To Nachal.
Nachal’s eyes rose to the being standing in the very center of the dead. Liran tensed a split second before Alera spoke.
“You have come to save her, knowing that this might cut short your own life. Do you do this of your own free will?”
Nachal slowly turned away from Alera—to her. The dead filled the distance between them. His deep, grey eyes were hard and intense. From across the distance she watched the emotions flash through them: determination, desperation, love. Liran went rigid. She tried to rise, but he only held her hand more firmly. “He doesn’t want you to interfere,” he said, his voice raspier and harsher than usual. “This is his choice.”
Nachal turned back toward Alera. “I do,” he said clearly. Then he stumbled back a step in surprise, holding his hands up to his eyes to shield them from the brightness of the being facing him.
Molten gold poured from Alera’s head, spilling down her back. Blue fire shot from her eyes. A miasma of palpable golden energy and light radiated from her, lighting up the darkening, dusky sky. She raised her hand and Nachal staggered heavily, going down on one knee. Tears streamed from his eyes, down his face. His body shuddered, massively at first, and then, as his other knee hit the dirt, in tiny, minute shudders that shook his entire body like aftershocks from an earthquake.
The earth rumbled beneath their feet. Auri barely noticed; she kept her eyes glued to the figure whose head had dropped down to his chest. To the figure who knelt in the middle of the dead elves surrounding him, shaking.
Alera’s voice crashed through her mind like thunder, echoing all the way through her. Inescapable. The sound beat into her chest like an orchestra of deep bass drums, cracking the earth, splitting it into seams and slivers that ran from the ground around her, all the way up the stone wall at her back. Liran’s hand clenched hers tighter in warning, but she couldn’t rip her eyes from the human kneeling twenty yards in front of her.
Alera glided forward. Each step of her bare feet on the stone made it light with radiance from beneath. Wind tore through the courtyard, causing her white dress to billow around her, ripping through her golden hair, making it halo out behind her.
Nachal raised his head. It looked as though it took all of his effort just to do it. His grey eyes were bloodshot. His face and skin had gone chalk-pale. There was hollowness in his eyes, an aching misery as he stared at the queen. As though—for one instant of time—he understood her pain. He shared it.
His body started to glow, like flameless fire was burning within him. His skin glowed iridescent. His hair looked like it was tinged with golden flames. His eyes shot forward brilliant, piercing rays, illuminating upward as his head fell back and he gasped air into his chest. He drew in one more desperate gasp, and then his chest shuddered still, and his body slowly fell to the earth.
Alera came to a stop at his fallen, still body. Her calm voice carried to Auri despite the wind whipping around them. “Use it well,” she said quietly. She bent to touch his still chest, and air filled it suddenly, making it expand, making her hand rise with it. “Save her. Save us all.” She rose from her crouch, and left the courtyard of the dead, heading back to the dying below her.
Auri tore her hand from Liran’s and started running. She fell to her knees at Nachal’s feet, her chest rising and falling quickly with each painful gasp of her vise-ridden chest. The light slowly trickled from Nachal’s body, until finally . . . it was completely gone.
He opened his eyes. His normal, unlit eyes.
“Why?” she cried desperately, tears streaming down her face, her fists clenched tightly at her sides. “Why would you do this?”
His face shuddered, rippling outward like waves through his body. His grey eyes were sad. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse with shock and pain. It wheezed from his chest in a breathless, grinding sound. “If you were given . . . one chance—” he paused, closed his eyes, and then opened them again more slowly “—one chance to save someone you loved . . . wouldn’t you take it?” His eyes ate at her face hungrily. Then they went blank and his head went slack, hitting the ground with a dull thud.
“Nachal?” Auri cried, quickly reaching for him.
“He’s not dead, only unconscious,” Liran’s voice assured from behind. She turned to him with Nachal’s head pillowed on her lap.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered brokenly. “I don’t understand any of this.”
He crouched down next to her. His voice was very gentle. “You are heir to the elven throne. More than that, you are the only hope for this world, and for our people.” He looked down at Nachal. “She has changed him. Made him more like us, with a few of our abilities and gifts, but still human. She believes that only he can save you, and through you . . . Terradin.”
Auri stared at him in shock. He reached out with strong fingers and took her free hand within his own. “There is more.” His eyes lit with a strange light. Intense, but . . . awed. She trembled in trepidation.
“The Dragon-King Cerralys. He is your father.”
Chapter Eighteen- No Going Back
Nachal awoke slowly, painfully. His body felt like it had walked through fire and then been encased in an iceberg. Not good. He raised a shaky hand to his face, keeping his eyes closed, and twitched, startled, when he felt a gentle pressure come down on his shoulder. His eyes blinked open slowly. Auri.
“Auri,” he croaked. “What—ˮ
He looked around him, blinking heavily a few times to clear whatever was wrong with his eyes. It took him a few moments to realize that there was nothing wrong with his eyes. They were just different. Changed.
He had been changed. Alera had graced him.
“Do you always see this way?” he asked, bringing his hand closer to his eyes and staring at it in amazement.
Auri cleared her throat. “What way?”
He dropped his hand and looked at her face. The moonlight illuminating her face was unnecessary. He could see everything. Each subtle pigment of her skin. Each curved eyelash. The shape of her tense, sad mouth, and the pain that hovered visibly in eyes that were the exact replica of her father’s. Her furrowed brow. Her slight trembling. He could see everything. It was all clearer than if the brightest light were illuminating her.
“Everything,” he answered.
She looked away. “I don’t see everything, Nachal,” she said quietly. “Far from it. If I saw everything I wouldn’t be so confused right now.” Her eyes found his face again. “Why did you do this?”
“I told you the reason.”
“Your reason doesn’t make sense. You don’t know me enough to love me.”
He looked up. A night hawk was soaring through the sky. He could make out each of its feathers and the faint yellow glass of its eyes. It soared on the wind. Free. Majestic and powerful. The darkened sky above him should have made it impossible for him to see. But he could. His stomach clenched as he turned back to her, preparing for what he knew he had to say.
“I love you, Auri. I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable.” He closed his eyes, not wanting to see that expression on her face. It hurt too much. “I have dreamed about you for months now. In them, I was able to see inside of you, to the person that lies beneath your skin. To your heart and soul. From the dreams, I grew to respect you, admire you, and then, later, to love you. I can’t change that. I can’t suddenly make myself not love you.” He opened his eyes again to see her staring intently at him. There was no expression in her eyes, only intense concentration on his words. “But I won’t force myself on you. I would like to be your friend.”
“A friend who hopes to save me?”
“Yes.” He rolled his head to the side, and tried to breathe evenly.
“What happened? What did she do to you?”
Nachal smiled grimly, still trying to take even, measured breaths. “She changed me. Graced me with different abilities.” He flexed the muscles and tendons in his body, stretching them and coiling them underneath his skin.
“I think I’m stronger now. My vision and hearing are changed as well.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking away.
“Don’t,” he said shortly. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not.”
“Well I am!” she ground out. “Can you stand?”
Nachal looked around to the dead lying in the mass grave of the courtyard. He closed his eyes and struggled to breathe again, ignoring the pain splintering through his body. He tried to sit up, but struggled until Auri grabbed his shoulder and helped. Then she helped him to his feet. He swayed, dizzy. Auri put a steadying hand on his shoulder, and he leaned into it, afraid that if he moved any more he would end up laid out on the dirt again. After a minute or so, he slowly started moving his legs, shuffling them clumsily forward. Auri kept pace with him as though he were an invalid. He felt very humbled . . . and awkward.
After a few dozen paces, he moved a little more gracefully. Strength was slowly returning. “I think I can manage on my own now,” he said quietly. Auri removed her hand, and they walked out of the courtyard. They passed beneath arched trellises and by the open pavilions where the dying slept. He looked in each one as they passed. El`ness Nahrral was dying. It was easy to see that now. It was dying, and both Alera and Cerralys believed that the elf walking next to him was the only way for them to win. That she was vital, and that he was the only one who could save her.
“I didn’t just do it because I love you,” he murmured as they passed another pavilion. “I did it because I love Eldaria. I love Terradin. And I think that whatever chance we may or may not have should be preserved and protected.”
“You believe, like Alera, that I can help?”
He turned to her. “Cerralys believes it as well. He told me before I left to come and find you that, though he doesn’t understand it, he feels that you are Terradin.”
She turned her face away.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “I keep bringing up subjects that are uncomfortable for you. Auri?”
She reluctantly turned to him again.
“I’m not asking for you to stop loving him. I’ll take you in whatever capacity you want me in. If all you can offer is friendship, I’ll take that. Just please . . . don’t shut me out of your life.”
She stopped walking. Her eyes were an intense blue, even in the darkness. “I don’t want to hurt you more than my presence in your life already has. What you want from me . . . I don’t know that I can ever give it.”
“All I’m asking for is the chance to be your friend.”
Her mouth twisted in a pained grimace.
“Please,” he said quietly. “Just a friend.” He smiled. “You can help me to keep Dhurmic in line.” He said it like it was a full-time job. “You can teach me about your wolf—he gestured to Wolf at Auri’s side—and keep the days from passing into monotony on the ship. And, if you would, you could teach me about these new abilities that I seem to have acquired.”
She shook her head, smiling slightly, and sighed. “I don’t think I’m the best person to show you that. I don’t know how to be an elf. I just am.”
“Do you think Liran would mind if I asked him?” Nachal asked, quietly, sinking onto the damp grass by the river’s edge. They had wound up at the point just at the apex of the tiered waterfalls. It felt like the top of the world to him.
Her eyes held his for a moment, and he read the emotions in them as easily as if he were looking into a mirror at his own reflection. She was confused . . . and in pain. Shadows grew in them as he watched. He lifted a hand, tentatively, slowly. Her gaze fastened upon it like a deer might watch a hunter. Frozen. He brought his hand gently to her face and ran the pad of his thumb down the creases between her brows, trying to smooth them. “Does he feel the same way about you?”
She swallowed and leaned back half an inch, away from his touch. He dropped his hand. She looked like she was debating something, and then she just shook her head and dropped her eyes back to the water.
“I think you’re wrong,” he said quietly.
“Whether I am or not doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “He only wants to remain friends. I am respecting his wishes.”
He nodded, and silence enveloped them for a time. She twisted to meet his eyes. “Drashmere shared some things with me about you, about your life. Do you mind if I ask you some personal questions?”
He chuckled wryly. “Ask away.”
Her hand reached out to strip some grass from the soil. She clutched it tightly for a moment, and then opened her hand again slowly, letting the wind carry it away. It rose in the breeze and drifted peacefully down across the water. “My father,” she murmured, watching the progress of the blades of grass. “What is he like?”
While her face was turned away, he studied her. Her question had been laced with pain and uncertainty. So much of it that she couldn’t seem to hide it. The uncertainty perhaps he could ease a little, but the pain. . . He could think of nothing that would alleviate that. Nothing that wouldn’t just make it worse.
Like the way that his touch did.
Her rejection hurt. He had tried so hard not to care too much, not to fall in love with her. But in the end, it had all been futile. He hadn’t realized during those many months of dreaming of her how much his feelings had evolved until it was too late. He closed his eyes on that thought.
Too late.
Thinking back, he thought that maybe as far back as the very first time he had dreamed of her it had been too late. Even then.
He kept his eyes closed as he tried to formulate an adequate response to her question. How could he possibly explain Cerralys to her? How could he help her to understand that she didn’t need to feel uncertain about him, that Cerralys would love her, just as he had loved that little nothing of a boy he had adopted so long ago. “He is the best father that anyone could ever ask for,” he murmured quietly, a rough catch in his voice.
Oh, old one. You will lose us both if I can’t stop what’s coming for her. Me—the orphan you never expected—and Auri, the daughter you never knew you had. The daughter who will cause you so much pain when you see her. When you realize how many years you have lost with her.
He hung his head, trying not to cry and failing. The thought of what this would do to his father tore at him. Cerralys had already had so much pain; he didn’t want to bring more to his door. But he had no choice. Auri was his daughter, and he needed to know her. He at least needed the chance to know her. Just the chance, however long or short it may be, to know this incredible person sitting next to him in the dark. A gentle, tentative hand touched his shoulder. He took a deep breath, running a dirty hand over his eyes to obscure the tears before he opened them.
“Cerralys will be devastated when he learns about you,” he said huskily. “He thought your mother was dead, Auri. If he had known that she survived, that you survived, he would have searched endlessly for you, and he wouldn’t have stopped until he found you. I know that with everything within me. He is not one to give up something so precious, and I know the loss of your mother has haunted him these many years.”
Her face clearly spoke her doubts more elegantly than any words might have, but she let it be for the moment, perhaps needing time to digest it. She brought her legs up, and wrapped her arms tightly around them, as though she were holding something inside of her. Her eyes left his to track the gleaming edge of the water as it spilled over the first tier of the waterfall. She was quiet for a long time; her thoughts seemed very far away.
“But what kind of man is he, Nachal?” she finally asked again quietly. “That he would have searched for my mother is nothing more than most would have done. That he would have searched until he found us is perhaps a little more telling, though not much. What kind of man is he in the secret chambers of your home? In the moments when the world is turned away from him and all is quiet.”
Nachal didn’t even hesitate. “When the world is turned away and all is quiet, he is my friend.”
She turned in surprise
, and he smiled slightly, shaking his head, searching for the right words that would open up to her the love of this particular father.
The love of Cerralys.
“Being around him, day in and day out, changes people. He changes them . . . with his convictions and kindness, his strength and wisdom. His love. He slowly molds them—simply by being the kind of person that he is—into better people. That is why those who serve under him would follow him to the great pit of darkness and back, because they never again want to return to what they were, and within his eyes they see the possibility of becoming something far greater than what they are.”
Her eyes were locked onto his own. “You speak of they,” she said quietly, “but what about you? What about you, Nachal? Are you a better person for knowing him?”
It was an unabashedly pointed and personal question. Was he a better person? He stared at those eyes for a long time, those blue eyes so like her father’s, and he felt peace descend. “From the first moments that I can remember with him, he has encouraged me, guided me, and loved me with a force that is encompassing in its reach, altering in its power, and humbling in its constancy.” He paused, swallowed, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they burned. “I am everything that I am because he believed that I could be. If you’re asking me if I think that because of his influence in my life I am a better man, the answer is yes.”
She looked away from him quickly. Her voice grew husky. “All those years spent mourning the loss of my father, mourning his absence in my life, and he was right there all along. All of those years. . .” She shook her head. “I don’t want to cause him pain, Nachal. Perhaps I shouldn’t go to see him. Perhaps I should just let it be.”
“Don’t, Auri,” he said harshly. “Don’t take that away from him. Whatever pain you might cause at the beginning, will quickly pale in comparison to the joy that you will soon give him.”
She stared at the water for a long time in silence.
Nachal spread out a little to shift his legs, letting them flatten against the damp grass. He could feel the wet on his skin now, soaking through his pants. They had been sitting for at least a quarter of an hour, talking. He lay back on his elbows and dropped his head back, staring up into the night sky. The moon illuminated the area around them brilliantly. It was impossible in Eldaria to see the color of things once the sun went down, but here . . . here the world seemed different. The colors were so much richer and more vibrant. The greens were more intense, the blues softer and clearer, the browns richer and deeper.