Chapter 119

MANY YEARS AFTER THAT

(just before a new evil appears and it all goes to hell again)

The wind pushed beneath my wings as I soared across the mountaintops, the tips of my feathers brushing against Darcy's and flames peeling from our skin to trail in our wake.

The sun was just rising and my heart filled with love for the beauty of our kingdom, the clouds dusting the horizon and the ocean glimmering in the distance.

It had been hard work, had taken countless years of nurture and revolution, but finally I felt that we could look back across our reign and be certain that all the changes we'd put into place had made a real, lasting difference.

It seemed impossible that we hadn't grown up in this land of beauty and terrors, of magic and mayhem. I felt like I was a part of this world as much as it was a part of me. To imagine a life where we hadn't been touched by magic or cursed by the stars seemed impossible now, and despite how difficult the journey here had been, I didn't think there was a single part of it that I would change in hindsight.

"I feel them," Darcy called to me.

I closed my eyes, reaching out my hand and concentrating until I felt it too; the gentlest brush of warm skin and scales against my fingertips. Our parents were flying with us out here in the sky again this morning.

I smiled, falling into our long-established routine of recounting the various parts of our lives and the lives of our family which our parents may not have witnessed from beyond The Veil, making sure they knew all of it, wishing they could have shared in it too.

There was something about doing this while we flew through the clouds which always seemed to draw them closer, letting us hear the distant echo of their laughter or imagine the soft tug of their embrace.

This kingdom was ours. All of it. And as I shared a smile with my sister, I knew that no matter how many more years we spent ruling over Solaria, no matter what other trials the future brought our way, nothing was ever going to change that.

We had been two lost girls adrift in the mortal realm, but here, in this wilderness of magic and endless love, we had found ourselves at home.

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