exploded in a blast of power which hurled me back against the wall.

I hit it hard, the guards surrounding me thrown away too, none of them rising from where they fell.

I pushed to my hands and knees, blinking at the destruction of the room, the furniture blasted apart and the dead emperor laying amid a coffin of bloodstained sheets.

“Run,” Luciet hissed in my ear, and I did.

I wasn’t running for my life, so I didn’t know what I ran for, but my feet hit the floor step after step, and I ripped the door open before charging down a staircase.

Bells were ringing all over the palace, the sound of booted feet colliding with the tiles as guards charged back and forth, hollering orders and hunting the palace for whoever had attacked the emperor.

Me.

They were hunting me like grouse in the long grass, and the power of the gods was the only thing which propelled me onwards through this hopeless maze of stone corridors and lavish extravagance.

It was so dark in the palace, every torch and fire guttered out as if a magical breeze had snuffed them all out at once, and I had to think Karu, the bird god of wind and storms, might be responsible for it.

The world was shifting around me, something changing in the fabric of all I knew, and I felt somehow responsible for it, for the way the gods were riled up, the way they hissed and spat and fought, whispering all around me.

Something was wrong. Inherently wrong with the world as a whole, and I was standing in the centre of the storm as it erupted.