Page 76 of Bright Soul

28

PHAERON

At the dawn of my life, a set of scholars had taught me what it meant to be a prince. A straight posture was a requirement; composure, a necessity. To be a prince meant achieving perfection.I’d caught glimpses of the ideal prince within me, thoughperfectwas always an impossible standard.

Shadowborn were instinctively drawn to dark, quiet places. We’d evolved on a planet shaded by eternal night as protectors, there to eliminate unseen threats so the rest of our kind could thrive.I was meant to have a territory to patrol, unceasingly seeking out the next fight until my True Light called me home and into her arms.

There was also the rage, a trait inconvenient and inferior to my station. Yet it so often simmered under my skin, reminding me not to remain in one place for long. I’d tried to heed my tutors and snuff out its sparks and heat, but it remained part of my core being, the blame of its reoccurrence straddled somewhere between the instincts of a shadowborn and the inferiority of a second prince.

I hated when there were witnesses to when I lost control. I always sought solitude to hunt and exist without the judgment of society or man.

But first, while balanced on a knife’s edge of self-control, I looked for Cress and found her scent lingering in Highfall’s Mall, twined with Geo’s earthen tang. She alone had the power to ground me.

But they’d left the mall by that point. I was the only living person in the whole complex.

Alone.

I took form far from the battlefield where the Hungering Darkness fell. My chest rose and fell in shallow gasps for air. I was too hot; my clothes and armor were too tight. And even with no manmade lights shining overhead, the numerous panes of windows high above made this mall toofuckingbright.

Shadows erupted from my skin while I screamed a shadowborn’s howl. Magic and power answered my call, and I wrapped myself in a cloak of night and became a destructive creature with a wolflike head and a trailing tail of spikes. My fingers lengthened into foot-long talons, shredding sidings and tile like ripping paper.

“Myuna!” I raged. Every uprooted sign and display could’ve been her, thrown, shredded, and ruined.

I pictured her paranoid face, the rage and fear that’d twisted her face from the Void’s wisdom:“She will defeat you before you have a chance to spread your influence on a new world.”

But the narrow-sighted monster had only seen what was before her, not the scope of what the Void could see. A prophecy from a Vess was supposed to be taken with a cynical ear, for it was most likely the madness and the laughter speaking through them.

I continued my rampage, imagining tearing her throat out with my teeth. Did goddesses bleed? Or was she simply a hollowvessel, a stretched-out form of clay that would deflate from a mortal wound?

She’d trespassed against me personally, worse than I could’ve ever imagined. My wobbly memories conjured Keshora, and my pace faltered a moment. I squeezed a guardrail over the three-story drop to the bottom of the mall, leaving behind an impression of my hands.

Keshora, as I knew her, was a weaver and a mother. A proud but unlikely second princess. I’d returned from war to find that, in my absence, she’d given her heart to two girls,RavitaandBrazita. When I tried to imagine their nicknames in her voice, only the throbbing of my heartbeat filled my ears.

“She who would mate the son of night and fight you alongside his daughter.”

I made a sound of pain low in my throat. It was ludicrous. Myuna thought the Void’s prophecy would be crushed like so much smoke as long as she killed Keshora and Ravai, two women who’d never been a threat to her.

“It wasn’t referring to either of them,” I mumbled, as if the truth would bring them back.

Unlike the wreckage I’d left behind me, I damaged the railing purposefully, creating a ledge for me to sit and dangle my feet and tail over the perilous drop. My power receded in tufts of smoke, exposing the rawness of my expression. What I thought was anger twisted and revealed itself as the chest-cracking grief that pounced the moment I acknowledged the truth.

My brother was dead.

My family was murdered.

My world was destroyed.

And my people were scattered and endangered, unlikely to unite as a kingdom again.

At the center of it all sat Myuna, gorging and laughing in her death knell of a voice. Fear and revulsion shuddered throughmy body. If the Void’s prophecy was to be believed and her assumption of my identity as “the son of night” correct, then I was a central figure to her end. But the one to wield the sword would be Cress, aided by Braza. I was two crucial steps from setting that destiny into motion.

I inspected my hands. Blood and smears of white-ish powder clotted under my nails and in the creases of my skin. One step would be easier than the other. I had no doubt Cress would agree to carry my mating mark, but I still needed to cobble together a proper gift for her.

And Braza… I cursed under my breath. I’d ruined that relationship with careless, unguarded thoughts. We’d had powercores on Soiluire, but she’d been the first I’d known before her transformation. Though she had becomeother, it’d been tactless to shout in my head that she wasn’t the daughter I remembered and marvel at how strange she’d become upon shedding her mortal flesh.

I couldn’t remember the last time she’d called me Father, a consequence I deserved and one that would not be reversed with a simple apology. I would produce a grander gesture for her for the right reason. Not just to kill Myuna, but to give Braza back the life she deserved.

“Well,” I said, scrubbing my cheeks to rub away the self-pity, “idleness is the enemy of progress.”

---