Page 97 of Renegade Kingdom
And just like that, despite the massive, terrifying form, despite the ancient magic and the burning mark and the tears on Ryder’s face, he was Fizzle again. Irritable. Impatient. Secretly, beneath all of it, proud.
The Autumn throne pulsed with light. Copper and gold, warm and alive.
The crescent of thrones glowed in the remade chamber. Spring and Summer and Autumn and Shadow, arrayed around the central throne of Light. Four courts claimed. And that cold, darkgap where Winter should have stood, a promise and a warning in equal measure.
I looked at my mates. At Tank, one hand resting against the flowering vines of his Spring throne as if he could feel the magic breathing through them. At Maddox, whose hand was still on Ryder’s arm, steadying him, always steadying someone. At Dean, arms crossed, jaw tight, his gaze fixed on that cold, empty gap with a promise in his eyes. And at Damon, the mate I’d yet to fully claim, wreathed in shadow magic that no longer frightened me, the first real, unburdened smile on his face.
And then there was Ryder. With autumn magic still crackling in the air around him and tears on his face that he’d no doubt deny later. A mark declaring him the ruler of a Court burning on his arm. Standing in front of an ancient griffin who had spent a lifetime pretending to be small and grumpy so he could watch a man prove his worth without knowing he was being watched.
Rhidian stood apart from it all, his back against the wall, no throne for him and no mark on his skin. But he was still smiling. A quiet, private smile that carried no envy and no regret. He’d been a prince who never wanted to be king, and now he was free of all of it. Free to be whatever came next.
No more kings and queens in the courts.
The prophecy whispered through my mind, and for the first time, I thought I understood what it meant. Not death. Not destruction. Transformation and renewal where stagnant malice had once been. The courts weren’t being destroyed. They were being absorbed. United. Pulled into something bigger than any single throne. And a realm without Courts, without a single throne, didn’t need me to become a queen. It needed me to become something else entirely. Something that Nymeria had been before she’d poured herself into this realm, tying herself to a struggling world until she faded to a whisper in the wind.
Their blood will soak into the depths of Nymeria, and from it, we will be gifted a second chance.
My blood. My bond. My sacrifice, when the time came. Not to die, but to become the realm itself. To take Nymeria’s place. It wasn’t an ending, it was a new beginning. To be the voice in the wind, the magic in the soil, the light and shadow that held everything together.
The thought should have terrified me. Maybe it would, later. But right now, standing in the centre of this remade chamber with magic humming through my veins and the bonds of my mates burning bright in my chest, all I felt was certainty.
This was what I was made for afterall. Not as a weapon. As a choice. Nymeria’s choice, and now my own.
But first, there was Arik. And the empty space where a Winter throne should be could only be filled once we faced him. It was inevitable that this would end in a battle that the prophecy promised would be like nothing the realm had ever seen.
If he’d felt the change rippling through the realm, and I knew he had, then he knew we were coming. And desperate men with nothing left to lose were the most dangerous kind.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rhidian
Ididn’t feel like myself.
That was the thought I kept circling back to as I sat on the stone ledge overlooking the chamber that served as the group’s common room. Not that I felt wrong exactly. Not ill or incomplete. Just different. Like a suit of armour I’d worn my whole life had been stripped away and the body underneath was a shape I didn’t recognise.
The Summer magic was gone. I’d known that the moment I’d woken up, gasping on the cold stone floor with Maddox’s face above me and golden light still fading from my skin. The hollow space where it used to sit was strange. Like a room I’d lived in for years that had been emptied of all its furniture overnight. The walls were still there, but everything that had filled it, everything I’d defined myself by, was gone.
And the strangest part was that I didn’t miss it.
I should have. The Summer Court’s magic had been my birthright, the thing that set me apart, the reason I’d been groomed and pressed into the shape of a future king since before I was old enough to understand what any of it meant. It had beenas much a part of me as my blood. Losing it should have felt like losing a limb.
Instead, it felt like setting down a weight I’d been carrying for so long that I’d forgotten it was there.
Below me, the group was gathered around a table that Tank had found somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of the Fifth Court. Alyssa sat at the head of it, and even from up here I could see the change in her. The light beneath her skin, faint but steady. The way the air seemed to shift when she moved, as if the court itself was breathing around her. She was becoming something. Something that didn’t have a name yet but that the realm recognised even if the rest of us couldn’t. And the men around her were becoming something too.
I watched them and felt the oddest sense of clarity. Like dying had cleaned a window I hadn’t known was dirty. Finally shedding the burden that had put a death sentence on my head and turned my entire family against me.
The prince I’d been before, the Rhidian who’d carried the Summer Crown’s weight on his shoulders and loved Alyssa from a distance that felt like drowning, that man had been a performance. A role I’d been cast in before I could choose for myself. The dutiful heir who would one day sit on a throne he never wanted and rule a court that had tried to kill him for the crime of being born to the wrong mother.
I’d thought that was who I was. I’d built my entire identity around it. The restraint, the careful composure that never cracked because a prince couldn’t afford to crack. Even loving Alyssa had been filtered through that lens. Quiet and steady and selfless. The kind of love that looked noble from the outside but was really just another cage I’d locked myself into because I didn’t know how to want things for myself. She’d been so free, wild in her own unique way. How could I not have looked at that and seen loving it as a freedom I’d never get for myself?
But that man had died at Ice Falls with a sword in his chest and the name of a woman who would never love him back on his lips.
The man who’d woken up on the floor of the Fifth Court was someone else.
Someone lighter. Someone who looked at the hollow space where duty and obligation used to live and felt, for the first time in his life, the terrifying, exhilarating possibility of being free.
“You’re brooding.”
