Page 42 of This Cruel Fate

What will Atlas do when he finds out? Does he already know? Why else would he try to kill her? It would explain why he and Peter were so tense the night of the gala, Xolia reasoned. She would have to keep her guard up. Although he had backed off for now, he was too tenacious not to try anything again. If that’s what his plan is.

She took her phone and went back to Adonis’s room. He hadn’t moved from his sprawl on the left side of the bed. As quietly as she could, Xolia slipped back under the covers. Adonis molded himself around her like it was second nature, instinct. Warm skin met cold skin, and he stirred. “You’re freezing.”

“This house is freezing,” she huffed in response.

He hummed. “This house is old. The central heating isn’t reliable.”

“Well, that’s hardly my fault,” she grumbled.

Adonis slowly blinked his eyes open. “Do you want it to be warmer?”

Xolia nodded.

He stretched out and slowly full consciousness filtered back into him. Xolia couldn’t tear her eyes away from him. She couldn’t look away as his muscles shifted when he rolled his shoulders. “I wanted to show you something anyway, now is as good a time as any.” He pulled the covers away from his body.

“I think I’ve seen it,” Xolia said with a pointed stare below his abdomen.

“Not that,” he said, gently pushing her back against the mattress. “Something else.” He leaned over the side of the bed, pulled his boxers back on, and went to the cold fireplace on the eastern wall. Though logs were already inside it, Adonis grabbed a fresh one from the pile beside the fireplace and placed it strategically on the other logs. His shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath.

Xolia tilted her head to the side, wondering what he could possibly have to show her in the dominating darkness of the room with only the briefest echoes of starlight to illuminate him. Then flames sparked to life across his hand.

Xolia gasped. He hadn’t grabbed a lighter, or anything, that she had seen. The flames steadily grew until they covered his entire hand, and he thrust his burning hand into the fireplace. After a few seconds the licks of flame ate away at the dry logs, crackling and lighting up the room.

“That’s impossible,” she breathed out. Variants could only control their element, not create it from nothing.

Adonis took his hand from the flame, letting the lingering flames around his hand die out. He smiled at her, something so proud and boyish that Xolia smiled back at him. “Who says it’s impossible?”

“Everyone.” Warmth spread into the room as Adonis crawled back into bed with her. She grabbed at his hand, turning it over to investigate. “But you did it.”

All sleepiness was forgotten in favor of the starved-for-information student who lived hidden in Xolia. It was the same part of her that had pushed herself to her limits in the barracks, repeating every offensive and defensive stance with her powers until she perfected them. The same tenacious pupil that had committed to passing the secondary schooling FAR had instituted for variants who had only achieved primary schooling before the rebellion. This was perhaps the most interesting thing she had seen since her childhood. This was unprecedented.

“How?”

He smiled again, but this time his features were pulled tight at the edges. Exhaustion. “It’s really fucking hard. I haven’t been able to hold onto it much longer than that, but I read about it in some old Rheathian texts. Back from the days of the monarchy. I don’t know how to explain it, I only figured it out through trial and error.”

“Rheathian archives? Like the religion?”

Adonis nodded, falling back against his pillow. “There was a brief stint when my parents and I thought to mend our relationship, and as Rheathism is supposed to be the religion for humans and variants, we started going.”

Xolia got back under the covers, waiting for him to finish talking. Her mind raced with her interactions with the Rheathistic priest. Did he know that was possible? What secrets did the church have hiding away in their ancient building?

“Of course once they learned about the creation story, they decided it wasn’t for them.” Adonis turned to face her, gently pushing a loose lock of Xolia’s hair behind her ear. “I don’t really know if I believe it, but there is some amount of peace in the church that I can’t find anywhere else. And after I donated a sizable sum to help with the construction of a new food pantry for them, they were more than happy to let me look at their archives.”

“But anything from the monarchy must be thousands of years old.”

He nodded. “Many of the priests are trying to digitize everything so their record keeping is meticulous. Everything is kept in climate-controlled rooms,and you have to wear gloves to even touch the parchment.”

“How did you know what to look for?” Xolia asked. Surely, if this was open information, it would have spread like wildfire amongst variants. “I mean, why would the church keep this a secret?”

“I didn’t, I was just curious and taking every perk they offered me. And”—he shrugged—“I like their creation story. I was looking for more about it. The lines about variants creating their element were brief. Just two.”

“That’s incredible,” she said, because it really was. Not only had he stumbled onto one of the most important and forgotten secrets of variants in a millennium, but he had taught himself. “Will you teach me?”

“Of course.” He closed his eyes. “I just can’t help but to wonder how much of ourselves we don’t know. How much did we lose when the monarchy ended?” His speech was slower, his breathing evening out. But there was no way Xolia could fall asleep. Not on the heels of such a discovery. Could she learn to create water from nothing? How much more could they do with control like that? What were variants capable of that humans had so ruthlessly taken from them when they rebelled against the monarchy? She already worried she had lost so much of herself following the rebellion; now she had to worry she didn’t size up to the variants of old.

Xolia thought back to the painting of the variants in the antechamber of the church. Did they create their weapons from nothing? She thought about the angry-looking one, holding his sword aloft and hate burning in his eyes. In that moment, she could understand the depth of that hate. Why had she been reduced to this helpless shell of a being that was removed from what slivers of culture she had? How was it fair that she had been blessed with her abilities, twice blessed at that, and at every turn, she had been shunned or told to hide that part of herself? She had endured forced military service, a war, and faltering peace, and for what?

She sighed. Adonis would teach her, once she could master that she’d be unstoppable. Even Atlas would cower before her. Then he could not deny her superiority over him. Nothing would stand in her way, not with Peter and Adonis at her side. At some point the crackling of the fire and the comforting pressure of Adonis’s body next to hers lulled her back to sleep, dreaming of unprecedented power springing from her fingertips.

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