Page 252 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

Guardian. She said I was one. Why had my steps only ever left charr behind?

I lifted a palm and she stopped as if my word was command. “In this realm it's Your Majesty. And I was not finished. As I was saying, I am part unforgiving, petty, feeble, breakable and part rotten, selfish, greedy. All that and with a great shiny crown. Do you know what that means for this realm?”

Her features turned cold and tense.

“Exactly. It means nothing,” I said. “Nothing good.”

“What are your intentions?”

I smirked at her and waved the sceptre piece. “To make acquaintance with a long lost of my sort. You must know her, too. I’ll pass Aurora your greetings.”

Her face contorted with wilderness before I walked backwards to the cliff of Valda Acme and pushed myself off the tall height.

Falling was euphoric. The wait for the crash, for the world to turn silent and dark, the build of adrenaline and anticipation of death that I would cheat right before it got to me.

Before my body crashed against rock, I bolted to the top of Taren castle.

The air was too thick and it barely reached my lungs. It felt as if the mountains drummed when I descended down the castle corridors. Perhaps they did. The thunder I’d set the sky alight with had turned to a lightning storm that blasted like percussion. I could feel electricity licking around my body passing through the wide corridors. A chill spread in the air, cooling and misting my breath white. Rage—I felt like rage.

For twenty-three years I lived loathing my existence, hiding and being fearful of who I was. Ashamed even. For twenty-three years I’d been lied to by the person I trusted the most in this realm. For twenty-three years he had let me think I was the pure abomination of evil desires and greed. For twenty-three years he’d not once had helped me soothe the self-gnawing feeling of wanting to perish. Of feeling less. Of feeling dirty. Of feeling tarnished and chipped. And now? The gods had plans for me? Is that what Alaric wanted to become of me? A vessel for gods’ good deeds? A puppet? The very same thing my father wanted to make of me? Take me from one wicked master to the other?

I came to a halt.

Kilian stood in the middle of the corridor in all his calm. Clad in all black, looking his part as the Night King—cold and distant. It had been days since I last saw him and right now there was nothing I wanted more than to run in his arms and let him tell me it was all alright. Though there was no such thing as alright, for a moment he would have made it seem so. “You will regret everything if you don’t calm down for just a few moments.”

So he’d been told. What had he thought of me? To know someone like me could be what they called the purest form of the divine. “I am calm, darling,” I said, my voice smoother than ever. “What makes you think I am not calm, huh? Perhaps finding out that I am the same sort of rot I’ve loathed, scorned and despised all of my existence? Perhaps that it took one sentence to turn me from an earthly monster to a heavenly one?”

He tensed. Must have sensed me too, because shadows flickered around the corridor and a lick of warmth touched my exposed skin—his phantom darkness had surrounded me. To calm or contain me, I didn’t know. But it wasn’t working. “Alaric would never do anything to harm you. He must have thought it best this way.”

“Too much thinking for how little it was required of him.”

“It is Alaric, Snow,” he said, as if that was an argument for reasoning with me.

“Yes. How simple, isn’t it? Simply Alaric. Simply the man I trusted most, intricately lying to me.”

“He told me everything.”

“And he told me nothing.”

His hand rose just slightly before it went back to his sides. He wanted to touch me. I wanted him to touch me too. “If you had known, would it have changed anything?”

I wanted him to understand. How could he not understand when he knew me better than I knew myself? “You once asked why I hated me,” I said. “I didn’t answer you that day, but you were right, I do hate myself. It isn’t you, or your people, or gods and their heavens, not my father either—it was me. I hate me more than anything. I hate myself so fiercely that I like to hurt myself in any way that I feel helpless—in any way to make the monster helpless. I hate myself to the point I want to punish myself because that is what you do to those you hate. I hate me, Kilian. And there are only so many ways to hurt oneself, but I found them all.”

He faltered. That stoic shield cracked and twisted and iced with pain. He looked like he was injured and bleeding. When he stepped close to me, I didn't back away. Not when he hooked a finger under my chin and grazed my lips with his. Not when my eyes drew shut from the ache clutching my chest—the ache that pounded my heart for just a look at him. The same ache that begged, pleaded and cried for me to forget it all—to let it all go. “Snow, my Snow. If only you knew your own heart like the rest of us do. If you only knew how the rest of us love you. My light.”

“I am not yours,” I whispered back.

“You will always be mine.”

His. In such a way that no one should belong to another. I was his. And it was ripping me apart.

But I was a woman who fed on pain. The fiercer it was, the more it fed me relief. I took a step back from him. This wasn't what I need now. No. What I needed right now was not to unload my anger and soothe. What I needed was to salvage it. I threw the sceptre piece to him. “Give it to Visha.”

I bolted where I knew he would be. Where part of my consciousness spent most of his afternoons.

Myrdur was eerier at sunset. Not because the dark came with it, but because it somehow looked like less of a graveyard and more like a city that was once filled with life.

Cai sat atop an arched ruin, staring ahead further into the ruined city. “My grandmother used to say that she could taste sunset in these streets.” He pointed to a broken house just as I settled beside him. “Apparently, above that terrace you could taste it best. Like fresh sweet dough and rosemary with a touch of apple. I can't smell it,” he said, regretfully. “Never could, no matter how much I tried. To me it only smells like...death. Alaric found me sitting here a few years after you came and I told him that. He laughed and said that it was because the building beside had been a bakery, the smell had come from there.” He laughed and my chest constricted at the pain he no longer hid from me. “All this time I've lived with the illusions they have put in my head, the one my grandmother used to tell me and then Alaric, you, Taren, travellers and every single one who could spare me just the smallest detail of the life here. The life I missed and lost. The life I was supposed to have.”