A Court of Secrets and Moonlight

85: The Price

Leur

Perhaps this was hell.

I woke to complete and utter chaos. In the distance, people were screaming. The earth beneath me was rumbling, everything in my body shaking as I tried to sit up. My body was weak, every movement, every breath accompanied by searing pain. My armor was burned and wrecked, the Apenati still glowing on the ground next to me.

Hollow, that was what I felt.

Completely hollow and tired beyond compare, as if something had sucked the life right out of me. As if whatever light that burned in my chest had been completely snuffed out. And there was just nothing now.

I groaned as my eyes darted around, finding only smoking remnants of the blast and ashes. The Cauldron was cleaved apart, split into three.

And in the center of where it had sat- a void.

Lack and substance, absence and presence, nothing and everything- leaking into the world. Spreading, just barely but nonetheless.

Why am I alive?

How am I alive?

If this void was nothing... if it was un-made. Then perhaps it could be put back together by Gwydion... the sword imbued with Made essence, the antithesis of this void. If I could just find Azriel, if I could just get that blade-

Azriel.

Panic, hot and dark burst through me. An energy I did not think my body could ever possess again gripping at me as I shot up. Everything sped up as I looked around for blue siphons, only finding the shaking of my hands and smoke in the places where I should have seen him. And when I pulled on the mating bond- the bond that had died and come back again, the bond that had linked me to him no matter how far apart we were, the bond that I had held onto for all those years- I found nothing on the other end of it.

No home.

No future.

No mate.

Laying on the ground on the other side of the rocks, Azriel was there. He looked fine... looked like perhaps he was just sleeping. Unconscious maybe, perhaps he just hadn't woken up yet.

I tried to convince myself as I crawled towards him. I told myself that he was fine, that he could not- would not leave me. He was fine and I was overreacting. In a moment, he would wake up. He would wake up and we would fix the mess we had created, he would wake up and we would have hundreds of years together. A life with our family, children and holidays spent laughing. Years bouncing between Solarea and our home, all the plans we had made, all the promises that we had echoed.

But his siphons were not glowing. There was no blue light, no shadows, no hint of his power, nothing.

Maybe none of this was real.

Maybe this was all a dream, some kind of repayment for what I had done to the Cauldron, the hell I deserved for all the lives I had taken. Perhaps this was simply a vision meant to torture me.

I did not know.

All I knew was that when I reached him, when I finally drug my broken body over to the spot where he lay- Azriel was dead.

Azriel was dead.

No heartbeat, no breath, nothing.

There was nothing.

I was nothing.

Light cannot exist without the darkness.

Screaming, I could tell that I was screaming. His name, over and over again as I shook him, as I begged for him to wake up. All that remained of me was this emptiness in my chest, the hollow remnants of my soul at the lack of that bond, at the lack of him.