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sirowsky-stories · 9 months ago

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The Old Prince

Part 13

Author's Note: It's been an intense week for me, my loves, (I quit my job of 9 years!) so this was severely delayed, but here you are!

Description: You're forced to make a really tough decision, and as the war rages, you finally realize what it's gonna take to win.

Rating: Mature 18+ONLY Warnings: Monster Oberyn Martell x Female Reader, AU fic, obviously Halloween themed, reader cusses. Angst. Severe injuries. Word Count: 6427 Author's Masterlist

You’re not quite sure how Simon’s managing to change the oceans so quickly, unless he’s concentrating all his efforts solely on the Atlantic, not trying to expand in all directions at once. Still, there is a lot of ocean to get through, and he’s advancing terrifyingly fast, turning thousands of square meters of the water into the same goop you saw in the Mexican Gulf, every few seconds.

This is what allows him to stay at the front of his army, riding a bizarre wave of dead things at the head of his legion, while Oberyn circles above, keeping just under the shadow of the cloud, as if itching to reach new land to destroy. Seeing him sends shards of glass through your heart. He’s not a spirit, which means your light won’t be able to save him, and you have to be prepared to kill him if you wanna win this war. There’s no other way this ends.

But no matter how badly changed he is, you still see your beloved prince when you look at him. Your heart won’t stop choosing to see the love he gave you. It just won’t. His gift will live on in you for as long as you survive this world, and in Day for the rest of all time, which is the only comfort you can find while you stand there in front of the now once more glowing lighthouse, waiting for the storm to hit.

He is lost. But not gone. You can still save one small part of him.

The cloud reaches over your heads just as the last rays of sunlight fade from the sky, no doubt a precisely calculated time-plan on Simon’s part, but the dragon pulls back then, remaining above the mass of the army as the gunk which replaces the sea makes landfall. You guess that he’s being held back so he won’t kill too many people before they can be converted and added to the ranks, but it makes no difference as the island itself rejects their arrival.

It’s more than a little satisfying to see the Darkling literally fall over when his wave of death is brought to an abrupt stop, as if hitting a wall, once it tries to spill over land. You can’t help but grin smugly at him when he glares at you while getting back up, which of course, only further angers him. But there’s no use. The light holds.

“That’s a neat little trick, Lux. But you won’t keep me out forever,” he growls, and the slight tone of incredulity in his voice tells you this is something he hadn’t anticipated.

Which must mean your spirit has never managed something like this before.

“I thought you were the new and improved dark one. The best one ever,” you taunt, feeling a tad superior to have finally found an angle he can’t immediately break through. “I thought you knew all my tricks and had already figured out how to counter them.”

“Like I said, it’s just a matter of time.”

You refrain from replying that you can reach around the entire world like this, since angering him further isn’t gonna do you any favors. Then Oberyn’s flame suddenly drops on you from above. As if spewed from one of those airplanes with water-tanks, used to combat wildfires, it cascades over the entire western coastline. The dragon is sick of waiting for his cue, it seems.

You can protect the island from the dark forces, which means he can’t land or swipe at people or animals on the ground, but his fire is just fire. Neither belonging to light nor darkness. The people aren’t frightened of it, so they just stand there as it hits them, melting their bodies in mere seconds.

If you don’t do something, the entire island will be destroyed. But the only thing you can do is try to kill the dragon. The thought fills you with pain and sorrow, and Simon immediately senses it.

“Poor little Boo. How awful it must be to know you have to kill your lover if you want to save these pitiful people.”

You can feel him prodding at your mind, trying to slip past the light so he can disrupt your power, but you’ve been down this road before and you’re still immune to him. Flooding your mind with all the happy memories, all the curious conversations in the beginning of your time at the castle, the immediate connection you’d felt with Oberyn and how it had eventually blossomed into love, you shove Simon out of your being with such force that it once again unbalances him.

And when the dragon lines up for his next run, you use your connection to all the people around you to increase the strength of your beam, before unleashing it from your chest. It hits him at the base of his throat before he veers off, but you maintain the beam, chasing after him until you’ve hit him again, leaving a glowing trail along his spine. He crashes somewhere to the northwest, and the sea of malice swallows him whole.

It’ll heal him, you know it will. He isn’t nearly damaged enough to be out of the game, but it gives you a while to think. And what you think is that you can’t fight a war by being only defensive. Your enemy can and will wait practically forever for your barriers to fall. His army isn’t dependent on food and water to survive, whereas yours is.

The only offensive measure in your arsenal is your light-beam but it won’t be enough to decimate Simon’s forces. You need to find a way to put a weapon in the hands of every living thing you’re connected to. But how? While you’re working that problem, the Darkling continues to let his evil spread through the ocean, killing millions of water-dwelling creatures in the process, and when you see the black goo travel past the island, you suddenly wonder why your light hasn’t seemed to reach the underwater population at all.

Reaching out towards Europe, you try to feel if your powers seem to have reached into the landlocked rivers and lakes, but the only answer you find is no. Which means, given time, all water on the planet will eventually be infected and undrinkable, killing everything no matter how much light you try and infuse things with. If you can’t find a way to protect the water, you’ll lose.

You can’t see Caelum anywhere, so you have to assume she’s hiding and waiting for her moment to strike. But you’re also highly aware the other spirits are absent as well, meaning Simon knows you can restore them and is keeping them out of your reach. Fuck! You need more time. There are too many unanswered questions.

Then something unexpected happens. A person on the beach below you loses his light, and the darkness instantly swallows him through the gap in your armor, giving it a foothold on the island. It can’t spread any further unless more people give in to it, but it still worries you. The dark one must be whispering to them, reaching into their minds just like he tried to do with you and just like you expected him to. But you didn’t expect him to succeed in persuading anyone so quickly. It’s only been minutes…

One problem at a time, that’s as much as you can work on, and right now, weapons take priority. You need a way to distribute light through something other than yourself. Another person falls, further inland, leaving a second beast in her place. It writhes and screeches, clawing at the invisible barriers which contain it, already hungry. Desperate to consume.

Consume… wait, that’s it! Using your hand, you shoot a highly concentrated beam at the newly formed creature down on the beach, turning him into glowing dust. Your light has now consumed and transformed him, just like the darkness does to the living. Except the dust he becomes also becomes a part of you, because it’s light.

Out of seemingly nowhere, Caelum suddenly swoops down over you, heading straight for the glowing dust and then beating her wings against it, sending it flying off over the blackened sea. Taking the opportunity given, you attempt to amplify the light of those little specks as they disperse, and it works.

Like fireworks, each and every particulate becomes a sizzling little bomb, which when it hits a creature of the dark, multiplies and creates a chain reaction which kills thousands in mere seconds. Simon manages to stop its rampant progression by throwing masses of thick vines in its path, essentially drowning the fireworks. But this time, you’re the one who can sense his fear growing, because this is an effective weapon, and one he won’t be able to wait out or prevent.

There’s no reason to hold back, so as soon as the first volley is extinguished, you launch a second one, and Caelum is right there, helping you disperse it with her microbursts of powerful winds. This time, you use both hands separately and aim your beam along as much of the front lines of the dark army as you can endure, before your hands are once again charred. But it pays off. The chain reaction which follows is massive, destroying at least a tenth of Simon’s army before he can halt it.

Then, just as the battlefield grows louder with the shrieks of anger from the decimated forces, there’s a rumble from below the semi-solid surface of the black ooze, and then Oberyn comes thrashing out of it. It holds him back, weighing him down with its oily muck, leaving him struggling to get his wings up, having to beat them hard repeatedly before enough of the shit has been removed to allow him to take off.

He comes straight at you, fully aware that you’re the one who brought him down and obviously eager to retaliate. It takes less than a second of seeing his distorted and enraged face glare at you, before your mind reverts into thoughts of grief and despair, and just like earlier, the moment you do, the Darkling pounces and tries to invade your mind. You’re not threatened by it, but it does scatter your resolve, leaving you frozen.

It tortures you. Seeing this, knowing that it’s your Oberyn but you’ll never get to see him proudly glide across the skies again. Knowing you’re the one who has to end him. There isn’t enough light in the universe to keep those thoughts away. He closes in so fast, and yet it seems to happen infinitely slowly. Jaws wide and the churning heat within, trained solely on you, needing to destroy with such desperation.

You wonder if there’s more behind it. His very existence depends on your obliteration, that much is easy to conclude, but somehow, you feel as though this need is fed by more than just the fear of death. It was the fear of losing you which brought him here, so it stands to reason the same fear is still what ultimately controls him, even if his memories are gone. But none of this really matters. It’s just thoughts, coming to you now as your own desperation is brought to a head. A last attempt to put off the unthinkable… but inevitable.

Stop..

An image flashes before your eyes, obscuring the jaws which are about to reach you, and you hear your own voice whispering inside your head, just as it had sounded back then, while something occurs to you on instinct. You’d made it stop that day in Detroit. The creature attacking the policemen. But it hadn’t been sunlight you’d put in its way. Once again you scream the word, not as loud as you can, but with all the might you possess… and the dragon stops.

He’s brought to a halt so abruptly that he flinches backwards and then crashes down onto the beach below you as if an invisible rope had snared and pulled him down. You look up, checking if there are reinforcements on the way to try and aid the dragon, only to see Simon’s face contort into pure rage at the sight of his presumed perfect weapon against you flailing as he tries to get back up. But the monster makes no attempt to help his minion.

Turning back to Oberyn, your breath is suddenly stifled as pain floods your being with the knowledge of what you’re about to do. He’s helpless to defend himself while you hold him down, pinning him to the sands as you try to prepare. Except there is no preparing for this. No amount of conditioning is going to make this one damned bit easier. You need to touch him to finish it, so although it’s the last thing you want to do, you start to walk down towards the beach.

He thrashes against the invisible chains you have wrapped around him, screeching through his ruined throat for his master to save him, but the dark one isn’t going to spare his resources on a lost cause. Whether he knows what you’re doing or not, he knows he’s powerless to stop it.

“Shhh…” you soothe, making your way to the once so mighty king of the skies, and his writhing eases up a little. “It’s gonna be alright.”

By the time you’re standing in front of him, he’s completely stopped moving, laying his head down in the sand, staining the tiny crystals black with the oil that seeps from his ruined skin.

“It wasn’t the sun which stopped that creature in Detroit,” you explain, even though you know he doesn’t have the ability to understand you anymore.

You just need to. One last conversation. Your final chance to ever say anything to him again.

“It was conviction. In that moment, I truly believed myself strong enough to stand up to something so evil. And I believed it so completely, so fiercely, that my voice reached into its dead brain and sparked the idea that maybe there is something more powerful than darkness. That’s all it took to stop it in its tracks. Just an idea. The barest hint of a flaw in the fabric of reality woven by the evils of this world.”

Taking one final step, you lay your hands on the tip of his nose, ignoring the thick, oily goo you sink into slightly, and which starts to trickle down your lower arms in sluggish dribbles.

“Such a simple thing. And yet, I couldn’t convince you of it. Because around you, I didn’t think I had to be that person. With you, I thought I could just be… human,” you shrug unhappily, giving yourself just a few seconds to let the tears fall. “I should’ve known better.”

He watches you, giving no indication that anything you say is affecting him, and even though you knew it wouldn’t, it still hurts you to know he’ll never look at you with those big brown, adoring eyes again. Light flows through your hands and your chest, and you watch as he slowly dissolves before your eyes, until all that’s left is the glowing dust. And the love of your life is truly gone.

Pain overwhelms you, bringing you to your knees, but there’s no longer any fear within you. The worst thing that could ever have happened, has already happened.

What’s left is agony and loneliness, but this doesn’t concern you, because you now know those feelings won’t take away your love or your hope. That they don’t eliminate positivity, but each exist alongside one another instead. You now realize both are born from the same place. Equal parts of the same core, and each vital for the existence of the other. And this understanding makes you truly untouchable to the Darkling.

But you can’t force this kind of understanding on other people. It’s not something one can be taught, so there’s no way for you to render others equally untouchable. Oberyn’s final act was to make you invincible against the darkness, not so that you can singlehandedly stop it, but so that the forces of light will always have a leader. No matter how long this war rages.

“You may have temporarily weakened me, Boo,” Simon snarls then, “but so long as the spirits belong to me, you will lose. I have all of eternity to wait for you to recognize that.”

With those words, he and his army retreats, although the Atlantic remains ruined after their departure. He’s not defeated, not even close. He’ll regroup and head for another coast, another continent to try and infect, and he’ll keep doing that for however long he has to. Because he’s right. Without the spirits, you’ll never stand a chance.

As if knowing you’re thinking about her, Caelum comes to your side and lands in the sand beside you.

“We can’t let him drag this out,” you say through the tears and the snot which has accumulated in your nose, while you follow your enemy’s departure with your gaze. “I don’t know how, but we need to free your sisters and we need to do it soon.”

In your periphery, you see her nod decisively, probably also aware the longer this takes, the more people will eventually succumb to the darkness no matter how diligently you try to safeguard them. And perhaps even more importantly; the more of nature will be destroyed. As you stand there, a plan begins to take form inside your mind, and you wonder if she somehow speaks to you, because you don’t feel like all of this is coming from you.

“Has it ever been this bad before?” you ask her, turning to meet her eyes now.

She holds your gaze for a few moments, but if she replies, you can’t tell. You don’t know if she even remembers things from as far back as the last dark one, but you also feel like whether she does or not, she’s no longer the same thoughtless entity of raw emotion she’s meant to be. Her stoic stillness somehow feels like an answer, though, and not a good one. But however bad you might try to imagine things could get from this point; nothing could’ve prepared you for how truly awful they would become.

--=¤=--

You sigh heavily as you feel another person die. Not by the Darkling’s hand, though, this was natural causes. A young man somewhere on the northern Australian continent, you’re not sure exactly where. It stopped being important a while ago. The exact locations. They’re all just losses. Caelum senses it too, and you feel her sorrow, which annoys you. You’re not sure when you stopped being able to grieve the lost ones anymore, but it seems like a long time ago.

You still care, perhaps even too much. Because each and every one who dies feels like your failure, but after so long and so much death, it’s gotten harder and harder to let yourself feel it. To let your love for the world carry your burdens and lighten your heart. It’s so hard when you’re connected to everything, because people die, in all sorts of ways, every minute of every day. And even if it isn’t traumatic or horrible, even if they just die in their sleep, you feel all of them as they leave the light.

How long has it been? How many deaths have you felt at this point? The fight takes you all over the world, so time-zones have stopped having any meaning to you. You battle the dark for as long as you can, and then you find a place to rest, sleeping for what you assume are a few hours, and then you get back to work. That’s the routine. Day after day.

The world fights with you, holding off the black hurricane and the senseless death it protects, even when you sleep. Determined not to fail, feeding off the light you still pour into it with as much hope as you can muster. But for all their courage and strength, Simon’s power has not been weakened. You’ve made almost no progress in recovering anything he’s already corrupted, leaving the American continents his adult playground.

He’s frustrated, though. You can tell. His need to consume makes him crave fresh bodies. Living things to torture the light out of so he can feed his stale existence and give it purpose. His army is restless, spending its time tearing at itself in search of relief from such a pointless existence, needing to tear, rip, destroy something. At times it gets bad enough that they even start dismembering themselves, further mutating their bodies as the removed limbs grow back even more distorted.

Time, it seems, is no more their friend than it is yours.

Caelum has changed as well. She’s no longer limited to non-verbal communication, having learned not just how to speak telepathically with you, but how to remember things from one moment to the next. Ordinarily, she shouldn’t be capable of thought or reasoning of any kind, but circumstances have forced her to evolve.

“Please, stop,” you ask her without saying a word out loud, when she continues to grieve for the dead man, and her sharp eyes refocus on you.

“You are the one who recognizes the strength of caring,” she chides, not for the first time.

“I’m aware. But lingering on the dead won’t help, will it?”

She doesn’t respond to that, but something about her gaze makes you feel guilty.

“I just mean we need to keep looking ahead, find solutions. We’re not a single step closer to ending this war and it’s been… how long now?” you ask, genuinely trying to work it out but coming up short.

“Three and a half years,” she replies, and for a moment you just stare blankly at her.

Your own assessment was off by about an entire year.

“Fuck…” you sigh, bowing your head in recognition of your absolute failure.

It’s the fifth time since that day you’re back on Faial Island, standing in front of the lighthouse and looking out over the Atlantic. You had eventually figured out how to heal the ocean, and all water, once Simon had left, so today it glistens blue against the horizon to the west. It turned out that all you had to do was change the wavelength of your light for it to travel through water. But that’s also about as much as you’ve accomplished.

The plan you’d once had, to try and sneak back into the States and covertly reach some of the spirits by using your conviction to gain control over a darkened creature and use it as cover, had failed on multiple occasions, leaving you scratching your head for some other idea. Brute force wasn’t gonna work, because as much as the world would stand behind you, they couldn’t operate offensively and would be of little help to you. And powerful though you are, even if you could muscle your way past an entire army, you still can’t kill Simon.

But somewhere deep inside you, there’s a glimmer. A truth, or knowledge, you’re not sure which. What you do know is that this glimmer is the answer, if you can just tap into it and learn what it’s trying to tell you. Because there is a way to win, you’ve never doubted that, and you never will. You just need to find it.

“Hey,” a voice quietly greets from behind you, and you recognize it as Andreia.

She comes to stand next to you, and you glance at her with a polite nod and small smile. She always comes to see you whenever she sees you arrive by the lighthouse where she still works. That’s another thing which seems very odd to you. How the world still has to keep going as usual, even with the truest evil trying to devour it. How the stock market has been affected by Americas destruction, how the politics of the world have shifted.

It feels like all that should’ve just stopped. Been put on indefinite hold while you all band together and fight. But that’s not how it works. Oddly enough, the planet has probably never seen a more peaceful time in all its existence, with the entire population so devoted to hope. There are no ongoing conflicts, virtually no crime even on the smallest scale of offences, and people are generally behaving more helpfully and tolerantly.

What a strange world this is, where the end of this war will see it return to those darker traits in very little time.

“Any progress?” she asks, following your gaze across the sea.

“No, not yet. I’m… stuck. In my head, you know?” you ponder, grateful to have someone other than the owl to talk to, just because humans relate to you better and understand things which no spirit can. “I keep trying to look at the problem from new angles, looking for something I could’ve missed, but as much as I know in my fucking bones there is an answer, I just can’t find it.”

“Maybe you need to write it down.”

At first, you dismiss her suggestion, since you can’t see what difference it would make, but when she continues to explain her reasoning, you start to come around.

“It activates a different part of your brain, which sometimes helps with problem solving. Singing does too, but I don’t think there is a song for this situation.”

“I don’t know. People have been making music for ages, covering every topic under the sun. I’m sure if we looked hard enough, we could find something eerily appropriate,” you shrug, laughing lightly at the subject.

Ever since you lost Oberyn, laughter hasn’t come as easily for you as before. It’s harder to let yourself be happy when he can’t be there to share it with you. But it’s also so important that you do hold on to the good moments and allow their brightness to infect you.

“How about… Ironic by Alanis Morissette”, she offers, making you snicker.

“Definitely. Or Everybody by Backstreet Boys.”

She hums approvingly, and a few more songs are exchanged between you, getting more and more ludicrous.

“Mr. Brightside by The Killers. I mean, come on, both the song and the group are appropriate,” you suggest, and by now you’re both struggling against incessant giggling.

“Lose Yourself…” Andreia replies, but then forgets the artist for a second, “…by uh…Eminem!”

But your laughter dies then. Partly because while the song does fit the theme overall, the message you’ve always taken away from it is simply about living in the moment and appreciating what you have, however unimportant or insignificant it might seem to someone else, which doesn’t really fit with going to war against ancient evil. And partly because of how the woman herself doesn’t seem to know why she chose that song at all. The moment she said it, confusion flashed over her features and with every second since, she looks increasingly befuddled.

“Lose yourself,” you repeat on impulse, but this time saying it as a suggestion to yourself.

Immediately, there’s a strange little click inside your head, and then the glimmer suddenly comes into full focus, so distinct now that you know it. How did you never think of it before? Oberyn even said it to you, in your final conversation on your way north from Antarctica.

You cannot possibly think that anything but giving it everything you have is going to be enough to free them all.

Every word he ever spoke to you or around you, lives in your mind, remembered in such vivid detail you can even recall the slight tremor in his voice as he’d said it.

“Andreia,” you say, turning to face her and pulling her into a tight hug which she bewilderedly reciprocates. “Thank you. You may have just saved everyone.”

You pull back and smile at her, but before she can say anything, Caelum picks you up and flies off with you, having heard you call out to her in your mind the moment the realization hit you.

“Am I to head west, then, Lightbringer?” she asks even as she aligns her beak to the shrouded horizon.

“Yes. It’s time to end this,” you answer out loud, because these words should be heard. The time for sneaking around and whispering between shielded minds is over. “I finally know how to free your sisters.”

Your once again brimming confidence rubs off on the owl, and she sets a nearly impossible speed, excited by the prospect of seeing her fellow spirits restored to their rightful glory. It doesn’t take long before you’re back underneath the poisonous cloud, and right away you can tell that it’s changed since your last visit, maybe a year and half earlier. The air is so thick with soot and ash that it clings to your skin and colors you black, while also wreaking havoc on your lungs in mere minutes.

Undoubtedly, this is what the entire world would eventually become, once all life had been consumed and all that was left for the armies of death to occupy themselves, was to torture each other, flooding the air with their oily blood and mutated skin cells. You’re grateful to know that this will never come to pass, while you cough up some of the black goo which has already begun to accumulate in your throat and lungs. It doesn’t harm you since you’re continually healing the damage it does, but it hurts more than one might imagine.

Looking up, you can see that Caelum isn’t affected by it, beyond how it obscures her sight, so you do your best to help her navigate by trying to get a sense of where Simon is. You find him quite quickly, detecting a massive surge of energy as he realizes his enemy is back. Which is probably the only thing he’s had to be excited about in a very long time. Directing the spirit there, you instruct her to drop you from an altitude high enough that she’ll be safe even if Octopus should be around and attempt to reach her with its enormous tentacles.

“Such a fall will break many of your bones,” she notes, not really out of concern, but more like she’s just making sure you know.

“I’m aware. It’ll be fine.”

The weightlessness is strangely liberating. Instead of falling, it makes you feel like you’re soaring, maybe because of how hopeful your realization has made you. But still no more than a trick of the mind. Hitting the ground removes the illusion when your legs completely shatter, all the way up to your hips, and fractures to your spine, ribs and arms make themselves known moments later.

You can still move, though, and as you feel Simon approach, you manage to claw yourself up to a seated position, finding that ignoring the pain is easier than you’d thought this time, which gives you comfort even as your enemy reaches you, sporting a large smirk on his disfigured face. Whatever’s been going on here for the past three years, he’s clearly begun to mutate himself, because his features aren’t entirely recognizable as human anymore.

He still has two legs and arms, and only one head, but the true shape of the Darkling has started to emerge, and it’s fucking hideous.

“Eww… the hell happened to you?” you ask, breathing hard through the pain, but otherwise mostly disgusted by his appearance.

Unlike his minions, the dark one is dry. His skin is a pale grey and where it’s cracked from the lack of moisture, mostly on his arms and hands but everywhere else too, there are miniature faces growing out of his flesh. Not like images of faces, but rather as though tiny people are actually trapped inside of him, trying to crawl out through the gaps but held back by some thin, partly transparent film. He’s at least ten feet tall now, so there’s much more space for these trapped people to crowd around, but they’re still fighting each other for room.

“You don’t like it?” he asks, and even his voice is unrecognizable. “This is my collection. The ones I like the most get to live inside me. The ones who are the most frightened… they make such delightful music inside my mind.”

You were hoping it wasn’t what it looks like, but clearly, it is. He probably grows larger with each soul he devours, and since he couldn’t have infected any new people for a long time, these must be his own creatures. Which would mean, once the mutated body is destroyed, the original human soul is still there, to some extent. But not in a way that would enable them to be restored. Their bodies are gone and no power on earth could bring them back. But at least the destruction of the Darkling will set them free.

“You’re using them to protect yourself.. aren’t you?” you ponder, trying to buy time for the spirits to reveal themselves, but also hoping to understand more about him, since that will help you take him down. “You cover yourself with them to make it harder for anyone to reach your dead heart.”

“Well, of course. Who’s gonna try and reach into this mess of scared little people, so desperate to escape their hell, they’ll crawl into the skin of anyone who touches me, driving that person mad. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose. In a devilish sort of way.”

“You will make a very nice addition to the flock…” he pauses, and puts a finger to his lips as if trying to think of something which evades him, “…oh, what was it Oberyn called you? I only heard it once, but it was something Egyptian, wasn’t it?”

You don’t really wanna hear that name spoken by anyone else, but since you’re still not sensing any spirits, you play along.

“Kaivalya.”

“Ah, yes! Freedom. How insulting a name to give to a creature whose entire life has been doomed to this ending from before she was even born,” he laments, putting on a very noticeably fake tone of compassion just to irritate you.

His voice already grates your eardrums. It’s so dry and course he can’t get much volume to it, but it still manages to cut straight into your brain with how it breaks on the high notes. The fake sentiment only manages to mildly annoy you in comparison.

“It was a promise…” you spit through teeth held tight against the pain of your legs trying to realign themselves so that the bones can be set, only to hurt more when the angles they’re trapped in won’t allow the movements.

“A promise? That old prince promised you freedom, and you believed him?!” Simon squeals before starting to laugh, further abusing your ears.

“No,” you counter, once you’ve adapted to the new level of pain. “He didn’t promise me freedom… He couldn’t have, because I was never his prisoner. He named me Freedom because that’s what I gave to him. A heart free to love again.”

You can tell he’s about to counter, it’s easy because his smirk returns every time his own thoughts amuse him, but you’re done with this distraction so you continue before he can.

“That’s what you took from him. I gave him this amazing gift… and you ripped it out of him.”

“Prince Martell sealed his own fate by allowing his fears to rip him apart,” he challenges, no longer smirking, though. “He was so scared for you. So worried you’d lose and he’d have to live on without you. And so, the coward you loved, the man who knew better than anyone how important it would be to keep hope alive in the time of the Darkling, chose to die rather than fight for you.”

Fuck. He’s found your weak spot and thrown a knife into it. You shouldn’t care what he says but you can’t help how his words cut through you, because they’re the same ones you’ve battled with in your nightmares. The same ones you’ve been unable to answer ever since it first dawned on you that he’d turned. Why did he give in? He knew what would happen. How could he leave himself so vulnerable?

But this is why you’re here. To set things right, no matter what happened in the past. You’ll never get those answers, so all you can do is let the questions go. And just as you begin to calm yourself, you feel it. They’re coming. He’s summoned them to watch as he devours you. And to protect him, should you have some trick up your sleeve.

“Tell me something, Si…” you start, giving them time to come closer before you get this over with. “Did you really think you’d ever get me to surrender to you? Is that what all this flaunting of your achievements is meant to do? To win me over?”

He sours while he listens, clearly unable to think of a witty comeback because you’re right. He absolutely thought that this, beating you, would be such a triumph you wouldn’t be able to resist admiring him.

“I’m the fucking goddess of all light, you prick. I was never gonna bow to you, you’re nothing but a shadow under the bed, a cockroach hiding in the bottom of the sink. You named me Boo, remember? Because even back then, I was better than you.”

You’re not actually trying to antagonize him, you just really wanted to give him a piece of your mind before you get this show going. But true to form, he’s enraged by your insults and comes at you with his arms raised and ready to beat you into the ground. The nine all are there, too far away for your eyes to make them out in the dark and dusty air, but close enough that you can feel them, standing in a circle around you and their master. And Caelum circles directly above you, just as you’d asked her.

“Don’t hesitate,” you tell her, as you watch Simon measure his first punch.

“Your sacrifice will not be in vain… Kaivalya,” she replies, and unlike the Darkling, her use of your most beloved name shows you just how much she respects you.

Nothing else is said between you. Nothing more is needed.

The Ten Spirits of the World Air - Forest - Water - Stone - Night - Autumn - Winter - Spring - Summer.

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