Chương 127: Epilogue (Book 2 End)

Selara stood before an ornate full-length mirror and barely recognized the stranger staring back at her. The glass was surrounded by a gilded frame carved with serpentine motifs that wrapped around one another in endless loops. She wore a gown of deep blue silk that caught the runelight, its fabric spilling at her feet in thick folds. Delicate silver filigree set with teardrop sapphires hemmed the neckline, and matching earrings pulled gently at her lobes. Everything fit perfectly.

Everything had been chosen and tailored just for her. She tilted her head, and the spill of hair that fell over one shoulder blazed with rich orange roots bleeding into yellow at the tips, individual strands catching the light and throwing it back like threads of molten copper. Her golden eyes looked back from a face she was still learning to recognize. My hair and eyes… they're just like Mother's.

The thought manifested before she could help herself, but she crushed it down before it could expand into anything more. Pushed it back into the dark where she kept all the dangerous things. The gown was exquisite. She couldn't deny that. She had spent the better part of a decade in travel-worn leathers and twig-snagged cloaks, her hair tied back functionally, her appearance a necessity of practicality. But a part of her… a part of her had missed this. She just didn't miss the why of it.

"How fitting." Aurelian spoke little louder than a murmur. He stood a few feet behind her, his lean frame wrapped in a tailored charcoal coat with silver clasps. The silver-blond hair had been combed into something approaching order, though a few strands had already escaped to fall rebelliously across his forehead. He looked every inch the noble son. The noble son who wanted to burn the room down.

"It's been, what, four decades?" He spoke to the reflection; grey eyes fixed on hers in the glass.

"Over forty years of not being exactly what they wanted. Deemed unworthy. Just… bastard twins thrown out with the rest of the trash." His lips thinned.

"But now you have a bloodline that can survive death itself, and suddenly we merit attention once more." Selara met his eyes in the mirror, her own frustration reflected back in him.

"I know," she said. Closing her eyes she turned inward, where the ember representing her new bloodline waited for her. It sat at the core of her spirit, a concentrated point of living heat. In the days after the ambush, after her first death and her first rebirth, the ember had been a guttering thing, barely powerful enough to sense. But in the week since their arrival, confined to the suite with nothing to do but rest and eat food more decadent than anything she'd tasted in years… the ember had refilled.

Slowly at first, then with gathering momentum as the heat rebuilt itself layer by layer until it was full-to-bursting. She rested her awareness against it and let the warmth spread through her. Just for a moment. That warmth reminded her of death in the clearing. It had been cold, at first. Terrifying. Yes, there had been pain and loss of control and confusion.

But it was only when her sense of self had started to unravel that the fear truly began to take root, ushering in an existential dread that followed her into the nothingness. Then the warmth had found her. A single point of light in the infinite darkness, like the first star in an empty sky. It grew and expanded. Wrapped around her comfortably as if she'd sunk into a perfect bath after a long day's travel.

The heat chased the cold from her extremities and then from her core, tenderly permeating every layer of her being and filling her with life. Since childhood, she'd always felt a kinship with fire. And in the darkest moment of her existence it was fire that had saved her. Welcome home, it seemed to say. And then it had forged her anew. Aurelian stepped up beside her, breaking her out of the reverie.

With careful fingers, he reached for her left ear and adjusted the sapphire earring that had turned slightly during her moment of introspection. Then he rested his hand on her shoulder. Their eyes met in the glass once more. And in those eyes, she read what she always found there beneath the arrogance and the caustic wit.

"Whatever happens, we face it together." She placed her hand over his and squeezed once. A soft click from the doorway drew her attention. Kilorn stood in the open frame, perfectly still, as if he had been waiting for them to notice. The tall, bald seneschal's dark robes were immaculate, and the red rune on his forehead emanated steady light. He inclined his head in a precise bow, a gesture calibrated to the centimeter.

"My lady. My lord. He will receive you now." Selara studied him. The seneschal's features were a mask of calculated efficiency, with every line of his expression smoothed into an absence of opinion. His brown eyes were intelligent and wholly impersonal. She had seen him three times now, and each time a question nagged in the back of her mind: how does he bear it? She sensed the press of his power even from across the room. He was strong. Immensely so.

The kind of strength that would have made him a man of import in any kingdom, on any continent, in any era. And yet he stood in the doorway dressed in servant's robes, the brand of a slave glowing on his skin, waiting to escort two people to an audience with a man he likely despised. Is there anything left of who he was? Or have centuries of forced obedience scoured him hollow, leaving only the shape of a person and the function of a tool? That thought chilled her more than the cold air.

Kilorn gestured toward the corridor beyond, and they followed. The halls of this palace were vast, and sound echoed off the hard walls into the vaulted ceilings above. Columns of polished black basalt rose into sourceless shadow, their surfaces carved with geometric patterns that seemed to shift at the edges of perception. The floor was white marble veined with black, each slab fitted so precisely that the joins were invisible, the surface an unbroken plane that reflected their bodies.

Crystal sconces lined the walls at regular intervals, radiating diffuse blue light. There was something unnerving about the halls that Selara could not quite put her finger on. At first, it was merely the absence of conversation and the comfortable quiet of three people walking a stone corridor. But with each step deeper into the interior, the quality of that silence changed. The rustle of Selara's silk and the soft percussion of Aurelian's shoes grew thinner. Softer.

As if the air were congealing and absorbing vibrations before they could travel. By the time they turned the third corridor, the phenomenon was undeniable. Selara's gown, which had whispered with every step, was now muted. She felt the fabric stir against her, but the air swallowed its sound before it reached her ears. Footsteps reached her only as faint pressure through the soles of her shoes and nothing more. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The temperature dropped alongside it. The ambient chill of the halls deepened and bypassed her skin to settle directly into her body. Selara used her magic to push back the cold, feeling Aurelian do the same beside her. They passed a mural that stretched across the entire left wall of the corridor, twenty feet high and running for dozens of yards. The scene depicted a dark forest shrouded in silver mist. Selara faltered mid-stride, for at the center of the painting knelt a woman.

Her head was bowed, obscuring her face in the shadow of dark hair, but the details were unmistakable. Green-tinted skin was visible along her forearms and hands, and the pointed tip of an ear protruded from beneath her hair. The matriarchal figure knelt before a younger man in golden armor, her hands extended, offering a luminous crystalline mushroom that glowed purple. It was the first of many such triumphs. As they walked, the man in golden armor was a constant—his victories rendered in painstaking detail.

He stood over the shattered carapace of a colossal beast whose claws had carved canyons. He accepted the broken standards of a horde of barbarians, their faces engraved with defeat. One after another, the murals depicted the same story: every knee had bent, and every neck had bowed. At the conclusion of their procession, they found the doors of the throne room standing open and it was just as cold as the man to whom the murals paid tribute.

Selara eyed the bas-relief legionaries marching in formation across the walls as they stepped inside. Blank and identical stone faces extended in an endless army. Living guards lined the approach. The Eternal Legion. They stood motionless at intervals of precisely ten feet, encased in full plate of blackened steel, visored helms revealing nothing of what lay within. Each carried a spear that emanated a deathly chill even in this cold. A localized snowstorm formed and swirled around the tips.

At the far end of the aisle, the throne itself waited. It was hewn from a single mass of stone so black it seemed to exist as a jagged hole in the visible spectrum. As if a piece of the night were held in the room. Every plane was angled aggressively, as if the seat hadn't been crafted so much as it had been broken from some larger whole. The material drank the ambient light at its borders, creating a faint halo of dimness around the object itself. She knew what it was. Every child of the Dominion knew.

The Heartstone of Avakian. An onyx dragon, whose territory had encompassed the Tjaart Mountain range and the critical rune gate nexus at its center. It was the last natural barrier between the free western kingdoms and the Empire's consolidated eastern provinces during the Unification Wars. The histories said Caelverax had fought the beast for three days and three nights in single combat around the caldera of Mount Tjaart.

When it was over, he'd carved the throne from the dragon's petrified heart with his bare hands and carried it on his back to the capital. Pfft, Selara scoffed internally. As if he could have been bothered to carry it back on his own. She rolled back her shoulders and faced the man who sat upon it. Caelverax the First occupied the throne as if he had grown from it.

His hands rested on armrests that weren't visible in the black material, with his back straight and broad chest squared beneath robes of deep crimson trimmed with gold fur. He had a bald and ageless face full of angular planes that was utterly unreadable. His eyes were black pits, dark and reflective and merciless. The chill that had dogged their entire approach radiated from him, leaching the warmth from everything it touched. The chamber was otherwise empty as Selara surveyed the vast space.

The few previous times she had seen this hall it had been a crush of bodies. Courtiers in layered silks vying for proximity and ministers clutching scrolls. Sometimes even petitioners in long queues stretching back through the open doors. A working court, filled with the barely controlled chaos of governance. Today, the marble acres stretched barren from wall to wall. Kilorn took three soundless steps forward.

When he spoke, his voice felt disproportionately loud, each word projected as if the silence itself had parted to let it pass.

"Presenting the Lady Selara Azh'vail and the Lord Aurelian Azh'vail." Azh'vail. Oh, Mother, how I wish you were here right now. You'd know what to do. The Emperor turned indifferently to Selara. He bypassed every pleasantry, glancing at the changes in her hair detachedly as he addressed the only thing he cared about.

"The bloodline." He spoke with a deep, bassy rasp.

"Is the power restored?" A flash of annoyance at his brusqueness pricked her composure, but there was nothing to be done for it. She straightened her back and met those depthless black eyes with her golden ones.

"I... believe so, but I have no way of knowing for—" The cold hit her before the pain. An icy wrongness suddenly spreading through her chest. She looked down. Through the blue silk and silver filigree of her dress gaped a perfectly circular hole where her heart and torso should be. She could see the marble floor through her own body. Cold froze the edges of the wound, sealing the tissue into a ring of black frost. The destruction so complete that the gown's fabric hadn't even torn. Her legs folded.

The floor rose to meet her knees, then hip and shoulder, each impact making less headway through thickening sensory dissolution. She thought she felt someone shaking her. She hoped Aurelian would be safe. The last thing she saw was Kilorn. His placid expression had cracked. A hairline fracture in the unflinching mask, there and gone in a fraction of a heartbeat. A small frown.

The downward pull of his mouth and the slight narrowing of his brown eyes conveyed something she couldn't parse in the milliseconds remaining to her. The cold took her at last, followed by darkness. An absolute zero of nonexistence—a void so total that the concept of cold lost meaning because there was nothing left to feel except the absence of everything. An interval of pure nothing that lasted an instant or an eternity. Then the spark came once more.

The tiniest point of light impossibly distant in the infinite dark. The faintest suggestion that heat could still exist in the emptiness. She reached for it without hands, somehow moving toward it by a deep instinct to live. When they connected, warmth expanded in a rush of all-encompassing tenderness, wrapping around the nothing-that-was-her and filling it with light and heat and the fundamental assertion that she existed. Before long she felt the freezing marble under her bare feet. That was the first sensation.

She stood, naked, the destroyed gown burned to cinders along with the body that had worn it. The throne room's frigid atmosphere immediately prickled gooseflesh across every inch of her newly formed skin. She drew a ragged breath that tasted of the ash of her rebirth, quickly using her magic to fight back the cold. Heavy wool settled across her back. Aurelian. He was beside her in an instant, his fingers gripping her shoulders with a force that would leave bruises.

She opened her eyes to find his face level with hers, a ruin of controlled fury—forehead vein bulging, grey eyes burning. But his grip was solid as an anchor. When their eyes met, the rage receded behind something older and fiercer.

"Be strong. You are not alone," it said. She reached up and clasped his forearm.

"Good." Caelverax revealed nothing of his pronouncement in his features, nor the heartless treatment he had just administered.

"This shall suffice. You have finally proven yourself a useful asset, Selara." He gestured with two fingers. A lazy flick of the wrist that dismissed a lifetime of rejection and a moment of murder with equal disdain.

"Kneel." Rage hit her so hard she vibrated with it. She'd just died. Been killed. She looked below the throne at the man standing in front of it. Kilorn had regained his placid features. The red rune on his forehead glowed softly, and a phantom itch ran across the faint scar on her own skin. It followed her even through death and rebirth. The choice wasn't if she would kneel, but how. Caelverax wouldn't force her body to the floor if he didn't have to. But one way or the other, she would kneel.

She found Aurelian's eyes and drew strength from the wrath she saw mirrored there. Then she released his arm and gathered the cloak around herself with as much dignity as it would allow. She sank to her knees and bowed, her hair falling around her face like flaming curtains. The marble bit into her kneecaps through the cloak's hem. Kilorn stepped forward.

"Declare your fealty." Selara stared at the marble before her knees. The words waited in her memory, rote phrases she and Aurelian had been forced to memorize as children, drilled into them by tutors who knew the twins would never be important enough to speak them aloud. A catechism for the discarded.

"Hail, Emperor—""No." The interruption was soft. Almost gentle. Caelverax fixed those dark eyes on her across the expanse of marble.

"Your previous insignificance is concluded. You will assume your station in this court and address me accordingly." Selara closed her eyes. The tears were there, hot and insistent against her lids. She bit down on the inside of her cheek until blood flooded her mouth, using the pain to hold back what was building inside. Aurelian was behind her. She felt his presence like a second heartbeat and knew his fury echoed her own. She opened her eyes and defiantly raised her chin to stare at the man who would own her.

"Hail... father." She continued the recitation through clenched teeth, the memorized phrases falling from her lips in a monotone that stripped them of everything but their function. And as the final words of fealty were absorbed by the ever-devouring silence, the blank face of the Emperor changed at last. He smiled.