Zodiac Academy 8: Sorrow and Starlight

I was on my knees, bile rolling up my throat as my gaze remained locked to the visions of me in battle, the merciless creature which lived just beneath the surface of my skin and had torn through countless lives so easily.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been trapped there, staring at myself, tears burning down my cheeks as I watched the carnage I’d unleashed without flinching. Flashes of my father’s terrible reign were interspersed with what I saw. I listened to his justifications, his excuses, the words he spoke echoing my own. But he had an excuse for what he’d done. Lionel had been the cause of his brutality. My actions had been entirely my own.

I couldn’t remember why I’d ever come to this place, the truth of what I was at my core devouring me until I was nothing but a relic of the girl I’d been, kneeling there before my own truth and sobbing at the reality of what I was.

How could anyone believe that someone capable of such violence could be worthy of a crown? How could anyone believe that a monster made of a wicked fury like that could be deserving of love?

I choked on that word as it resounded through my mind, crippling me beneath the weight of it as I felt golden eyes resting upon me from somewhere beyond my own reality.

“Get up,” the wind seemed to growl in a tone so familiar that my pulse thumped loudly at its command, though I remained kneeling where I was, watching my own destruction play out.

I was the thing that the people of this kingdom should fear, the true heir to the monarch they had all hailed as savage beyond reason. I was merciless, vengeful, furious. And those parts of me had only festered since that battle. Any softness I had once been able to lay claim to had been burned away by the flames which had coated my body that day. By the loss of…

I lifted my head as the ghost of a touch brushed my cheek, my limbs trembling in the wake of my own destruction there upon that ferry, at the foot of a creature who wore my father’s face.

“Get up, Roxy,” the wind snarled, and my chin lifted higher at that name. That fucking name.

I found the ferryman smiling down at me with nothing but malicious intent in his foul gaze while I broke at his feet.

“Few can face the horrors of their own self and stand by them,” he purred in the doting voice of a father who I had never known. “Especially those guilty of the acts you have committed. What is unbreakable and yet so easily shattered, what is cunning and honest, brutal and vulnerable, pure and tainted?”

My eyes flicked to the water once more and for the briefest moment I saw something beyond my own form raging my way across the battlefield, merciless and ruinous. I saw a golden Dragon tearing across the sky, fire erupting from his jaws while light glinted from his metallic scales and set my heart pounding in my chest.

“What is greater than all fear?” I hissed at the ferryman as I met his gaze once more, the tears drying on my cheeks as I summoned the last of the strength in my limbs and sat back on my heels. “What is more powerful than selfishness and more brutal than hate?”

“You may only answer once,” the ferryman purred and this time there was a crack in his voice, in the perfect visage of my father, a guttural growl tinging his words as if he could see the truth of me just as plainly as I was beginning to see it too and it wasn’t such an easily destroyed thing after all.

“What will fight without end and destroy without mercy?” I demanded, rallying my strength as I pushed myself to my feet and faced the demon which haunted me.

“Look into the depths of the pool again,” he crowed. “See the truth of what you are.”

“I did look,” I replied, my voice a brittle, ravaged sound as I thought over all I had seen of myself, of the savagery, the endless, formidable power and of how furiously I had turned that upon my enemies. “And I saw something which you had been hoping I’d forget.”

“What is that?” the ferryman asked, the water beginning to churn beneath us, the ferry bucking precariously, making my gut swoop as I fought to keep my balance.

“The reason I became that creature.” I pointed to the burning monster who raged across that battlefield without turning my head to look at her again. Because I had already looked, I had already seen, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. “Love.”

The ferryman hissed like a wildcat as I answered his riddles with that word, my skin erupting into flames as my wings tore from my back, shredding through my jacket and making my pack thump down on the raft as I let him behold the creature of nightmares that resided within my soul.

“Love makes a monster of me,” I continued, stepping towards him, the print of my boots burning themselves onto the wood of the ferry which hissed and spluttered in useless protest. “I have tasted the depths of love born from the embers of hate and I have lived through every emotion between the two. I have sobbed and raged and begged and cursed the stars themselves, but none of that made the slightest bit of difference. So I let that love turn to vengeance, I let it fester and blaze inside of me, and I found a way to defy the stars themselves. You’re standing in the way of that path, which means you must have been hoping to meet with this monster yourself.”

“Love is pure,” the ferryman denied, backing up a step as I advanced. “Love is sacrifice.”

“I have sacrificed!” I shouted and the flames which lit my body blazed like a beacon for all to see. “I have given everything I was and everything I am to this fight. I have cried and raged and pleaded for the heavens to favour us just once, but they turned their games on us instead and took all I had to offer. I never promised to give them any of this. I never agreed to the price they chose, so let my love be unbreakable and brutal and cruel and endless, the harbinger of war and the summoner of violence. Let it be all those things and more because I am done sacrificing myself for the stars and their entertainment. I am done being a puppet in their games. They took from me too many times and now they will have to face the monster they made when they incited me because I. Have. Had. Enough!”

I stomped my foot down on the ferry with that final word, power erupting from me as the wooden raft bucked wildly beneath my feet and the ferryman screamed as he was thrown from it, the roiling water hissing and spitting as he plunged into it.

The world seemed to shudder as he disappeared beneath the waves, echoes of his demise radiating out from that place as if the entire balance of the Elements themselves had shifted with his defeat.

But as the raft was flung across the water and my wings flared to help me maintain my balance, I spotted an edge to that eternal pool, an end to the drifting and I fixed my eyes on it. I may have been a monster, but I had never claimed not to be.

The wind picked up as I closed in on that edge, the world itself seeming to plunge away into nothing beyond it, and the raft I was perched upon gaining speed as I raced towards it.

There was a pulse echoing through the air itself, a vibration in the world which had started with the ferryman’s death and would only end when I finished with what I’d come here to do. Or when I died trying.

The ferry bucked and swayed beneath me, that edge racing closer with every heartbeat and as I shot over the precipice, I leapt into the sky, grabbing my pack as my wings flapped hard and caught in an updraft.

Coiling smoke hid the drop beneath me as the raft shot away into it, no sound marking its passage, nothing at all indicating it had even impacted with something at the bottom.

The wind twisted around me, spinning me on the spot and making my flames flare as it kissed its way through them, a greeting and introduction.

There were voices in that wind. Breathy pleas and heartfelt prayers. My chest ached as I heard them all, countless voices crying out to the stars to save them, while nothing but silence came in reply. I heard my voice, felt my chest ache with the sobs that had wrecked me when I found Darius on that battlefield, his body cold and empty, his soul gone and mine shredded right along with it.

For a moment I was paralysed there, caught in that memory, in the pain which had carved out a piece of me ever since. In some ways, I was still there, on that battlefield, holding his cold hand in mine and begging fate to change its mind.

I hadn’t left him. Not for one moment. I hadn’t released his hand even when I’d taken the dagger which had killed him and sliced my own flesh open with it. I hadn’t let go. And as that scar tingled along my palm, and the scent of smoke and cedar seemed to billow around me and my own vow to him buzzed through the air, I knew I never would.

He was the destroyer of me. The ruination of the girl I’d been and the creator of the woman I had become. He was my one true love, without any help or hinderance from the stars. He was more than my Elysian Mate. He was more than my equal. He was my end. And I was ready to keep the vow I’d made to him all those weeks ago.

The Winds of Sky and Spirit continued to whisper to me, but I was beyond listening to them anymore.

I tilted my head to look down into the smoke coiling beneath me, looking towards the endless drop and knowing for a fact that I would not fall forever once I gave in to it. Because it may have been eternal for a soul who relied on the stars to grant their wishes. But I was a queen, come to make my own prayers a reality, and there was no power in this realm or the next which could deny me.

My Phoenix blinked out of existence in a flash of fire which arced into the sky, my wings fading and the heat dissipating as I plummeted out of the air and shot into the smoke which held whispers of my unfulfilled promises in its grasp.