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Alana watches him with wonder in her eyes. She breathes his name, and I hate the way it sounds on her lips.
Finn drops the ribbons. His shadows crawl towards him from the corners of the room, they reach me first, but Alana is still smiling at Finn.
They are taking me. They are suffocating me. I call to her for help, but she just stares at him. And stares at him.
He kisses her. He asks her if she will stand beside him and she whispers yes as she opens her dress for him.
While I suffocate on the throne beside her, Alana lets Finn take her body. She calls his name again and again. And when they are done, he kicks me to the floor. The shadows swallow me up.
He takes the throne. His demons bow before him. The vision blurs, speeds up. Cities falling. Kingdoms crumbling. Darkness spreads across the land like a plague.
The vision fades, leaving me gasping for breath, my body drenched in cold sweat. Finn’s demonic form, wreathed in shadows and destruction, lingers in my mind. The scale of his plans, the sheer devastation he intends to unleash, is beyond anything I could have imagined.
And while I am normally left in doubt, trying to piece together my visions and interpret what they mean, this time it could not be any clearer.
Finn intends to turn the Shadowkind into demons, form an army, and take over the city. And if he does, the carnage will be unimaginable.
As I try to sift through the snippets of information that now swim behind my eyes, I cannot shift the image of Alana giving herself to him like that.
Would she really want to be by his side?
She owes me nothing, but would she betray herself like that?
I stagger to the window, bracing myself against the sill as I gulp in the cool night air. The citadel sleeps below. The Sunborne cannot be oblivious to the storm that is coming. Come the morning, they will be here, demanding answers for what happened in the sky above the castle.
And I will have to find a way to explain it to them.
“Eldrion.”
The voice sends a chill down my spine. I turn slowly, already knowing what I’ll see.
Who I’ll see.
My mother stands in the centre of the room, shimmering and translucent in the moonlight. Her eyes, which I remember as being so cold and distant, now brim with an emotion I’ve never seen in them before. Regret.
“Mother,” I say, my voice hoarse. “Have you come to apologise?” I shake the journal at her.
She lowers her head, taking a step towards me. “No, my son. I’ve come to confess.”
I laugh bitterly. “Confess? Now? When it’s far too late? I know everything. I read it in here! All the things you never told me. The pieces that would have made everything make sense.”
“I didn’t know,” she whispers. “I swear to you, I didn’t know it would come to this.”
“Then what did you think would happen?” I snarl, my anger rising. “When you twisted an innocent child in her mother’s womb, and when you created a weapon without thought for the consequences?”
My mother’s form flickers, as if buffeted by the force of my rage. “I saw the darkness coming,” she says. “I saw our kingdom in ruins, our people destroyed. I thought... I thought I could prevent it.”
“By creating Alana? By burdening her with power she never asked for, never understood? And by telling no one?”
“I believed she would be our salvation,” my mother pleads. “A force of light to push back the shadows.”
I stride towards her, my wings flaring. “And instead, you’ve given those shadows form. You’ve handed Finn the key to unlock his true nature, to become the very demon you feared!”
She flinches, and for a moment, I see the proud, infallible woman I grew up with crumble. “I was wrong,” she whispers. “So terribly wrong. I let my fear cloud my judgement, and now...”
I should feel sorry for her. But I don’t. I look at her and all I see is the woman who made my life a misery, and who made me grow up feeling less.
“Now we all pay the price,” I finish for her. The anger that’s been building inside me finally explodes. “You should have left well enough alone! You should have trusted in us, in me, to face whatever came! Instead, you played with forces beyond your understanding, and look what you’ve done.”
