Broken Wings [Completed!]

Chapter 34

Villains always lost. In the stories engraved in modern history, princess stories - it was the hero that rose, leaving the villains burning in ashes.

And for the whole of Evira's mortal life, she had felt that she was losing. People called her a sinner, a murderer - she was the sister of the darkness. So when they clothed her with the taunts, she'd accepted the darkness, let it replace her blood with poison. They changed her, morphed her into a monster, and she'd accepted it with open hands.

She may have won the battle, but she'd lost everything as she did so. She'd lost Haku. The boy with a crooked smile, the one who made her feel properly, truly alive with his soft kisses, warm embrace. The string to making her feel human and normal finally torn.

Did that make her a villain?

Her silence said everything.

Maeve watched her with sadness, no doubt having heard everything in her own earpiece. She picked herself up, whistling for her dragon. It crashed through the roof and dug its claws into the floorboard with a dragon's roar, but the noise was just white noise in Evira's ears.

She couldn't move. Didn't want to face any more deaths.

A coward.

That was what she was all along.

Maeve's hands reached for Evira's chin and tipped it upwards, so her green eyes burned into Evira's own. "We'll survive this," she said sternly. It must have been the first time she said something non-bitchy because Evira only replied with a blink.

"Repeat it," she said.

So Evira did. Again and again. Until they were the only words she could utter, the only words that made it out of her throat.

We'll survive this. We'll survive this. We'll survive this.

Zach and Cas dropped down from above, the ring of protection drawing an outline around them. The light of the sky spilled down from above - Haku had reversed the curse of the Faerie Lands, dried the sky above until it was just a map of stars and the night sky. Now the sea soaked up the werewolves and faeries instead, washing away their sins.

"We heard," was all they said. Cas threw Evira her axe and she found the hilt, gripping it so tightly that her knuckles were white.

It was only when his eyes widened did Evira remember her injury. She turned her attention to her bleeding shoulder. "It's nothing," she reassured gently.

The physical pain was nothing compared to the sinking heart, the slow melody of death playing through her.

Her dragon, a red ball of flame, dived into the library and Evira swept herself up on it, urging it upwards and out.

Others silently followed her into the sea soaking the lands, so that around them were the sharks that swam beside them, blood trailing from them as limbs protruded out of their teeth. The blueness was a vast canvas, stretching so far it competed with the idea of eternity.

Quietness sank its claws in the sea as the fish swam freely across the ocean and faeries and werewolves fell into the darkness of the sea where the sun had never touched. She could hear nothing, but she could hear everything. The groans of the soldiers far away, the sodden weeps of the fallen, her own silent prayers.

"Euo, where are you?" She said into the earpiece.

"The mountains. Axel and Nyx are here. But the werewolves seem to have some protection against the water and my robots. They aren't getting swept away."

"Someone's betrayed us!" Zeph shouted as he craned his head over his dragon. "The werewolves have some sort of new tech that protects them from the sea. Like they've predicted what Haku would do..."