Darkness and Beauty (The Fated Series, #1)

Chapter 29 - Lance - The Jade King

"My boy."
I wish I were a boy again. One who never had to worry for his father's life, let alone be utterly helpless to save him from death.
"Hang on, father. We'll get you fixed up." I cast a greatly unconfident glance to Fauna who panics at she stares at his wound and just shoves her hands into the bloody hole. He groans at her harsh pressure and I scoot closer and take his hand. A pathetic attempt to redirect his attention away from the pain.
The corner of his mouth twitches a hair. "Youknowyoucould...neverlie tome, son."
His head lolls to the side. I catch it and use my knee to keep the rest of him upright before he tilts and falls.
I take it back. I take it all back. Every life, every cut, every wave of pain I've caused others – whether they deserved it or not – I take it back. I'll take every ounce of it back if it means he can stay. I'll carve out my heart, I'll slit my throat - I'll do anything that I need to do to keep him.
I lost mom. I lost Rose. I can't lose my father.
"Please stay," I beg him and anyone who's listening. I'll beg for the rest of my life if I must.
"You're stronger than I ever imagined you to be." His words rid of the slur, but that's never a relief when someone's dying. I should know.
"Dad..."
His head weighs heavier against my hand.
Dozens. I've taken dozens of lives, some of which had quick ends with no blood, other's bloody but swift, and some treacherously slow. I know every little tick death has. Every slight sign and weak spots. It's practically second nature to count the labored breaths and lessened blinks. Every time his lids lower he has to fight to raise them once more, and every time my heart stops thinking that he won't win.
He used to scold me for allowing my eyes to do the same thing when the night got late and the plans were nowhere near finished. Most of the time he'd make me finish the whole mission's reports, and the rarer of the two options would be him shaking his head with the faintest of smiles and telling me to bed before my drool smudged the ink and ruined the work I had already done.
Many think my father cruel and negligent, much like King Neven, but he just had different ways of showing his love, and odd or unconventional as they may seem to the eyes of outsiders, I would trade this moment for any other in the past.
His breathing quickens as he rallies his breaths to speak. I shove my body closer, not wanting to miss a word. "You never once failed me...no matter what I said or did...there wasn't a single second...where I wasn't proud of the person you were becoming...of the person...you are now."
Choking on his own blood, he raises both his hands to my face, and the feeling of his blood on my face...
"Don't leave me too."
"I won't."
"Promise me."
I stare resolutely into his eyes, and damn him - damn him - he forces his eyes to stay open to do the same.
"I...I promise."
My chest caves with the knowledge that this is the one promise he won't be able to keep, and he was the one to teach us to always keep our promises.
Damn him! He promised - he promised so he has to stay. He has to live. None of us have ever gone back on our word, and he can't start now. Not with this.
Damn him, not now.
"I love...love you - son." His next breath barely makes it through the blood and the likely damaged lung.  The weight I hold up for him has doubled too.
Damn him. And damn the fucking tears cutting off my vision from seeing him. Damn them to the Underworld and Helias.
"Lance." Fauna's voice is barely more than a whisper, but it's practically a scream for what it warns against. I hold tighter to his hand and put my forehead to his shoulder, listening to what's left of his heartbeat.
I know what she's going to say. Death's own hand has been touching my shoulder since we turned the corner, but now it's insistent. It hurts rather than simply lying there, a reminder of what lingers by even though I know what's to come.
I know what's coming - what has been coming since I saw him pinned to the wall. I knew that there was no saving him, but I just couldn't accept it. Not with him.
"You both remind me so much of your mother," he whispers, wheezing a bit with the effort it takes to slip his hand from mine and once more lift it to Fauna's cheek. "You were never born to be soft and quiet, children. You were born to make the world shudder beneath your feet."
I lift my head to see his eyes once more, but half a second of me doing so and he just...stops.
Fauna's pleading voices turns to a ringing in my ear when I realize that every heartbeat I was counting just now were his last. The breath that tickled my ear no longer lifts his chest, and I am the only thing keeping his body up against the wall.
My sister's hands return to his chest, her sleeves drenched in scarlett as she tries to continue to staunch the bleeding.
He used to cut his palm on purpose when we first started training to show us that wounds, though they hurt, are nothing more than reasons to get stronger, to keep fighting, and to do what it takes to win. We're mortal. Easily afflicted, but hard to suffocate when our hearts scream in a battle cry and our souls refuse to bow.
I would have to curl my fist just to keep from grabbing something to bind his cut hand because I didn't like the sight of his blood. My father was a strong man, and it didn't seem right to see him with even the slightest of wounds, regardless of his lessons or his need to prove them. He was my father - is my father. There's absolutely nothing in this world I wouldn't do for him. He loves me, cares for me, gives me a compass to point north...
He trained me to fight so that I could when my heart deemed it time to do so, and soon enough the sight of blood barely affected me, but this is just...cruelty. It coats my whole front half and my face. It chills my skin where the breeze that comes through the smashed window touches it.
I've been coated in blood before. This isn't just blood, and as I once again watch my sister try to once more beg and save our parent to come back, I shift his body until it falls entirely into my own and encase him within my arms hoping against all hope that it'll fend off death and he will come back. I hold him tighter than I would've ever dared to before and I beg just as Fauna does, watching the tears fall from my cheeks and into his salt and pepper hair just as quickly as the rain outside.
Fauna still fights against the wound, and I know I should stop her, but I can't. I'm too afraid to move just yet, because my next movement will be without him, and I always had him. Even when I was miles away or on another continent or on the other side of the world, I had him.
But now he's gone, and I don't know what comes next. He didn't write a plan for this.
I curse this world. I curse this world that takes and takes, giving you the materials to live another day, only there's no guarantee you'll be here the next. The Gods and the wealthy live atop their luxury while the poor grow and make their food and design the clothes they, themselves, can't afford. And when one of us dies, only the loved ones are the people who suffer. This world has taken everything but my sister from me. They tortured my mother until her slow death, stabbed my love, and shot my father. They've taken and taken, and never once did it consider that  in doing so, it'd create something entirely more dangerous than the ones that committed those acts. Never once did it consider what I'd do with the pain now rotting in my chest.
Well, they'll find out soon enough. The Jade King is dead. My father is dead. Grief is a terrible thing, but my father raised this keep on the ideal that we do not succumb to our emotions that threaten to drown us. No. We make them our sharpest blades. Insecurity becomes precision. Jealousy becomes confidence. Anxiety becomes strength. But mourning? Sadness? That becomes deterimination. It becomes your fuel and your resolve.
Your grief - one negative emotion - becomes the raging flame to your anger - your wrath, and though it's another negative emotion, it's your biggest strength so long as you give it a purpose that yearns not to seek revenge, but to uphold your purpose.
My father's future was my purpose. He's gone. Taken, and while I still hold his dead weight, I feel my pain turn into my new purpose.
Revenge is a poisonous bastard, and I'll seek it out just as I seek the same of those who killed my mother and Rose, but I will not go into those battles blindly. Like my father raised me to, I will use it as my kindling, but my new purpose is this:
Refuse to fall. Make the world shudder beneath my feet, because it certainty didn't hold back when shuddering mine.
I can feel as the killing calm settles within me. It's like a blanket being thrown over your head, only instead of covering your senses it heightens it. I can hear every clash of a blade out the window and the office doors, and every cry of the fallen as they follow my father into the next life. I can taste my father's blood, feel it the leftover heat of it that cools slowly falls down my neck as I gently lay him on the floor. The amount of wrath boiling inside of me is a force to contend with, and with their mistake of drawing blood in my house, in my family, so am I.
They've killed my father. They've made that abyss I've been working to ignore for the past year awaken, swallowing every last drop of kindness into its lightless depths, and now I'm entirely empty. I feel empty. It's a numbness that silences what love I have left to give to anyone else. There's no angel on my shoulder to tell me to see the bright way out. They wanted a war, they wanted to see the killers they've heard so many rumors about, but they didn't get that. They got something far worse. Something the Gods themselves will come to fear, and something that will make the world quake and howl.
Fauna and I lock stares over our father's body, the killing calm already settled in her dark glossy eyes, no tear falling anymore, and itching to be let out. Pulling the balaclavas back over our faces, we stand and walk out of the office, shutting the doors behind us. Jades and Cressidians fight on the ground floor and stairs.
At least the number of dead Jades are less than the Cressidians.
My focuses intensely, blurring on everything but the Cressidians while my mind focuses on the yellow capes they wear with such pride. The handles of my Sinister Blades easily slide into my palms, threatening to slip from my fingers with the slickness of my father's still-warm blood working against the leather. I tighten my grip until it hurts, and I don't loosen it.
I take out one Cressidians with a jab at the back of his neck and a vertical swing of Fauna's arm cuts the throat of another. One by one, with a single cut, a single hit of our blades, the Cressidians don't stand a chance.
We have watched our father die with their arrow in his chest, and now they want us to surrender? Blasted idiots are all going to the Underworld.
As we reach the bottom of the steps, six Jades at our back, everyone before us stops their fighting to see who threw their comrade's bodies down the stairs. We don't hesitate. We launch ourselves onto the nearest assassins. I let the killing calm take over. Let my grief hone my skills and move my muscles into action. I let everything - every fiber of emotion - pour out of me. I feel the pain of my mother's loss, the anger from Rose's, and the emptiness of my father's flowing through me like blood in my veins. I've lived through every spectrum of pain one could name. I've cried more times and longer than one could think possible. I would cry myself to sleep or to sickness. My world has been ruined and torn from my hands, and it is down to me and my sister to now find a way to stay standing when the ground is being pulled out from under us.
Not yet.
Falling like the leaves in autumn, the Cressidian assassins charge at us all at once, forgoing our own. The Jades move to get in on the attack but I order them to stand down and leave them to us. For one, Fey and I aren't in a sharing-caring mood. Secondly, too many of us have died tonight, we don't need to lose any more.
I feel like a whirlwind of steel, spinning, ducking, twisting...our father taught us how to fight. He taught us how to throw knives and how to take someone out without them. He gave us what we need to stay alive, knowing that his knowledge wouldn't save his own life. He never trained with us, only instructed, and I'll die before I let those lessons go to waste.
Pushing off the wall, I jump onto the shoulders of a man and swing my upper body down and then back up, forcing him on the ground. A swipe of my blade and his neck is bleeding. I'm already turning, throwing a knife right into the chest of a man about to attack Fauna. At the same time, she throws one behind me. The only thing telling me that her hit landed true is a grunt and thud of a body hitting the ground.
There's one more Cressidian standing. A tall, muscular, and angry-looking man. Together, Fauna and I walk to the man standing in the doorway to finish the fight.
The mammoth swings a hefty fist, but hefty means slow, and slow means an easy target. Ducking, Fauna swings her leg into the back of one knee, forcing him to kneel. Catching his arm, I grab the back of the mammoth's head and bring my knee up to meet his head. A loud crunch sounds from the impact, and before the mammoth can recover I kick him square in the chest, sending him tumbling down the keep's steps.
As we make our descent on the steps, my eyes catch on something on the roof of the building in front of us. I look up, finding the silhouette of a dark cloaked figure standing out against the moonlit sky. I don't need to see his face to know who it is. His shoulders are still wide, his stance still the same since the last I saw him. I'm about to chase after him when movement catches my eye again and instinct has me dodging to the left to avoid being socked. Fauna digs into his thigh with a long knife, and taking his hesitation, I grab the giant's head and look him straight in the eye.
"Say hello to Helias for me." I snap his neck, letting him fall to the ground.
I stare at the dead mammoth before me, not feeling at all satisfied with the number of lives I've claimed. When I look at Fauna, the same thought is running through her eyes. It's not enough. The death of our father is nothing compared to the number of lives we just took. Our father was the heart and soul of the Jade Assassins. The men we just cut down like trees are mere pawns of the game.
I look back to the roof, but as expected, Will's gone. There's no point in trying to track him and chase him down. He's long gone, and he wouldn't have left a clue as to where he was going unless he wanted us to follow. In that case it'd be a trap. A practical suicide assignment.
Turning back to the House of Jade, I find the remaining Jades standing on the steps and filling the doorway. Their clothes are slick with blood and rain, our cloaks keeping us from the same fate.
It's easy enough to read it off of them despite the fact that they know fucking better and should be concealing even the slightest of tics.
They know. You can see it in their eyes that they know he's is dead, and they know what comes next. With a glance to me, Fauna takes her place among them. Still standing in the rain, a bloody blade in my hand, she looks at me with sodden eyes, and speaks the vow.
"In loyalty and in trust, I offer my life to you, son of the fallen Jade King." She puts right fist over her heart and takes a knee, head bowing.
The Jades behind her follow suit, both in a farewell to my father and a welcome to me. They don't kneel for theatrics or formality, but for the love and respect of the new Jade King. For me.
It twists the knife already lodged in my chest.
Damn him.