***
Rook waited until Bremen was halfway to the stage before sprinting off towards the princess. He did his best to stay low and duck behind anything he could along the way. He knew his muscles should have been aching from days of being shackled to whatever was nearby, but they moved as fluidly as when he’d been a teenager. He thought he might be out-of-breath by the time he reached the wreckage, but the air, too, came as easily as ever. He just didn’t understand why.
When he eventually made it, he caught a glimpse of Tryss’s arm jutting out from inside it. Blood ran down her skin, and her veins glowed with the mark of the Flensing. She wasn’t moving.
He grabbed onto the wood and hurled it aside. Miraculously, he could hear her breathing, albeit faintly. He reached out to touch her blood-soaked face, and her eyes fluttered half-open, caught somewhere between life and death.
“I’ve been here before,” he whispered to her, propping her up in his arms. “But I was on the other side.”
It was then, while his mouth formed the words, that Rook finally understood. Lurien, the Kirshal, the power brimming inside of him…everything. And he knew exactly what he needed to do.
He touched Tryss’s cheek, and he could feel the energy within him slowly ebbing from his body into hers. There was no pain at all, only clarity—clarity unlike anything he had ever experienced before.
“Lurien told me I still had a purpose,” he said softly, “and now I know what it was.” He brushed the hair from her face and looked down into her brilliant turquoise eyes as they slowly came into focus. “I told you once that I always felt like I was living on borrowed time. We all are, in a way. And now it finally caught up.”
“No…” she mouthed, her voice barely even a whisper.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “One life for another, that’s the way it works. We can’t cheat our way out of it.”
Her hand grasped meekly onto his arm, and he smiled down upon her.
“From the first moment I saw you, I knew you were the one,” he whispered. “It scared me—it terrified me—because when you opened your eyes and looked at me, I wanted to believe…I wanted to believe that there really was a Kirshal who could make everything better. And you are the one.” He leaned down and kissed her gently. “Or you will be.”
Rook slumped to the side as he watched the marks of the Flensing drain from her body. The cuts and slashes mended themselves whole, and her veins once again vanished beneath her skin. It certainly wasn’t the death he had been expecting all these years, but he couldn’t imagine a better way to go out. If he had been able to save Lurien back at Turesk, he would have done so in a heartbeat. And here and now, the stakes were even higher. The world needed the Kirshal. The world needed a Messiah.
The world needed a goddess.
The Last Goddess Page 84