Page 5

Some embraced. Others raised weapons into the air. The sound rolled across the ruined landscape like a wave, filled with relief, triumph, and the belief that the nightmare was finally over.

But I found myself unable to share their certainty. As the battle may have been won, but the war felt far from over. Demetrios was still out there somewhere, and until we knew exactly what had become of him, celebration felt dangerously premature.

Then the cheering changed.

One by one, voices faltered, shifting into gasps of astonishment as the land began to transform before our eyes.

Grass pushed through the blackened earth in rippling waves of green, reclaiming ground that had only moments ago been scarred by corruption and death. Flowers burst into bloom amongst the ash, splashing the landscape with colour, while trees that had stood twisted and dying seemed to awaken. Cracked trunks knitted themselves whole, branches stretched towards the sky, and fresh leaves unfurled beneath a breeze that carried the scent of life rather than decay.

For a moment, I simply stared, my mouth agape in awe.

It was as though the darkness had released its hold on the land.

Hope stirred inside me, small and cautious. Because if the darkness was truly receding, then perhaps Atlas’s dagger had done more damage than any of us realized. Perhaps striking Demetrios had disrupted something far greater than his control over Lazaros.

But even as the thought surfaced, doubt followed close behind. As I knew that Demetrios had manipulated too much for me to believe he had been defeated so easily.

“How?” Atlas asked under his breath as he stepped outside. “The odds… they were… were overwhelming.”

His astonishment was easy to hear, yet I gave no answer. Instead, my gaze settled on the battlefield stretching out before us, and this time I looked properly.

Selfishly, I wished I could step back into the throne room and have the doors close behind me. Return to the shadows and darkness where I wouldn’t have to face what everyone else already seemed determined to overlook. Bodies littered the ground below, countless mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends who would never return home. The soldiers around them cheered and embraced one another, celebrating the end of the battle, and I understood why. They had survived. The darkness was gone. The kingdom had been saved.

Yet all I could see was the cost.

The deaths I had been too late to prevent.

The memory of driving the lightning dagger into the Typhon flashed through my mind. I had felt the power surge through me before erupting across the battlefield, tearing through the darkness that had possessed the soldiers.

At the time, there was no choice. If I hadn’t acted, Atlas would have died. Aster would have died. Countless others would have followed. But standing here now, staring at the aftermath, it was impossible to ignore the weight of what that decision had demanded. The darkness had been destroyed, yet so too had the people trapped beneath it, and no amount of celebration could erase the knowledge that I had been the one to make that choice.

And it wasn’t just me struggling beneath the enormity of it.

Lazaros moved forwards on unsteady legs, ash swirling around his boots as he made his way towards the sandstone steps overlooking the battlefield. He looked as though every step cost him something, his face pale beneath the streaks of blood still staining his skin. Then his knees gave way beneath him, and a broken cry tore from his bloodied throat as he stared out across the destruction before us.

“No. This… this wasn’t me.”

And then, as though the sight of so much death had pried loose a door he could no longer hold shut, something far worse moved behind his eyes.

His hands came up, fisting in his blood-matted hair, and the breath he dragged in shuddered apart on the way out.

“Father…” The word cracked clean in half. “Oh, gods no. Father, I…” He shook his head violently, as though he could fling the memory loose. “I killed him! I killed our father. It was my hands. It was me…”

A cold that had nothing to do with the morning air swept through me.

I had never met the old king. I had only ever heard him spoken of in the past tense, in the careful, flattened voices people use for a grief still too raw to touch. But I felt the truth of it tear through the two of them all the same, the way a crack races silently across a frozen lake.

Beside me, Atlas went rigid, a muscle leaping in the hard line of his jaw, his hands curling slowly closed at his sides as though he were physically holding something in. Yet he said nothing at all.

Instead, his arm drew tight around me until it very nearly hurt, and when I glanced up at him, I saw the muscle ticking hard in his cheek, his throat working as he swallowed down whatever fought to climb out of it. Grief, I thought, or fury, as with Atlas, I was beginning to learn, the two so often wore the very same face.

What frightened me most was that neither of them told him he was wrong.

My bottom lip trembled.

The shock and horror in his voice were enough to make my chest ache, but it was the guilt that struck me hardest. Looking at him, I realized we were both seeing the same thing. Not victory. Not salvation. Not the end of a war.

Instead, we saw the thousands of lives caught in the middle of it all and the impossible choices that had brought us here. The difference was that Lazaros believed those deaths belonged to him. Yet I knew exactly how much blood stained my own hands. No matter how many people would end up telling me otherwise, I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to convince myself that there hadn’t been another way. Perhaps if I had managed to avoid the Typhon and reach Atlas sooner, his dagger striking Demetrios might have lifted the darkness from the possessed before so many lives were lost.