Discordant Note | The Beginning After the End SI-Chapter 294: The Pain of Love

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Aurora

Andravhor had the most wonderful eyes I had ever seen. I remembered, long ago, being immediately struck with intrigue upon seeing them. It wasn’t simply their paleness, like a geode’s crystal, or the way they reflected any emotion I might feel. It was that sparkle, that inquisitive awareness of everything around him that made me gravitate towards him.

When my husband-to-be spoke, there was a sort of dance that he held with his own mind, deep within. He’d talk of the stars and mathematics and distances and things that made little to no sense to me, but I could understand that twinkle in his eyes as he told grand tales of the wider universe. I could understand that because it was what I felt whenever I sang.

Days had turned to months, then years. Before long, I had made Andravhor—one of the very last of the djinn—my husband. And then Chul had come along.

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Even now, I remembered the swell of pride and joy I felt whenever I looked into the binary gaze of our son. He had both of our eyes. The fiery suns of my pupils burned there, true, but so too did that inquisitive and hopeful curiosity that my husband called his own.

Until this moment, I had never truly understood why I loved those eyes so much. I had never truly internalized what made them so special to me.

My son was covered in a dozen shallow wounds, each of them still red and seared from his last battle with Toren. Though I had no heart that could beat, I still felt as if it had broken apart all over again upon seeing the ragged state of his body. The unhealing wounds were cauterized in a vain attempt to seal them, but it was an imperfect measure. His hair clung to his face like reeds, each strand seeming to lack the vibrant fire that always drove him to laugh and challenge the world.

He shouldn’t have suffered like this. Nobody I loved should have to suffer like this.

Chul’s eyes held Toren’s, both of my sons frozen as if by a spell. I could feel our rage—that twin, burning, impulsive rage that we both had shared as we enacted a facsimile of justice on the broken Scythe at our boots—melt away in the face of this moment.

The room was still as they looked at each other, quietly measuring. Quietly guessing. Not a soul moved, not even Seris Vritra.

I pushed outward more with my spirit, layering the Unseen World over Toren’s vision. Though my skin ached and burned with every movement, it was utterly inconsequential to the thunder of my thoughts.

Toren, I thought quickly, Toren, please! Let him see me! He can’t, not without your intervention.

Painful visions of a night not long past seared through my soul, where my son had failed to see me. He lacked the requisite understanding of heartfire to pierce the veil of souls. Already, I was seeking the relic brooch pinned to Toren’s breast. Should I inhabit it, we could finally speak.

Toren’s eyes flicked to me, his jaw slowly working in the darkness. “I can try, Aurora,” he thought slowly, “but with the Brand–”

As Toren’s attention shifted away from Chul’s, my half-blood son seemed to finally gain awareness of the room around him. He blinked, groaning as every movement jostled his wounds. His confused attention wandered about the prison chamber: from the black diamond walls, cracked from Toren’s might, to Viessa Vritra’s broken body beneath our feet, and then to Seris.

Chul snarled, then lunged.

Toren was moving before the world had time to register his brother’s bared teeth. He flickered from a pulse of mana, then interposed himself between his nest-mate and his blood-borne brother. In his clenched hands, fire sputtered protectively.

He needn’t have acted. Chul collapsed forward onto the floor, too weak to affect much of anything. What might have been a powerful and predatory growl turned into a whimper of pain.

Toren’s emotions simmered and boiled again as he kept his hand on his nest-mate’s arm, his grudge clouding his mind as his expression settled into one of restrained anger. Behind him, Seris Vritra’s eyes narrowed slightly, the woman far more calm and collected in the face of perceived threat.

“Step away from the Vritra, Human Cage,” Chul wheezed on the ground. He struggled to push himself to his feet, his bulky arms straining from weakness. “She lies and… beguiles. She will take—”

Toren scoffed with disgust, cutting off his brother. “Seris, take Viessa somewhere else. She’ll bleed out from that arm before too long.”

The aforementioned Scythe stared at the bleary Chul, then back to my bond. “You are making presumptions of your authority, Toren,” she replied slowly. She didn’t step out from Toren’s protective stance, however. “You don’t command me.”

Toren breathed in deeply, then let out his breath as he kept his brother pinned with an iron stare. I began to pace back and forth, unable to keep every rising emotion contained with my mere shade.

“Please take her somewhere else,” he asked instead. “I’m not commanding you.”

Seris Vritra visibly considered this, running the words over in her head. She looked down at the prostrated visage of my son. “This asura is a danger to everything in this castle, as he has already displayed. Even weakened, I am loathe to leave you alone with him.”

Chul’s brows furrowed in confusion and anger at the perceived insult. “I see the schemes in your eyes, Vritra,” he said, finally pushing himself to his feet. He wavered there, his mana weak in his core. “Step away from–”

“Sit down!” Toren snarled, finally marching forward. His aura flared around him, slamming into Chul as if a physical blow. “You cannot even comprehend what you have done. Talking about schemes? You cannot even begin to understand your crimes. Your sins taint you.”

Chul’s eyes widened at the complexity of Toren’s intent. Every bit of rage finally began to reach a breaking point. The lid on his emotions and power quaked and trembled, each bit of grief and sorrow slamming into my son like hail within a storm.

Just as he professed his love of life and desires for hope with his music, Toren beat his brother with his rage.

Toren marched forward, his shrouded spirit flaring as Chul stumbled back. The black diamond vault trembled and quaked. “The first thing you do after your genocide is to demand I step aside so you can kill more of the people I love?”

Chul’s breath choked off as he fell backward, unable to call on the power that would have protected him. His hands rose to his throat as his lungs stuttered, his eyes widening.

My relic was between them before any more of this tragedy could continue. It flapped its wings weakly as it interposed itself within the wrath of my bond. I drove the wedge of my anger and care and the veracity of Toren’s promise deep into his raging storm.

Toren stuttered to a halt as he glared daggers at my relic, but I stood firm. With my heightened control of the craft, I had shrunk the Vessel Form from its normal size to something that would fit within this room “You made me a promise, my bond,” I said angrily. The distorted words echoed from the seared Vessel. “You will not hurt your brother.”

My bond’s aura gradually drifted away as he gnashed his teeth. “So you want him to just go unpunished for all the death and destruction? You think he should just get away with it?”

“You know what I think and feel, Toren,” I snapped back. “You can sense my very emotions. Do not put words into my mouth.”

Behind Toren, Seris had moved over to the unconscious Viessa. The silver-haired Scythe grabbed her Truacian counterpart by her long hair, before hauling her away from the crater.

Toren’s smoldering eyes snapped to where Chul lay on the ground. His brother stared at my decimated relic with awe, fear, and hope. And as my bond saw those familiar emotions, he could not restrain himself from recalling when he had felt them in turn.

It turned his burning fury sour.

“You talk to him, Aurora,” Toren muttered, turning on his heels. “I can’t stay in here. I need the sky, not this dark, angry fucking pit.”

My bond distanced himself from me over our mental link, giving himself time to think as he followed after his nest mate. His hands clenched and unclenched as he fought for control of himself.

I watched him go through the eyes of the decimated relic, my worry warring with my hope.

They would be able to reconcile. I would make certain of it. Chul bore the weight of many sins, but Toren could see past the exteriors of people that clouded the judgment of others.

He’d done so with his lover. When I had warned him that the only truth of Seris Vritra was her schemes and plans, he had seen the shining gold that lay far below despite it all. He could do the same with his brother. He would be able to see all the gold. I just needed time to show it to him.

And he had promised me. Toren kept his promises.

“Mother?” Chul’s voice echoed out, weak, tired, and hopeful. “Mother, is that you?”

I turned, limping within the Vessel of my bronze form to observe my son again. The last time I had witnessed him, it had been in the fit of devastation and combat that had wrought fire and destruction across Burim. I had forced my errant child to calm down, to listen to what I had to say.

And then the lavatides had erupted, tearing away any chance at speaking with him.

It was such a strange thing. I had spent so long waiting for this reunion, but I had not considered what words I might say.

“Chul, my son,” I whispered from my deformed metal beak, feeling entirely unprepared. I felt the constraints of my metal shell more than ever. I wanted to become a woman again and wrap my son in my arms.

He had grown so much. Were I still a being of flesh and blood, he would stand above even me in stature. I realized then, as I stared at the terrified and hopeful expression of the young man who bore my blood, that even if I were truly alive, I wouldn’t be able to hold him anymore. I wouldn’t be able to feel that strong heartbeat of his beneath his chest as he endlessly questioned me about the stars. It was denied to me by this cage.

So instead, I hobbled forward, limping like a war veteran returning home. Chul’s eyes watered with liquid fire as he watched me approach. His lip trembled as he struggled to speak through a throat choked by memories.

But Chul had never been good with words. As a boy, he had been a person of action and deliberation. Ever stumbling forward, following his too-good heart.

So when I wrapped my molten, broken wings around him in a gentle, brass-glinted embrace, he found the strength to hug me back. When his words failed him, the familiar act of taking comfort and warmth from my nest saw him through.

“I went looking for you,” Chul blubbered, tears sinking into my bronze facsimile. “I wanted to find you. They all said you were dead.”

“I know,” I whispered, ignoring the sensation of my soul burning from our embrace.

“They were in error. You’re here. You yet live.”

“I do.”

“They shouldn’t have left you. They should have all listened.”

Molten tears fell from the edges of my eyes as the rest of the world fell away. For a moment, it was just me and my son. My little battling songbird, who I had taught nearly everything I knew. This wonderful impossibility, like a morning star in the sky. “They should have.”

“I love you, Mother,” Chul sobbed, his knees trembling as he struggled not to collapse. “I missed you. I missed you so much.”

I love you.

It had been so, so long since I had heard those words. So long since I’d heard them said in that hopeful, cheery and emboldened voice. I could remember—somewhere distantly in the depths of my memory—this little boy, who had somehow become a man, echoing them with such truth and honesty.

I remembered standing along our stream, our martial training winding down. I remembered how Andravhor had watched from the distant side, amused as he watched our son roll through the stream after a failed throw.

“If you keep putting your balance wholly on your lead leg when performing Rising Talon,” I remembered saying to the young chick before me, “you’ll always falter in the final push.”

I had demonstrated such, casually sweeping my foot across my young child’s knee. He’d fallen with a cry into that stream within the Sunswept Glades, water splashing about us. Far to the side, Andravhor had laughed in deep amusement.

“Grace, Aurora,” he’d said, lowering his beautiful blue eyes from the constellation map he’d been roaming over. “He needs grace. He isn’t the warrior you are, not yet.”

Chul had pulled his small body to his hands and knees, sputtering and coughing. I recalled smiling warmly, patting my little songbird on the back as he stared up at me with a pout.

“He will be the greatest of the Asclepius,” I had said with staunchest faith. “He has the fire, Vhor.”

And my little songbird’s shoulders had drooped, the water flowing off of him. “You really believe so?” he asked, looking up at me with those wonderful, perfect eyes. “But I’m… weak. Uncle says that my core will never match those of Li-ae and Kel-nu and everyone else. And I cannot be a great bird like you. And when Father shows me his maps, I don’t understand. I want to understand.”

Andravhor had shut his book, stowing it away with some application of aether as I struggled to say something else. His attention had focused on our conversation more and more.

“You will understand,” I’d said eventually, feeling angry that Morn would be so blunt with my son. He was selective with his subtleties. “I am certain of it, my little battling songbird.”

I’d given Chul a hug, then. The kind I always did. The kind we shared now. And in the depths of my embrace, he had stared up at me, fearful and afraid. “But I’m still stupid,” he said quietly. “The others all say so. I use the big words that they do, and they say I don’t understand.”

I’d knelt in the stream, allowing the water to flow around us both as I lowered to Chul’s level. “You are perfect, my son,” I affirmed, laying my hands on his shoulders. “You are perfect as you are. And even if you weren’t, I would always love you.”

Andravhor strolled over to us, his pinkish brow lighter than my own. He had a fire of his own, burning deep in his mana core, but it was of a different kind. “Words mean only the intent behind them, Chul,” he said, kneeling in the stream too. His robes flowed around him as our small, young son stood between us. “When they all tell you that your words are stupid and that you don’t understand, that’s just because they don’t understand you. Big words, little words… It’s all arbitrary, son.”

Five-year-old Chul had blinked in confusion. “Arb— Arbi… Arbitrary?” he echoed, drawing out the ‘y.’

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My husband had smiled then, recognizing how confused our son was at the errant bit of philosophizing. “What I mean to say is that you can use whatever big words you want,” he said soothingly. “And I daresay that the others are idiots for telling you not to.”

Chul’s shoulders had loosened then, the tension releasing from the reassurance. “I love you,” he’d said as Andravhor joined our little group hug. “I don’t wanna ever stop loving you.”

The memory faded away back into the depths of my mind. I knew not when, but I realized that I had begun to sob, too. It was a broken, decrepit sound, like the grinding of steel and shearing of metal as it left my hollow throat. But still, it echoed through that empty vault, absorbed by the black diamond.

“I love you too, Chul,” I wheezed, still feeling so weak. So unable. “I love you. I missed you so, so much.”

I didn’t know how much time we spent in that embrace, Chul sputtering nonsense as he tried to say more. Time seemed like a distant concept as memories of long-gone days in the Hearth swirled. Even with the events of the past few weeks, those could never be tainted. In each of them, my son’s eyes shone with joy and love of life.

But as I felt my soul burning, I knew I had to withdraw.

I slowly pushed myself away from my son. Were I flesh and blood, perhaps I would note the lack of warmth. I knew not if that made the distance more painful.

“We must go,” Chul said hurriedly as he turned, stumbling to the side as his eyes took on a dark cast. “The Foul Vritra keep you here, locked away. I have found you, and now I can return victorious to our clan. They will have a way to fix this. I am sure of it.”

Our clan.

Those words broke something in my heart nearly as much as his profession of love and care mended it.

“Chul,” I said quietly, my words distorted by my metal cage, “we must talk.”

“We cannot converse in the depths of this accursed dungeon,” Chul asserted, his mind already veering toward combat. He stumbled, struggling to stay upright as he turned toward the broken vault door. “The Vritra will listen and conspire. I will see you to safety, Mother. It is my duty.”

The relic clicked and whirred in a disjointed rhythm, dawnlight steam leaking from the cracks. “I am not a prisoner in the way you think I am, my son. You were… deceived.”

“This, I understand!” Chul bellowed, turning around and frowning in uncertainty. “Always, I was deceived. But now we are together, and we can flee. It is the way of things.”

I looked my son up and down, my eyes lingering on the unhealing wounds left by Toren. I would see him heal those with his heartfire magic. “No, Chul,” I said soothingly, turning toward the exit. “Agrona did deceive you, true. But only in turning your mace to the wrong targets.”

My young songbird blinked, confused. “I do not comprehend your words, Mother.”

Though I struggled to find the words to say to my son in the wake of our reunion, I had known from the start that if any progress were to be made, I needed to impress upon my son the nature of his errors.

“Grace, Aurora,” Andravhor’s voice echoed in my mind. “He needs grace.”

“The Retainer who spoke with Arthur Leywin spoke to you truly,” I said slowly into the darkness. “It was he who was betrayed first, which led to your… misunderstanding.”

Chul stood still as a statue as my words reached him. “I do not understand,” he echoed again, sensing the gravity in my voice. “The Vritra are all liars and schemers, mother. The Retainer fought me, and I reaped his blood in vengeance. He sought to entrap me with lies.”

“Yet I am here, amongst the retinue of Seris Vritra,” I countered. Cylrit had spoken of his encounter with my son to Toren, so I knew precisely what had transpired on that accursed lake. “My spirit is bound to Toren Daen, precisely as told. Cylrit was betrayed as much as you.”

“The Wraiths, Mother!” Chul retorted loudly, leaning against the wall to support his exhausted bulk. “The Wraiths sought to slay me in a moment of weakness. They colluded together.”

“Try to slay you, certainly,” I agreed. “Collude with the Retainer? That, they did not. The Retainer was forced by circumstance to align with those who would otherwise kill him for his master’s plans,” I said quietly. “And hush, my son. Do you think that if my survival were known to Agrona, he would allow me to act as I have? It is a secret known to few people. It is because of them that I escaped from Alacrya to this continent at all. And… your mace was pointed towards those who assisted me. The Vritra are not all that you say they are. And neither is Toren.“

Chul blinked several times, seeming to struggle to keep up with the stream of my words, tired as he was. “Spellsong. You are bound to the Human Cage,” he said again. “He keeps you trapped.”

I sighed a mournful stream of dawnlight. If there were any god out in the aether, I realized that I could not fathom their cruelty. For such a belief to have entrenched itself within my son’s heart…

“He is the only reason I yet persist and have not seen the Beyond,” I said quietly, my wings shivering. “I was trapped in the depths of Agrona’s dungeons, subject to his cruelty. And Agrona… He took much from me. And when he had taken too much, I took a gambit for freedom. I threw my soul to the wind, hoping against hope for a solution. And… Toren was what answered.”

Chul worked his jaw, slumping against the wall. “I do not understand,” he said quietly, looking defeatedly down at his hands. “I do not grasp it as I should.”

A familiar sorrow washed over me as my son engaged in his usual self-deprecation. I forced my Vessel’s legs to trundle over toward Chul’s exhausted form. “I cannot blame you for such. It is a complicated story, my son. I am not sure I understand all of it myself.”

“This Spellsong—Toren Daen—he helped you reach your freedom?” Chul echoed, forcing himself back to his feet again. He could never afford to sit still, even when he was a chick. That fire burning inside of him compelled him to never stop, to always put one foot in front of the other.

It was a wonderful, beautiful gift. But just as often, it proved itself a curse.

“He must be welcomed into our Hearth,” Chul declared vehemently, not quite having put together the situation. “To act when no other shall is a virtue most rare! We will see him showered with gratitude!”

My Vessel creaked and groaned as I shifted, suddenly feeling deeply exhausted. “Chul, my young songbird… That won’t happen.”

“Whyever not?” he blurted, tilting his head sideways as he stared at me. “This human acted justly! He saved you, did he not? How can that be unbefitting of all honors of the Clan?”

He feels before he thinks. It was the nature of all phoenixes, to be true, but I had never been there when Chul needed me so that I might impress upon him the ability to think before he spoke. He feels it with all his heart, and there is no room for anything else.

My relic shook as I failed to suppress the wrenching memories of Burim’s Breaking. I wanted to remain strong and authoritative for my son, but the flashes of fire and the blood that had been spilled still sunk far, far too deep into my soul. I remembered how every touch of my son caused my very soul to burn away.

Agrona’s torment, while horrendous, had always had a level of… apathy. When his tendrils dug and tore at my mind, they did so with a more grand, overarching purpose than cruelty. He wanted the location of my Hearth, not so that he could hurt me, but so that he could remove a variable in his war games with Kezess.

His actions were a means to an end.

But everything that had happened in Burim… It felt cruel. It felt like there was a hand at play somewhere, guiding the world towards pain and misery. I could almost imagine some demented hand of Fate nudging events towards catastrophe, taunting me and Toren for trying to make things better. Why else would my sons seek to kill each other, with me unable to intervene?

“When you first met your brother, how… how did you react, my son?” I asked, struggling to force the words out. I needed to be calm. I needed my voice to never waver. But the relic betrayed me, turning my words into a jumbled mess of pained octaves.

Chul opened his mouth to say something, his chest puffed out in his usual, boisterous way.

But then he froze. And deep in his pure-lake blue and sunfire orange eyes, I could see when the events that had landed him in this vault all rushed back into his head.

My presence had kept him occupied. I’d stopped him from thinking. But as every ounce of color drained from his face, leaving him pale as a corpse, I could see that everything slotted back into place.

He hadn’t just assaulted the very few beings who cared to try and make this world a better place in Seris and Cylrit. Thousands of dwarves and men had died in the burning wake of the lavatides.

But among all of those, there was one act that drove a knife deep into his heart. He had tried to murder his brother. And by extension, he had tried to kill me, too.

Chul’s breath came in short, panicked gasps as he spun, slamming a meaty fist into the black diamond walls. If he were at his full strength, the wall would have shattered with casual ease.

But weakened as he was, he only bloodied his knuckles across the impossibly hard material. And as his blood splattered against that surface, he roared in distraught anger, his cries shaking the underground. One. Two. Three. Four. He slammed fist after fist after fist into the wall, splattering blood across the reflective surface.

I did not intervene.

On and on and on he went, his breath heaving as tears welled up in his eyes anew. There was no form in any of his attacks, no care or reverence for the martial peak. No—this was simply the actions of a boy lashing out in helpless rage.

The fire that burned in his chest fueled each of his blows. Until there was nothing left of the skin on his hands. Until the bones started to break, too. Until his screams of fury couldn’t be distinguished from his sobs of horror.

And finally, when he had wrung himself ragged, he collapsed to his knees, slamming his balled fists against the ground.

“I just wanted to help,” he said between breaths. “Why? Why must I break everything? I did not wish for this. I wished for the good people to live free of the Vritra’s tyranny, not… not…”

His blood pooled around him, red and sad. His angry punches had agitated the unhealing cuts given by Toren, causing them to weep in chorus with all the lives lost in that tragedy.

I shuffled closer to the boy trembling on the stones, his broken fists weak. “I know it was not your intent,” I offered somberly. “I know it was not what you wanted, my songbird.”

Chul turned up to me, his eyes halfway between hope and despair. Before, I had thought of how much older he’d looked, with his grown physique and boisterous laugh. But now, he looked as much a child as he ever had been, looking for answers from his mother. “I must fix this,” he declared weakly. “I must make right the things that I have broken. It can be done. It must be.”

For the first time, I allowed the Vessel Form of mine to shrink. I drifted free of the relic, a shade once more.

When first I had shown myself before Chul, he had been unable to see me. I had been just a ghost, a spirit with no voice. And then had come the pain of the Brand.

But as I slowly stood over my son in my spectral dress, I felt a strange mix of relief and sorrow. Because somewhere—between the utter horror of his fight with Toren, or perhaps the bond we had reignited—he could see me. His eyes widened ever-further, the red puffiness around their edges eclipsed by every emotion swirling within.

Love. Fear. Hope. And horror.

Because I wasn’t the phoenix he remembered from his childhood. There was a great, gaping hole where my spirit’s heart should have been, sacrificed as it was to grant Toren his lineage. His eyes lingered there for a time, silently aghast by the state of my tattered and worn martial robes.

And when his eyes tracked to my spectral skin, he saw. Chul could see the burn scars marring every inch of my phantasmal skin, tracing all the way to the Brand on my throat.

The brand that marked me as banished. That told my son that we were no longer of the same clan.

“Some things cannot be mended, my son,” I said softly, my eyes dimming. “There are some things that, when broken, can never be put back together.”

“Cannot be mended… Mother, what… What sort of cruel punishment is this?” he whispered, looking at me as if I had stepped from the pits of the damned. “Why was this done to you? This mark on your spirit—no, it does not—”

“I will tell you why I am the way I am,” I soothed, cutting across Chul’s angry and pained rant. “Patience. Patience.

“Your brother and I went to the Hearth, Chul. We went there to call a Forum, because we had determined that the time for the Asclepius to remain sheltered, oblivious to the pain of the humans and elves and dwarves caught between this world’s twin tyrants, was due to end.”

I looked down at my hands, wanting so much to reach out and hold my son. But I knew that any touch might see me greet the Beyond again. “We failed.”

“So you were banished?” Chul snarled, his rage rising again. He could not seem to move from the place where he knelt, but I could sense the desire swelling within him. “I will see this act abolished!”

I exhaled through my nose, kindling a twin sort of anger in tune with my son. But it couldn’t burn and rage like his. No, this was a cold, detached sort of fury.

Mordain could have taken action at any point. Before, during, or after. With his magic, he could have found a way to prevent all of this tragedy. But his fear kept him bound and caged in chains of his own making.

I had always looked up to him as wise and knowing. His word was the one to follow, the light on the path. When the night seemed dark, his was a star I could follow.

But stars—by their nature—were distant, faraway things. It did no good to rely on the constellations for light when they kept such a distance.

“It is the Will of the Clan,” I declared solemnly, my teeth clenched. “Those of the Asclepius will not intervene in the war between Agrona and Kezess.”

I suspected that Mordain would be sending a message to Chul, soon. Or perhaps he was allowing me this piece, knowing that anything he said would only send his nephew into a justified rage?

“So Toren and I… We took the option allowed to us. The Will of the Clan binds those of the Clan alone,” I said with finality.

Chul looked up at me with something I could not decipher. His eyes were not blank and empty—they could never be empty—but there was something hollow inside. “Uncle persists in his cowardice,” my son said. “He insists that his is the only right way. It is foolishness of the highest order, even so far as to banish the only one who has ever suffered for the good of us all.”

I slowly knelt, taking the time to situate my feet beneath me. I could not feel the black diamond beneath my metaphysical boots, but imagining the sensation helped to center me and the unsteady fire that burned in my soul.

“You asked if there was a way to make right on all you have done, my son. I can offer you a way. Me, you, and Toren… We are all that can fight for the good of our flock and the world beyond, even if they do not know it. Even if the price is the flock itself.”

A tremor went through Chul’s body. “This is wrong,” he muttered. “I know not what is right. But this is wrong. To be forced to choose between two pains such as this.”

I lowered my head, my feather-red hair settling over my shoulders as the Unseen breeze relented in its grasp of each lock. “I wish that you would not have such a choice laid before you, my little songbird. Nobody should have to make such choices for the world. But such is the world before us. One where, even when we are so very burned, we rise again.”

I exhaled a deep breath. “But no matter what you choose, I will still love you, Chul. Should you return to our flock deep in the Beast Glades and spend the rest of your days with those we love, I will still love you, too. But it is your choice to make. An evil, horrid choice. But yours.”

Chul reached out a hand to my shade, but as I shied away, he let it drop.

“This is so very cruel,” Chul repeated again, an oath deep inside. “that you should be so burned Mother. It is unfair. It is unjust and wrong.”

Tears blurred at the edges of his vision, a child unable to hold his mother’s hand. And seeing that—seeing how my wounds hurt him, too—I felt my rage reignite. That anger at the World, anger at Fate.

How dare this World take so much from us? I thought, raising a hand. I brushed away my son’s tears, even as the pads of my fingers smoked and my brand started to burn. He shied away, about to cry out in horror, but I cut him off. By all the deva, it hurt. It hurt so very much.

But my little battling songbird was worth any pain. He was worth any misery, any sorrow, any hardship.

“I was destined to die, Chul,” I whispered, ruffling his hair and persisting through the pain. “Fated to an end in Agrona’s dungeons. In another world, I would never get to see you again. I would never get to know your brother. And I would never see my family. Banished I may be, but what is that torment compared to eternal capture? Was I not exiled before?”

I raised my arms to the side, gesturing to myself as I sought to raise my little chick from his nest. “So often has Fate tried to reclaim its prize. Vindictive and cruel, it is, trying to tear us apart. Set things back along a path where we are never family. But the apathy of this universe does not understand suffering, despite what it inflicts upon us. Because this pain we feel—it is our fuel. Our fire, that brings us to life every day.”

It felt so much as if the World were attempting to reap its due once more, rip me back toward death. I had defied its clutches once, and so the Reaper came. Trying to break me. Trying to break my children. But in that life I could have lived—that very dungeon of torment I would have been condemned to, in another timeline—I would not have suffered this agony, true.

But neither would I have seen my Chul again. Neither would I have met Toren, brought him beneath my wing. And even as they fought and bickered, there was so much that had otherwise been impossible. So much sunlight, even as the night insisted upon itself.

“Fated…” Chul muttered, shoulders slumping as he sniffled. “Does what I want mean anything, in the face of such things?”

I chuckled lightly, moving my forehead ever-so-close to my son. Not close enough to touch, but enough that he knew I was here. “What you want means everything, my little chick,” I whispered, my words a song in the silence.

“I want to be in the Sunswept Glades,” he finally muttered, staring at his blood-soaked knuckles. “I want to be small and weak again, splashing in the stream. I would not be burdened with such sin. I want to be light and free.”

A soft smile slowly stretched across my face. “I do, too,” I said quietly, reminiscing on old memories. “But in the Hearth, one cannot stretch their wings and soar. It is denied to us.”

“When I left, I did not know which direction to fly,” Chul replied quietly. “Everything was so great and vast. I could not fathom it all.”

“You did begin to fathom it though, did you not?”

My son was quiet for a time as his sins continued to weigh on his shoulders. He had not moved from where he knelt, but for the first time, he turned his face to the heavens.

“I endeavored to watch the Aurora Constellate,” he said with unsubtle wonder. “You and Father told me of the origins of my wondrous name. The Chulsen Star Cluster, only visible during the rare display of astronomical beauty that would paint the sky in valiant blues and greens. Father had me memorize it, long ago.”

Not long ago, Toren and I had gazed up at that very same cluster as I told him this story. It was a strange thing to think about, that in some distant reach of the continent, his brother had been under the same stars.

I nodded slowly, feeling a paradoxical sort of contentment deep in my breast. “What did you think of them?”

“They were small,” he said honestly, his voice a low mumble. “I thought they would be of a grand and vast nature, but no spectacle was to be had.”

I chuckled lightly, a motherly sort of warmth rising in my chest that smothered my worries and fears for this short moment. “We didn’t name you for the Chulsen Cluster because it is grand and vast,” I said gently. “We named you as such because of that rare, impossible window of time. A short moment that becomes perfection in the light of the afterglow.”

Chul shifted, some of the sins on his shoulders forgotten for this short moment, too. In that dark, horrendous vault—so close to the one that had held me for ages under the High Sovereign’s whims—I found a bit of that light of hope in my soul again.

Perhaps Toren had found his spark in defying the pantheon and rescuing his lover’s Retainer from the jaws of death, but then I had still been a broken shell. I could not see a way forward, stripped as I was of the stars to guide my way.

But as Chul and I slowly talked, and I told stories to him once again, I found that perhaps—just maybe—there was hope out there. There might be a light that could see us through.