Chapter 6

The footsteps and whispers in the corridor faded away.

All that remained in the room was the sound of the wind whistling through the cracks in the window, circling my bed hangings like a silent jeer.

When Faye rushed into the room, she found me pale and bloodless, the sheets soaked with cold sweat and black blood, the shattered glass vial scattered on the floor.

"My lady, what happened?"

"Where is Prince Caelum? How could he just leave you like this?"

My gaze was vacant, as if my body no longer held the weight of a soul.

"It's nothing," I whispered, my voice so faint it threatened to dissolve into the wind. "Nothing can be worse."

Faye looked at my lifeless, despairing state and understood everything.

The only one who could have broken me like this was the high elven prince who had once sworn to protect me for all eternity.

Faye bit her lip, her tears falling as she changed my clothes, which had been corroded by the black blood.

"He would never have treated you like this before…"

"Three years ago, you pricked your finger on a silver thistle in the woods, and he ordered the entire thistle grove uprooted that night. He stayed under the World Tree for hours, healing you by moonlight."

"And now he is going to make a soul-bond with Lady Nyssa… What does he even think you are?"

Not a single ripple of emotion disturbed my pale face.

I spoke in a calm, almost foreign tone, as if telling someone else's story.

"Let him."

"I don't care anymore."

When love was present, he could lift you to the highest branches, make the entire forest bow to you.

When love was gone, he could grind you into the deepest layer of rotting leaves and complain that you had dirtied his boots.

My gaze fell on the shattered vial on the floor. The acrid smell of the potion still hung in the air.

It hadn't "purified" me. What had evaporated along with the potion was the last wisp of warmth I held for Caelum Sylari.

In the long nights that followed, my body completely broke down.

A violent backlash, a storm of ice and fire, gnawed at my magical channels and my bones.

In delirious visions brought on by the pain, I sensed the approach of that powerful being. A hand as cold as a deep spring reached down from the shadows of the ceiling, resting on my forehead, whispering to me in an ancient, low tongue.

I didn't understand the words. But I knew he was calling me.

I felt my body grow lighter each day. The healing tonics Faye managed to coax me into swallowing would come back up moments later, mixed with black blood.

In the end, even the blood I coughed up had lost its warmth, seeping into the sheets as cold as the waters of the River Styx.

My parents never came to see me. Not once. Meanwhile, the Vaelen estate grew more frantic and festive with every passing moment.

Everyone was working day and night, preparing for Caelum and Nyssa's upcoming soul-binding ceremony.

White flowers, symbolizing the purity of high elves, ancient scrolls of betrothal inscribed with blessings, gold-leafed invitations sent to all the great noble houses of the elven continent…

The air of the entire estate was thick with fervent anticipation for this grand union.

And my remote courtyard felt like a silent tomb, long forgotten by the world.

Faye wiped away the endless trickles of black blood from my lips with a soft cloth, her voice pale and weak as she tried to comfort me. "The Lady is just too busy… Once the ceremony is over, I'm sure she'll come to see you."

I gazed out the window at the sea of branches, grey as if covered in dust, and a faint smile touched my lips.

"With you by my side, I have not felt so lonely."

The words only made Faye's tears fall harder.

The days dragged on. The intervals between my coughing fits grew shorter, my breaths shallower.

I knew I wouldn't last much longer.

Finally, the eve of the Night of the Shattered Moon arrived.

Even the moonlight at the top of the World Tree was stained a rusty red, as if someone had cut a wound in the sky in advance.

The door to my room was pushed open.

My mother strode in, dressed in a golden-threaded moon-white gown, her face a mask of urgent, feigned concern.

"Elowen, my child, are you feeling any better?"

I froze.

It had been so long since I had heard my mother call me that, in that tone. For a moment, the weed of "a mother's love," which should have long since burned to ash in my heart, sprouted a pathetic, new shoot.

My mother reached out and gently pulled me into her arms. Her fingertips brushed through my hair. I leaned into her fragile embrace, willing myself to believe her with all my remaining strength.

"These last few nights, with Nyssa's ceremony… Mama has been so busy. Don't think your mother cruel."

I was about to nod, but in the next second, her tone changed.

"Elowen, your sister will be publicly bound in soul tomorrow night. As her older sister, you must present a suitably significant blessing."

"Give her the royal soul-ring Caelum gave you all those years ago."

A chill colder than any winter spread through my veins.

That ring was a token Caelum had spent a whole season polishing for me. He had said the starlight pattern carved on it was the sigil of the Sylari royal family, given only to their future princess.

My mother had not come to see me.

She had come only to claim what she felt should have been Nyssa's.

An overwhelming wave of disappointment extinguished the last bit of warmth inside me.

I pulled away from my mother's embrace, my throat painfully dry. "I will give it to you, Mother."

"But before I do, please answer one question for me truthfully."

My mother blinked. "What question?"

I raised my eyes and asked, enunciating each word:

"If, on the Night of the Shattered Moon, the one who doesn't survive… is me…"

"Would you shed even a single tear for me, as you would for Nyssa?"

My mother's body went rigid. She avoided my gaze and did not speak.

She wouldn't even weave a perfunctory, placating lie for me.

The last thread of attachment I held for my family was finally, cleanly, stripped from my broken soul.

"I understand completely."

I forced my ruined body upright and retrieved a black wooden box carved with a sealing sigil from the back of my bedside table, placing it in my mother's eager hands.

My mother clutched the box and turned to leave. At the door, she seemed to remember something and looked back.

"Tomorrow morning, you are to go to the Abyssal Shrine in the lowest level as usual. Kneel in that sunless place and pray to the Tree God for a blessing on your sister's ceremony."

"As for the ceremony, with that aura of death about you, you are an ill omen. You need not attend."

As my mother left, the tears I had refused to shed finally fell.

I had completely accepted it. My parents had never loved me.

The desperate need for their love, the obsession I had held for eighteen years, dissipated from my chest like mist.

On the Night of the Shattered Moon, the upper levels of the Vaelen estate were ablaze with light. Starlight and silver foil intertwined, and celebratory music flowed from the high ceremonial hall all the way to the royal court.

And I, escorted by two silent guards, was led down through layer after layer of withered branch-webs, past old, vine-choked altars, until the roots beneath my feet became black and rough as rock.

The area was sunless, shrouded in perpetual darkness. Massive black roots coiled and tangled overhead, like the skeleton of a slumbering, ancient beast.

The guards threw me to the ground before the thickest, central root, and the door closed behind me.

I was left alone in this deepest, coldest, most lightless part of the World Tree.

The necrotic energy I had suppressed for so long finally erupted. The blood came like a river bursting its banks, each wave more violent than the last, carrying with it torn fragments of my own flesh. My hands gripped the roots so tightly my nails cracked and split, the grey bones of my fingers piercing through the skin.

I collapsed against the massive black root.

In that instant, the dormant silver runes on my pale, paper-white skin suddenly flared to life, illuminating the sunless Abyssal Shrine for the first time.

Droplets of crimson blood fell from my cold fingertips, tracing paths down the ancient black roots and blooming on the silent flagstones into ghostly blood-blossoms that glowed with a faint, spectral light.

My consciousness was rapidly fading. In the distance, I could hear the faint, melodious tolling of bells from the ceremonial hall above.

Caelum and Nyssa. Carving their souls to one another.

How wonderful.

Just as I was about to sink completely into darkness, a black flame, born of the Underworld, silently leaped to life.

It licked its way up the deepest roots of the World Tree, burning the ancient wood into a gate of ethereal blue fire, a path leading down.

The voice I had dreamed of for eighteen years thundered in the depths of my soul, like all the bells of the Underworld being struck at once:

"The gate is open. Blood is the key."

"My true child, it is time to come home."