Page 335 of The Edge of Darkness

“Have you not thrived here for thousands of years? Are your witches and Dionachs not living full lives without threat of harm?”

“That has nothing⁠—”

“It has everything to do with it!” He took a threatening step toward the witch goddess, and she shrunk back. “I am not a tyrant, but I will rule as I please—as is my right as god-king. You are always free to leave and go back to your homeworld. I’m sure that now, with your sister dead, you will have no issue taking up your place as a goddess there once again.”

At the mention of her sister, Torin’s expression shifted into panic. It seemed, in the midst of discovering that Niall had become a god alongside me, the four of us had forgotten about Skadi, and the queen who had somehow managed to kill her.

We all turned to where the goddess’s body lay in the dust.

Further away, Corinne crouched, clutching onto her golden crown. She appeared unharmed, untouched by my blast of power, just like everyone else was. She had come from a portal, caught the dagger, and finished the job. I remembered the look on her face as she drove the blade into the goddess. What she had done wasn’t an act of courage, it was an act of revenge.

My brows pinched as I stared, wondering how she was capable of inflicting a killing wound to the goddess?

Torin took a step, her lower lip wobbling as if she’d just witnessed a heart-wrenching tragedy. She would never regard her sister’s death as such, so the emotion that was overcoming her had to be for Corinne.

Slowly, the queen lifted her eyes—blue as the morning sky. Except now, they too swirled and churned from within.

Torin shook her head in denial, a sob breaking free. “Why?”

The queen stared back at her. The queen who was a witch. A witch who had abandoned The Neveshir Isles, knowing she had little time left to live. But she didn’t die, she survived. She told her story to Silas at the tournament’s dinner, how she lived in hiding as a human queen—an effortless act, given there wasn’t a magical inkling about her. She possessed no ethereal, other-worldly essence, other than her natural beauty.

So why was Torin reacting this way over her? Why had her eyes changed?

“She killed my beloved,” the queen said, her voice shaky, but not frail. “I vowed to avenge him—to have her feel my wrath. But I-I didn’t know I could kill her.”

I stole a glance at Torin, then to Niall and Karios, but none of their expressions told me anything more than what I already knew.

“Forgive me,” Corinne continued. “I know I left the isles when I shouldn’t have, but I needed to see the rest of the world before my death.” She looked down at the crown in her hands. “I planned to return, but I got shipwrecked in the human lands, and the prince found me. I fell in love, and I . . . lived. I thought about death every day, waiting for it to claim my life when I least expected it, but it never did. And when I had my son, the power within me finally surfaced.”

Torin shook her head. “All this time, you’ve been alive?”

Corinne nodded. “Despite the odds.”

The witch goddess took in a shaky breath, then her voice dipped lower. “You should have stayed in the human realm. This is not what fate destined for you.”

“I foresaw it. I saw Skadi, vulnerable in the arms of a Dionach, and an entity poised to kill her, but unable to. And I could not stay in Belthria. Not after what she’d done. Not when the very reason our kind fled our homeworld was here, threatening everything this world holds dear. I thought . . . I thought that maybe, if I was able to just help in some way—weaken her, or distract her . . .” She squeezed her crown, her knuckles whitening. “At the very least, I wanted her to feel what I felt when she took Broderick’s life from me.”

Tears fell from Torin’s eyes. “And in doing what you did, you have claimed her place in eternity.”

Corinne’s brows pinched in a hopeless way, the kind of expression that embodied grief and relief, victory and regret, all in one. “Is that what happened?”

“You ascended . . . as your blood allowed you to.”

Corinne lifted her eyes to the witch goddess and tilted her head. “My blood?”

When Torin hesitated to answer, I stepped forward. “What is this, Torin? Who is the queen to you?”

“She is . . . blood of my blood,” the witch goddess finally said, pausing long enough to let the statement sink in, before drifting off on a memory. “I had a daughter on Skotos, at the start of the war Skadi waged on me and my kind. After her birth, I hid her with a matron witch, one whom I trusted, because I did not trust that Skadi wouldn’t try to take her from me and use her as leverage if she ever found out I had a daughter.

“When we arrived here, I didn’t bother to assume the role of her mother again, nor did I tell her who she was to me. My fears were a bit irrational back then, and I didn’t want to put her in danger. So the matron raised her as her own, taking my secret with her into death. And since then, I have watched all the daughters that have come from my own—many generations, each one carrying out their life on the isles.

“Then came Corinne. Beautiful. Intelligent. Daring. But powerless. She was the first of my bloodline with stifled powers, and it nearly broke me to watch as she fell into depression over it.” She wiped away a tear, stepping closer to Corinne. “When you stole that boat and escaped the isles for a glimpse at the outside world, I let you go. I couldn’t keep you locked away and watch you sink further into darkness. And when you passed beyond the wards, I committed you to memory and told myself I was better off not knowing the ending. In my mind, you died peacefully, having seen what was beyond, and hopefully having made a few memories of your own. But it seems that death had no part in your story after all.”

Corinne pushed to her feet. “I’m a descendant of yours?”

“Yes, my dear,” Torin answered.

“And . . . this strange power that’s now coursing through me . . .”