by Eva Brandt
“Oh, gods, you’re terrible,” Eranthe finally managed to say.
“I’m the Grand Lich,” I said, smirking. “I’m not sure why you expected anything different.”
“I’m trying to have a serious conversation here!” Eranthe protested. “We’re talking about saving your life.”
Yes, and I had already told her I wasn’t interested. Talking about something that would never come to pass was a waste of time. Also, I didn’t intend to ever tell her the truth about me, so no idea she came up with would apply. “You’re not going to save my life, Eranthe. You want to try, I won’t stop you, but I’m not interested in participating in your project. I’d prefer having a real distraction.”
I sighed and turned my attention to Eranthe’s still watching soulmates. “Honestly, arguing with Emperor Octavian is beginning to get tedious. And gods help me, Baltasar, I never realized your mother was so obnoxious until she started screeching at me. She’s lucky I didn’t turn her into a thrall on the spot.”
Mormo had been very vocal in her disapproval of my life choices. She’d ended up lashing out against The Realm of Eternal Youth because of it, and now, she was languishing in Eranthe’s dungeons. It served her right. She’d forgotten I was the one who’d kept her insanity at bay and I didn’t like ungrateful people.
Baltasar flinched. “I’d apologize, but I can’t say it was exactly unexpected.”
“Oh, of course it wasn’t.” I shot him a bemused look. “Very few things are unexpected to me at this point. I’m not surprised they hate me now that they’re aware of the reason why you were sent here. I’d normally find it amusing, but I don’t have the patience for such trivialities.”
“Because you’d rather spend your time discussing making out with your other self,” Eranthe said, unimpressed with my decision. “This is giving me a headache.”
I smiled beatifically. If this was tough on her, she was nowhere near prepared for what was waiting for her in The Voievodat. I remembered enough about Chronikos to know it must’ve been a soft, gentle home. Eranthe might be a queen, but she’d never experienced the realities I’d had to face shortly after I’d been created. She would need to take over my position once I was gone, so she’d have to get used to uncomfortable conversations.
If she found kissing me strange, she’d never be able to grow accustomed to the more questionable branches of magic I often turned to in my work, and that was unacceptable.
Interestingly, our sisters seemed to understand what I was going for. “I don’t think this is something of concern,” Pandora said. “After all, a kiss is a display of affection, and it’s a sign that the two of you can get along. That can only be an advantage in the long run.”
Our mother stared at her like she’d sprouted a second head. “Why am I not surprised you’re the one to say that? Don’t encourage this, Pandora!”
“It’s progress, compared to the things you encourage,” Pandora snapped back.
“I can’t say I disagree, Mother,” Cassia added. “In fact, in the big picture, Eranthe kissing or being kissed by Eiar isn’t really that big of a deal. You yourself said that we should get along with our artificially created selves, didn’t you?”
I wondered to what extent Cassia blamed herself for this whole debacle. My existence was indirectly her fault. If not for her taking up the throne of winter, the rest of us wouldn’t have decided to claim the power of the other seasons. Then again, the one who’d initiated the whole process had been Snegurka, and my parents’ blunder had ultimately been the actual cause. What would Cassia do or say if I spilled a few more of Helios’s secrets?
I was debating the merits of doing exactly that when Adrian grabbed my elbow and dragged me out of the throne room. I could have easily freed myself from his hold, but I went along with it, interested in hearing what he had to say. “Can I help you?”
“We need to talk somewhere in private. I think we can all agree that this is getting out of hand. I don’t know who you are and I don’t understand why you’ve been acting the way you have until now, but I do know you are powerful. You’ve had time to prepare for this. So you need to give us the exact details of what you came up with. Otherwise, we won’t know what we’re working with.”
I arched a brow at him. “You won’t know what you want to avoid, you mean. You really should stop trying to win useless battles. It will only cause you frustration and pain.”
“I’m pretty sure killing you would be even more frustrating and painful, so we’ll just have to get by.”
I couldn’t help but let out a small laugh. I’d always found Adrian Burke so intriguing. Even if he’d turned into a strigoi, a part of him had always been very kind, unable to let go of what he had been taught as a fae. It was why he’d bonded so closely with Baltasar and Cezar, even if they had their own hang-ups and eccentricities.
“I get the feeling that by the time this is over, I’m going to miss the days when you automatically obeyed me and trusted I knew best.” I took hold of his arm and allowed a hint of my magic to slide into his body. He hissed in pain, and his grip on me loosened. His knees went weak and he dropped to the floor, unable to hold himself upright any longer.
“Don’t ever forget who and what I am, Adrian,” I told him. “You can’t save me. You should focus on saving your true soulmate, not on me. I am a lich. That hasn’t changed just because my hood has dropped.”
That wasn’t the complete truth, but answering Adrian’s questions would make him even more unlikely to cooperate. Right now, I had faith that he and his friends would come around once they understood I was right.
Adrian, Cezar and Baltasar loved Eranthe. As they’d already pointed out, I wasn’t her, but someone entirely different. The Grand Lich was their superior, the mysterious figure whom they’d been following for most of their lives, a person they respected, but didn’t really care about. As long as they believed that, they’d do the right thing.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you, Adrian? Nod if you do.”
Adrian nodded obediently, sweat now beading his brow as he fought against the pain assaulting his body. I scanned his face with interest, wondering what Eranthe would think of my actions if she were present. I disliked doing this to Adrian, but I didn’t regret it. What did that say about me? Probably nothing good.
Perhaps Eranthe sensed something was wrong, because the throne room door opened, and she slid into the corridor. When she saw me and the fallen Adrian, she paled and her breath caught.
Her magic responded instinctively and vines exploded from the walls, heading straight toward me. I waved a hand, and they withered away into ash. The brief lapse in concentration was enough to free Adrian from my spell. He got up, still shaky and pale, but looking just as determined as before. “You know, Grand Lich, you’ve never felt the need to enforce your words with your power before. I wonder why you’ve turned to that option now.”
“Because you’re being disobedient, obviously, and you need to remember your place,” I answered. Sneering, I turned toward Eranthe. “You should learn to tame your vampiric pets, Lady of Spring. They’re nowhere near as kind as shifters. If you let them run amok, they will consume you and everything you’ve ever known.”
“I’m not really concerned about them, and I think that neither are you. Besides, I thought that was what you wanted. For them to consume you? To kill you?”
She was trying to turn the tables on me, to point out the hypocrisy of my statements and behavior. I had no desire to listen to whatever she wanted to tell me, especially since I feared that if I did so, I might give away more information than I already had.
With a thought, I wrapped myself in the power of the shadows and left The Palace of Eternal Blooms. It felt an awful lot like running, but this meeting with my other self was about to become far more dangerous and annoying than anything I’d done in The Voievodat.
I couldn’t afford to truly hurt any of them until the plan was completed. If Eranthe was injured, she wouldn�
��t have a chance at containing the powers of death. She needed her soulmates in one piece to support her—and to kill me.
On the other hand, I didn’t really want to go back to my armies either. I allowed my magic to guide me in whatever direction it chose. When the shadows faded, I found myself standing in front of a familiar-looking bridge.
“Well, this is unexpected,” I said to myself as I looked around. “I must be more out of it than I realized if I ended up here.”
I hadn’t visited The Bridge of Melting Snowflakes at all since my arrival to Chronikos. I’d had ample time to do so, but I’d decided it would be for the best to avoid it.
I’d been right in that regard. From my current vantage point, I could see the river Amethyst snaking between the realm of winter and that of spring, still glowing brightly and full of magic despite everything that had happened.
Memories flashed through my mind, recollections from a different life, one that seemed so distant and alien to me now. This was the place where it had all changed, where my sister had fought her nemesis, where my existence had truly begun.
Eranthe would probably never realize it, but something had shattered inside her the moment she’d seen Cassia collapse, with Snegurka’s blood all over her face. She’d been so young at the time that she hadn’t managed to deal with the trauma very well. If things had been different, those wounds might have healed. But the power transference ritual had eliminated all chances of that occurring and my parents had stumbled into the worst possible scenario in the history of time.
I sighed and started walking down the path, toward my village. Even if I didn’t need to cross the distance on foot, I enjoyed the trek, the feel of the wind as it rushed through my hair, the underlining perfume of the struggling flowers hiding underneath the scent of death.
As expected, I found Lillia a ruin. The settlement had been destroyed by one of Octavian’s earlier attacks, following a serious argument between us. The house where I had grown up had been burnt to the ground. Since nymphs crafted their settlements mostly out of vegetation, very little had survived Octavian’s anger.
I sat down on a blackened rock and idly swept my fingers through the patch of grass growing nearby. It had miraculously survived the fire, but it wasn’t so lucky this time. The death magic suffocated the life within the stubborn plant, and it withered away at my touch.
I smiled bitterly. A lich. That was what I was and what I’d always be. A creation of death magic, an anomalous existence made possible by the desperation of a deity and a forbidden ritual. I was selfishly glad that I’d been given the chance to live, but I’d be relieved when the moment came for me to shed that burden.
The sound of a desperate cry startled me from my musings. “Stop!” someone begged. “Please, don’t! Go away! Leave me alone.”
I frowned and slowly got up. According to my information, the village had been evacuated a long time ago and its surviving inhabitants moved to a safer location. Had anyone come back out of some misguided belief that they could live here once again?
“Why are you doing this?” another voice asked. “We’ve never harmed anyone in your land.”
I followed the sound of the voices into what had once been the center of Lillia. Much to my dismay and irritation, I found a small group of naiads facing off against an undead patrol. The skeletons in question wore the insignia and uniforms of the emperor’s army, and had surrounded the nymphs from every possible direction. Two older naiads were shielding the younger three of their party from the undead. I wasn’t impressed by their approach.
“Please,” one of them said again. “Just leave us be. We’ll go and you’ll never see us again.”
I didn’t know why she was even trying to speak to the skeletons instead of defending herself with her magic, but I found it just as exasperating as most things that were happening to me as of late. For a few seconds, I considered the merits of letting them die. It would probably serve them right, since they’d been stupid enough to come here. On the other hand, this wasn’t Aeternum. If I wanted balance between life and death, it was time to even things out and stop the unnecessary bloodshed.
Besides, there were children present, and no matter how much I blamed adults for their selfishness and stupidity, I couldn’t let the young naiads perish.
As I watched, one of the skeletons lunged forward, ready to eviscerate the nymphs with their blades. I flicked my fingers, cutting off the supply of death magic that animated it. Normally, that wouldn’t have stopped an attack with such momentum, but that wasn’t an issue for me. Left without the necromantic energies that had created it, the skeleton fell apart, turning into a harmless pile of bones.
Like one being, the nymphs turned toward me. “Your Majesty!” one of the older naiads cried out. “You’re back.”
I didn’t bother pointing out the fact that I wasn’t the Eranthe they knew. “Were you really trying to reason with an almost mindless necromantic construct?” I asked without preamble.
A younger naiad emerged from behind her friend and dashed to my side. “We couldn’t see any other way out,” she murmured apologetically. “Our magic seems unresponsive here, and there were so many of them...”
Their magic had been unresponsive? That was strange. Had Octavian cast some kind of enchantment that still kept the naiads from accessing their powers? He might not be a necromancer, but he had other skills almost as powerful as mine.
No, that wasn’t Octavian’s style. He wouldn’t have left the patrol here to guard an already ruined town, especially when the elemental wards now erected around Chronikos put so much strain on him.
“You should go,” I told the naiads. “Don’t come back here again. It’s much too dangerous.”
“But now that you’re back, you’ll surely protect us, and the war will end,” the young naiad pointed out with a smile as bright as the Amethyst. She tugged on my robes with a boldness that took me aback. “That’s what my mother said—that you won’t let anything happen to us, that you’ll save us from the bad people.”
“Did she really?” I asked, surreptitiously freeing my black clothes from the child’s grip. “Well, it looks like I did exactly that. But now, you have to return to your homes, since I won’t be able to stay here for much longer.”
“Yes, of course we’ll go,” the older naiad said. “But before we can do that, we need to give you—”
“You don’t need to give her anything, fool,” a familiar male voice interrupted her mid-sentence, deceptively calm and aloof. “You’re a blight upon her presence and this place. Remove yourself this instant, or I will remove you.”
I wanted to scream in frustration. I’d been right. Octavian must’ve decided to come after me and had tracked me down here. How could the emperor of The Immortuos Voievodat be such a stubborn idiot? When was he going to learn that I could handle such simple matters myself?
Probably never, a voice at the back of my mind reminded me as the vampire in question came out of his hiding spot. I suppressed a groan of embarrassment and annoyance. Had he been lurking behind a tree this whole time, just waiting for his chance to intervene in my conversation with the naiads?
This was becoming beyond ridiculous. If anyone at court found out about it, he’d be a laughing stock.
I was very tempted to throw something at him, but the presence of the nymphs made that course of action impossible. “Your Majesty, there’s no need for such unpleasantness. I assure you I had the matter well in hand.”
Octavian narrowed his eyes at me, but decided to not challenge my authority. “How many times do I have to tell you that you can call me by my name, Eiar?” he asked instead.
“At least one more time, as always, Your Majesty. Now, if we have a meeting pending, perhaps those uninvited to it should leave, yes?”
Octavian sneered at the naiads, and they went pasty white, whimpering at the sight of his anger. It didn’t help that the skeletons I’d frozen started moving again, and were once more making their way towa
rd the defenseless nymphs.
I could have incapacitated those constructs again or destroyed them like I had the first one, but that would’ve been rude. Octavian was still my emperor and my superior. I might challenge him in some things, but it would’ve been inappropriate to do so in front of the naiads.
Thankfully, Octavian seemed to have decided to not test my temper, because the skeletons didn’t attack the depowered nymphs. Instead, the creatures took hold of the naiads’ arms with as much gentleness as could be expected and started to guide them away.
“It’s all right,” I said. “They’ll just lead you out of the village while I have a conversation with His Imperial Majesty.”
“But, Queen Eiar...” the oldest naiad started to protest.
“I’m losing my patience,” Octavian said, his voice even colder than before. “You will leave or I will make you regret it.”
The naiads obeyed, although they did give me hesitant looks as they departed. I waited until they were out of earshot to address the emperor. “Your Majesty, what are you doing here? I told you to not look for me while I’m in Chronikos. Besides, you’ve already done enough.”
It was true. I was still cross with him for his excessive use of force in Tis Ánoixis. None of this had been warranted and he damn well knew it. He was throwing a tantrum because I wasn’t willing to go along with his ideas any longer. It was quite disgraceful for a man in his position to resort to such things.
“Well, excuse me if I’m not very happy with your idea of allowing yourself to die for the benefit of your past self.” Octavian scowled at me. “If I have to track you down in this ruin of a village to change your mind, I’ll do it.”
“I’d have been more inclined to accept that if you hadn’t brought a whole regiment of skeletons with you and started killing people again.”
“Please. You don’t really care about them and you know it. They are only dust in the wind compared to us.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors again, Your Majesty,” I told him tiredly. “Nymphs aren’t humans. Your magic might be more powerful than that of a regular naiad, but that doesn’t make them inferior or unimportant.”