I did not get to ask any more questions of Caduan before he ran back out into the wreckage. When I tried, he only barked that we had no time to
Speak only to battle. In this, he was justified. Ela’Dar lay devastated. The beasts were nearly invincible. Their overwhelming numbers and our lack of preparedness brought the city to its knees within hours. Our fallen quickly turned against us, forcing us to fight for our lives. Some attempted to burn the bodies, only to unleash flaming corpses that spread wildfires as they rampaged through homes and forests.
How long did the nightmare endure? I couldn’t tell. Time blurred as survival consumed my thoughts.
By the time the city was sufficiently under control, it was well past nightfall, allowing me to follow Caduan back to his quarters. He had spent part of the evening with Luia and Vythian, then with Meajqa, who whispered urgently from his healer’s bed after regaining consciousness, speaking of matters I was not permitted to hear.
As the door closed, I watched Caduan unravel, like sails collapsing on a deserted ship. He sank into his desk chair, head in hands, while I lingered at the door, breath still labored and heart still racing.
“What were those things?” I gasped.
Caduan didn’t respond. Instead, he moved to his closet, donning an ill-fitting jacket over his shredded shirt, concealing what lay beneath. He stepped behind a divider, tossing the jacket and then the torn shirt aside.
“Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me what just happened. Tell me how that just happened.”
“That,” Caduan said, far too calmly, “was the work of a Lejara. Creation magic, to be specific.”
A Lejara? That didn’t make sense. “But you have spent the last six months searching for the Lejaras.”
“Searching for the other two. Yes.” “But if you already had one—”
“No one knew it was here. No one but me.”
My mouth closed. I could not see Caduan behind the divider, which made me angry.
“Why would you hide it?”
There was a long silence, so long I was ready to tear down the wall between us so I could force him to answer. “What were those things, Caduan?”
“The Aran queen took the Lejara. She must have used it. She would have known— I should have known she would feel its presence, considering how obsessively she has been studying such forces.”
“But how—”
“Creation is just as dangerous as death. More dangerous, perhaps. There is nothing more dangerous than life that should not exist.”
I felt so sick. “Why didn’t you tell anyone that you had it?”
“Because…” At last, he stepped out from behind the divider. He had a fresh shirt on, too white against his blood-and-sweat caked skin. He left the buttons open, revealing his body beneath.
I had not imagined what I had seen in the circular room. The lines of black covered his entire torso. They started at the center of his stomach and fanned out, spreading like rotten roots up his chest, collecting at his sternum and ending shy of his throat.
“What is that?” I asked, quietly.
I had never seen Caduan ashamed before.
“I did not tell anyone, not even Meajqa, about the magic I had, because I wanted to be able to use it as I saw fit without justifying that decision to anyone.”
“You used it to create the shades.”
Pain cracked every line of Caduan’s features. “Not just the shades.” I looked down at my hands. My soft, mortal, living hands.
So many moments roared through me at once.
The shock and horror on Ishqa’s face the first time he saw me. How?
How did you do this?
Meajqa’s voice, that night in the pub. I don’t ask those types of questions.
Nura. Whatever magic your precious king used to create you, it is just as dark as mine.
And then, immediately after, came the image of the corpses attacking my kingdom.
There is nothing more dangerous than life that should not exist, Caduan had said.
You knew from the beginning that you should not be alive, the voice jeered at the back of my mind.
Me. He used it to make me.
“So no one knows,” I choked out. “No one knows how you made me.”
Caduan took two steps forward, as if he couldn’t stop himself. “I didn’t make you. You were already there. I simply made you whole again.”
“I—”
Whole? Is that what you are?
I approached him, so I could look at his body up close. The darkness looked like veins, or spiderwebs. They pulsed slightly beneath his skin as if in time with his heartbeat. Merely being close to them felt sour and wrong, just as I had felt when standing in the presence of the living dead.
It hurt to think of something as beautiful as Caduan’s heartbeat marred by this… this… corruption.
I touched it with my fingertips, and Caduan flinched.
Do not ask, the voice whispered. You do not want to know.
But I said, “What is this?”
The seconds before Caduan’s answer were excruciating.
“Mortals were not intended to do such things,” he said, quietly. “Not intended to channel such forces, especially not those powerful enough to…” His voice faded, and his knuckles brushed my cheek—such a light,
tender touch. My eyes flicked up to meet his.
Look away.
“I don’t understand.”
You do understand.
“I did not bring you back to be a weapon, Aefe. I brought you back to be everything you could have been, if you had lived. To be everything I should have been, once I run out of time.”
No.
“I do not understand,” I said again, almost a snarl. “I am dying, Aefe.”
How weak a mortal heart is. The words cut deeper than any battle wound.
“No.” I shook my head, hard. “No, that is not true.”
Caduan’s eyes shone. “I have always known the dangers. I knew what I was doing. But that night… the night I needed to make more shades. I pushed too hard. I knew that night, it was going to be the end.”
That night. The night the earth seemed to tear apart, when I found Caduan in that circular room, when he could barely stand, and I walked with him through the forest—
“No,” I choked out.
Don’t leave me, I had begged him.
“I knew from the beginning the side effects of handling magic this potent. Doing it for so long. And I was always willing to—” He reached for me, but I batted his hand away.
How quickly, the pain turned to rage. “How could you do this?”
“Aefe—”
I hated the way he said my name.
“You brought me here just to abandon me. You— you brought me here and gave me this empty body and this empty heartbeat and you— and all the while you—”
He stood a step closer, and I wanted him to say something, I wanted him to scream at me, I wanted him to hurt me, because every piece of warmth within me had now become this horrible, blistering fire that I only knew how to feed.
Don’t leave me, I had begged, and he had told me, I am not going anywhere.
“You— You lied to me,” I spat. My vision was blurry—why was my vision blurry? “You betrayed me. You betrayed your entire kingdom.”
He stepped closer again. “I never wanted—”
Lie. He did want. He had been nothing but want that night.
“You made me love you.” My words were jagged and raspy with sobs.
He reached out for me, such a gentle, tender touch. “Aefe, please. We need you.”
I backed away.
He said, more desperately, “I need you.”
Once he had said that to me and I had hated those words because I thought he needed me the way one needed a weapon. But now I knew a different sort of need—the way he needed me the night I let him into my body. The way he needed me when we held each other at the sunrise.
I knew, no matter how angry I was, that when he said, I need you, this was what he meant.
And that, that genuine affection, hurt deeper than all of it.
“I hate you.” I hurled the lie at him like a throwing knife, and I did not let him say a single tender word to me again.
