Page 149 of Renegade Kingdom
The realisation landed like a stone in still water. Carry him. Not briefly. Not temporarily. Forever. An unbinding would absorb his existence into mine. The unmade pieces would weave into the fabric of the realm the way ashes dissolve into soil. But the pain, the centuries of accumulated suffering, those would live inside me. A weight I would bear for the rest of my existence, which, if the realm sealed around me the way I could already feel it preparing to do, would be a very long one indeed. Nymeria had wanted me to take her place and it would be unending.
The cost was not death. It was something harder than death. It was choosing to carry your enemy’s pain inside you for eternity and doing it anyway because the alternative was letting him destroy everything you loved.
The bonds tugged. Frayed but holding. Five men bleeding for me on a battlefield I couldn’t see.
There was no choice. There had never been a choice. I had walked into this knowing it would cost me, even if I hadn’t known the real cost.
When I opened my eyes, Arik was watching me. The smile had thinned. Something behind it had begun to fray. Whatever I hadlet show on my face, he had read it, and he didn’t like what he was reading.
“What are you doing?”
“Something I should have done at the start.”
I reached for the magic again. Not to throw at him. Not to break against his foundations. Just to hold. The way you hold a candle in cupped hands so the wind can’t take the flame.
He felt the shift. I knew because his expression cracked.
“Don’t.”
It was the first honest word I had heard him say.
I crossed the distance between us. Not running. Walking. The way you walk towards something that has been screaming for centuries and finally gone quiet. He stepped back. I kept walking. He flinched when I lifted my hand and I almost stopped at that, at the sight of him flinching the way a child flinches from a hand that has only ever been used to strike. But I didn’t stop. I cupped his face, and he went rigid under my palm.
I knew he couldn’t really hurt me in this place, because it was mine. It was part of Nymeria and our mother had gifted all of herself to me. Arik might be able to enter this place, but he had no control over it. He’d never really had control over any of it.
“What are you doing?” he asked again. Smaller this time.
“I see you. All of you. The hope and the flaws. The wanting and the loneliness. The boy she made and the man she abandoned.”
He tried to pull away. The realm had brought us into contact and the realm wouldn’t let go.
“Stop.”
“I see what she did to you. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Stop.” He was struggling now, but he couldn’t escape, because I didn’t want him to.
Arik’s voice cracked. The way a child’s voice cracks when they have been holding back tears for too long.
“You were enough,” I said. “From the very first moment. You were enough, and the only thing that was ever wrong was that no one ever told you.”
He shattered.
I didn’t know how else to describe it. The thing that had been Arik, the predator with the indulgent smile, the King of Endless, the man who had taken courts and slaughtered the people inside them, fell away in pieces under my hand. All that was left was the boy. The first creation. The one who had opened his eyes to a beautiful world and been told, within an hour of his existence, that he was wrong.
He sobbed.
It was the most terrible sound I’d ever heard. The dam of centuries breaking. Every scream he had buried. Every wail he had swallowed. Every cry that had echoed through an empty world with no one left to hear it. All of it pouring out of him at once. I held him. The way Nymeria should have held him. The way someone should have held him long before this. With both hands. With my whole self.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the dark. “I’m so sorry, brother.”
He clung to me.
For a long, formless moment we stayed there. Two children of a god who hadn’t known how to mother either of them. One of us holding. One of us being held. I felt the centuries of his pain pressing against me, asking permission to let go.
And I finally gave it to him.
I drew the magic of the realm around him slowly. Gently. Not the burning fury I had thrown at him before. Something softer. Something that came not from the courts but from the bonds, from the love I’d been given by five men who had taught me, through patient and stubborn daily example, that love was not a feeling but a choice made over and over in the face of every reason not to.
