❝ Sometimes I feel like I have changed into something unrecognizable, but then I see you, and the love I feel tethers me back to this earth ❞
Maiya was walking a fine line. On one side was safety; her brother and mother and love, but the other was c...
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𝔐y home had slowly turned into a battleground of sorts for me. On the one hand, I had my father, monitoring my every move and trying to find any little thing to berate me over. Then, you had my mother, who wished to speak with me but the feeling was not returned, so I had to spend a fair amount of time disappearing from her. Finally, the Shadowsinger from the war camps seemed to appear everywhere that I went and he was making things all the more difficult.
I knew that he was my mate, I had heard the story enough times from my mother when I was younger to remember that there was never a feeling like it. You knew who your mate was, for the feeling inside of you was like no other, and your soul recognised them above all else. I wanted my soul to stop recognising Azriel though because what the Mother hadn't considered when she had found my mate, was that my father was still present.
My father had expectations of me, expectations that an Illyrian Shadowsinger could not meet regardless of who they were or how powerful they were.
I had been on the marriage market since I turned ten and six, though I knew if my father had his way, it would have been ten and three. So far, he'd had no luck in finding a suitor to marry me and in the six years that he had been trying, he had failed each and every time, down to a lot of meddling from myself. All of my hardwork would go to waste the moment he discovered that my mate had no titles, no land, no armies under his control and no money that could help us.
It was all greatly hypocritical, considering his own mate was an Illyrian, but I would not dare run the risk of having that sort of argument with him. Arguments with my father were nasty affairs, ones that often left injuries that took weeks to heal and left me banished for months at a time to the Hewn City.
I dreaded to think what he would do to Azriel if he found out that we were mates. I didn't put it past my father to torture the shadowsinger in front of me, or worse, kill him.
Huffing, I turned the corner, only to bounce off of a seemingly solid wall. The wall grunted, as I stumbled backwards, my balance faltering.
"Shit..." I hissed, before warm hands wrapped around my waist, catching me before I could hit the floor. Electricity shot through me, my soul humming in content as I cursed mentally. I knew exactly who I had run into, even before he spoke.
The universe hated me with a burning passion.
"I'm so sorry," Azriel told me, picking me up and setting me on my feet again with an ease that had my knees weakening. I huffed, wondering why my soul and body kept betraying my brain. "I should have looked..."
