Summer Garden

Luna

Luna gasped, falling to her knees, swords falling from her hands.

She felt rather than saw members of her army stepping up to protect her, but she didn't care. Her hands grabbed blackened soil in angry fistfuls. Not anger. Not this time. Tears fell from her eyes unbidden as she lay there gasping.

Trei was dead.

She didn't think it had been possible. She didn't think she could lose him, even in all of this. Janus had failed to kill him. The fates had failed to kill him. Summer had always been there, always in the last moment, sweeping in with the power of the goddess to change the world, and save it. To save him. Not this time. The ball of emotions in her head was gone.

She could feel the severed thread of fate dancing quietly in the wind as she cried, leaning into the soil.

She could see his look of dumb confusion as she'd appeared in the bedroom at the beginning of all of this. Feel her cheeks flush as she his face and felt herself imprint onto him. Felt him become her world.

Her world was over now. Vastras had won. Her victory was complete.

Luna stood up slowly, hands relaxed as she looked at the field of battle, tears in her eyes. The Fae would win, eventually. Some had died, and some were dying, but in the end, the mortals never had a chance. All this could ever be was a madman getting in a fear cuts of the knife before someone took his head. A madman's tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Luna raised a hand into the sky slowly, summoning her magic, her darkness. Her face was blank, and her heart was empty. She didn't feel anything at all, knowing what she was about to do, knowing what it would cost.

The world she wanted was gone.

She would usher in the new one with a sin to exceed the birth of the last.

The mortals began to panic, and the Fae slowed their attacks as the light of the sky vanished, blotted out by the rising storm of black dust overhead, as the princess stood there, weeping silently for what was lost. Her hair and dress shone in the darkness, the only light left in the coming darkness.

This was what she was born to do.

She was the Faen weapon of war. When nothing else could be done, when no one else was willing to act, it was her duty.

She was the Guardian of the Shrine.

She summoned the power entrusted to her.

Luna looked down sadly as she heard the screams begin. Heard the souls bound to her beginning to die. They were gone. The Fae were pulled apart, fragment by fragment and into the storm, into the stream of magic that was hers, preventing their return to the broken lifestream.

Justice had no voice in this world, and so it would remain silent. As silent as she, as she broke her vow as Guardian. As she broke every tenant of belief that all Fae held. As she became a shadow of a dying world. A world that no longer deserved to keep on living.

They'd all had the choices. They'd taken action, and doomed themselves. She was just doing what had to be done. What had to be done to end all of this, to stop the bloodshed, to stop the breaking of their hearts. To remind them of what they had done.

To remind the whole world.

This would be felt in every realm. Seen by every star. Every heart in every timeline would feel the cost.

Luna finally spoke, bitter words tumbling from her mouth.

"Hail, to the king."