Zodiac Academy 8: Sorrow and Starlight

The fog rose all around me as I ran on, any lingering sign of the setting sun far above the canopy of black leaves stripped away until I was left in nothing but a sea of those bone white trunks with tendrils of grey coiling around me.

The longest night was upon me, and the winter solstice was in full effect.

I panted through the exertion of my run, uncertain how long I’d been chasing those screams, but finding myself exhausted by my desperate hunt.

I leapt between two of the cursed trunks and skidded to a halt on the soft earth as I found a stone hut there, its walls squat and grey, the mist curling from its chimney in an eerie imitation of smoke.

The wooden door stood wide, the girl’s screams coming from within.

My breath caught in my throat and I drew my sword, stalking to the threshold. Fear made my bones quake as I closed in on the darkness within that building, something soul deep telling me that I wouldn’t like what I found in there.

But the girl was crying now, her sobs radiating through me with a gravity that was inexplicable, like her pain was my own, like she was shattered and ruined beyond repair and there was nothing left in this world which could free her from her suffering.

Phoenix fire lit along the length of my blade, and I rolled my shoulders back as I fought the urge to shift, knowing there wouldn’t be room for my wings inside that tiny building.

“Closer,” the mist seemed to whisper. “Help her.”

Its encouragement did nothing to bolster my confidence, and I swallowed against the knowledge that this was a very well laid trap. One put in place to lure any Fae foolish enough to set foot in this forest of curses and evil. But that didn’t mean the girl wasn’t real. I could feel her pain. I couldn’t leave her to this fate.

I swung my sword out as I reached the door, the brittle wood bursting alight with little more than a thought from me, red and blue flames devouring it, making sure no one could lock me inside once I stepped over that threshold.

The space within the hut was dim, but I solved that flaw with a flick of my fingers, throwing flames out to each corner, revealing all the secrets the shadows might have been holding. But there were none. Only a sobbing girl with ebony hair sitting in the middle of the room, her face buried against her knees.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her, the hairs along my arms standing on end as the wrongness within that hut pressed in on me.

I slipped into the room, my gaze skimming the bare walls surrounding us again just in case I’d missed something.

“I’m all alone,” she sobbed, a shiver going through her small frame. “All alone and it’s all my fault.”

“Why is it your fault?” I asked softly, dropping to one knee before her while keeping my sword in hand.

“Because I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t give them enough, couldn’t keep them safe. They all left me because I’m toxic, poison, the last choice.”

I swallowed the lump which rose in my throat at her words, the heartfelt depth of them resounding with some long-hidden part of me. How many times had I felt that way when I was a child? When no one ever wanted to keep us? When I knew that I was the reason Darcy had never been wanted either?

“You have no one at all?” I murmured, reaching for her arm, the touch of her frost-cold skin making a chill run into me too.

“I had a sister,” she breathed. “But in the end, she didn’t pick me either. Because she knows, she sees it.”

“Sees what?” I urged, cocking my head to try and see her face but she kept it buried against her knees, that ebony hair a curtain which spilled down over her too slim frame.

“How empty I am inside. How worthless.”

The girl lifted her head, and I stifled a scream as I lurched away from her, finding myself staring into my own face minus around ten years. Except instead of the stubborn, wilful child I’d often seen in the mirror, this version of my former self showed the gaps in her soul on the outside. The scars that had been left with every rejection she’d suffered marred her face, jagged lines cutting to the bone like everything covering them had been a mask.

“No one will ever truly choose me,” she hissed. “They can see my broken edges. They can taste my easy lies. They know me when they look at me, no matter how hard I try to hide the truth.”

“What truth?” I demanded, my hand trembling where I gripped my sword, this fractured piece of me wounding me with every word flung my way.

“That I’m not worthy of the faith they wish to put in me. That I’m a selfish, stubborn creature who cannot and will not ever put the needs of others above her own. I stopped anyone from choosing my sister until my sister was forced to stop choosing me. She had to, to be free.”

“Free?” I breathed, my back hitting the wall as I just stared at this girl who was me and who wasn’t me at all. “You think I’m a tether on her?”

I knew that she did because I’d always known it myself. Darcy was the one everyone was drawn to, she was the one who could summon strength and courage so easily while I was too jaded by life, too caught up in fighting the world off to ever truly let anyone breach my walls.

“Aren’t you?” the girl demanded, her eyes full of pity and reproach.

I opened my mouth to deny it, but how could I? I’d been a burden on her for our entire lives, I’d made it harder for her to make friends, meet boyfriends. My lack of trust in the world had forced her to hold herself back too. And when we’d come here, to the land which was always intended to be ours, I’d kept holding her back, shielding her from the world whenever I could and fighting it off whenever I had to. Would she have suffered half the things the Heirs had put her through without me there antagonising them at every turn? Or would she have found a way to peace so much sooner?

“She made her choice,” crowed the scarred girl who I didn’t want to admit was me, getting to her feet and padding towards me, the thin nightgown she wore revealing more scars on her arms and legs. They were violent, vulgar, the truth of me. “And it wasn’t you, was it?”

A lump of iron lodged in my throat as I fought the pain those words caused me, fought the memories of Darcy rejecting me in that throne room after all I’d risked to reunite us. I’d spent the weeks since the battle fighting to get back to her, desperate to save her, only to find out she didn’t need or want me to rescue her. She’d made her own choice, was treading her own path. And despite its brutality, she had chosen to stick to it rather than come back to me.

“Would you carve the silver from her eyes?” the scarred me purred, and I could feel the emotions she was trying to lure from me, the jealousy she was trying to stoke. “Would you slip a knife between her mate’s ribs in the dark?”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” I hissed, my grip on my sword tightening as she stepped closer still.

“You didn’t let yourself notice it before, did you? When you had your own mated male to distract you, you tried so hard to ignore it, but it was always there, wasn’t it? That choice she’d made. She lied and lied to you, left you all alone for months on end and watched you shatter rather than give up her truth. She chose him then too. And you were left to rot in the reality of what you are, what you always have been.”

“And what’s that?” I whispered, a tear rolling down my cheek as her words cut me open, cut me where the scars which marked her own skin lay and worked their way beneath my bones.

“A burden. Unwanted. Selfish. Alone.”

I almost crumpled at that assessment of what I was, of who I was at the heart of myself, but as I felt the fog curling around my legs, the fires I’d lit dying down around me, a voice echoed through my mind. A soul connected to mine through love and death and grief and hope. My other half. My reason for fighting as hard as I did.

“It’s you and me, Tor. No matter what, wherever we are.”

The oath she’d made to me when I truly had been the age the thing wearing my face was pretending to be. The promise that she didn’t want anyone or anything else more than she needed me. Soul-deep, unbreakable, the foundations of us both. And I wasn’t going to let this creature of lies twist my own insecurities into my downfall.

“There’s a problem with the tactics you’re trying to use on me,” I growled as I pushed all of that despair, self-loathing, and heartache away from me, stoking the fire inside myself with all the anger I’d been bearing for so fucking long that I was ready to combust with it.

“Oh?” the girl asked, tilting her head like she doubted me, but her tricks weren’t going to work anymore. They were nothing, insubstantial, the petulant insecurities of a child, but they weren’t even close to the truth of the woman I’d become.

“You’re assuming I’d rather die here, sacrifice myself in her name, free her from the burden of my weight around her neck.”

“Won’t you?” she cooed, something unholy flickering through her eyes as her bare feet padded closer. “Won’t you lie down here and set her free? Or will your selfishness keep growing and growing until it consumes both of you? Will you curse her even further than she has already been cursed?”

“My love for her is selfish,” I snarled in agreement. “And I’m no hero. Perhaps if I was, I would sacrifice myself here and now, lay down my life in the hopes that it might buy her the freedom you claim it would. That it might leave her free to rule without me, to love without me, to just fucking be without me. But my death would be the destruction of the beauty in her soul. My end would be the ruin of all the light in her world. So no, I won’t sacrifice myself so that the world can have more of her. I’d rather sacrifice the world itself, just so that I can be there to make sure I see her when she rises up to claim it. By her side, where I belong. Two halves of one fucking whole. And if you don’t know that much about me, then you aren’t me at all.”

The girl screamed again as I swung my sword at her, the blade carving through her neck with an impact that made my bones rattle as her blood coated me.

But I knew it wasn’t as simple as that, her scream echoing on and on, bouncing through the silent forest like a summons for every branch and bow within the cursed forest to turn their attention on me, to aim their darkness my way and cage me so this scarred girl could destroy me.

I didn’t wait to find out if the blow had been enough to kill her, I just turned and fled, heart thundering, muscles quaking. Phoenix fire erupted wherever my feet fell, the entire world bursting into flames at my back, and I let it all burn.