Page 30 of Fallen Stars

“Did you not like me showing you up in your own city?”

“And here I was thinking you were noble and just.”

“I’m playing the villain,” she replied, pouting. “Wasn’t that what you all wanted?”

Eli’s mask was back, his smirk too. “What doyouwant, Elara?”

“A favour.”

Eli snorted. “She says as she has me by the throat. I’m not really in a charitable mood.”

“It’s not just any kind of favour,” she replied. “I want to place a bet.”

Eli raised a brow as she loosened her shadows. Eli adjusted his collar before returning to his seat.

“If I win, I receive your favour, free of charge.”

“And if I win?” Eli asked.

“If you win, I tell you a secret, as per your…” she waved a hand artfully through the air, “currency. And,” she added, “you can keep the midans.” She looked around the club. It was tasteful and beautifully decorated, but she knew how to hit a Star’s vanity. “Put it towards redecorating.”

Eli scoffed, his eyes narrowing as he settled back in his chair, Elara unpicking her illusion. “It’s a deal,” he said.

Elara forced herself not to smile, picking up her cards and scanning them as the game commenced.

She had been dealt a bad hand.

The Star cards she’d received were Aquaria and Verra, depicted by their symbols of a woman blowing ice and a flower blooming. Two goddesses she knew next to nothing about save for the basics. The weapon, poison. Yes, that she would keep. As for the kingdom, she’d ironically been dealt Asteria as the setting for her story, which she supposed she had the fates to thank for. And the miscellaneous cards she possessed were ‘love’ and ‘power.’ She could work with those. Not that her hand really mattered at all, thanks to the plan she’d formulated the moment she’d made Isra take the blood oath.

“Ladies first,” Eli said sweetly.

Elara scoffed, tapping her cards. She drifted a little of her illusioning magick over the two Star cards in front of her before flipping them to the table.

“Have you ever heard of the taleThe Ram and the Serpent?”

The two Star cards stood out, one a deep red depicting a ram’s head, swords crossed behind it, dripping with blood. The other was a slate grey, an iron key depicted with a thick black snake curled around it, the same as the one coiled around Eli’s arm. Sleeting rain fell in the picture, shimmering in foiled silver.

“Hang on a minute,” a gruff Castorian man spluttered, waving his cards in the air as it dawned on him that Elara had stolen his cards. Elara flicked him a gaze filled with such terror that made him gulp. He put his hand back down, shaking as she took her gaze off him and continued. Eli was looking at her, his black gaze filled with trepidation.

“As I was saying,The Ram and the Serpent.”

“You’ll have to enlighten me.” Eli smirked, striking a match and lighting another tobacco roll. The sweetly perfumed smoke reached her as she continued.

“The ram,” she said, sucking a tooth, “was known and feared throughout the realm as the strongest animal in the kingdom. Its horns could knock a house down, its perseverance and sheer will enough to shake a building to rubble. The passion and vengeance in his veins could make even a lion quiver. All others bowed to him—the bull, the crab, the scorpion...so many. And in this hierarchy, slithering near the bottom was the serpent. One who no one paid much attention to.”

She placed an elegantly painted red nail onto Eli’s card, the serpent, and looked at him below her lashes. He had stilled, the tobacco roll neglected between his fingers. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that the rest of the table had gone blank-eyed, not moving a muscle. So she had gotten under Eli’s skin then, his charm smelling like rain and cedar as it began winding around the table, seizing the minds of the other players.

“The serpent was low to the ground, easy to step on and kill. How could it compare to the giants of the kingdom?” she told Eli, the only audience now. “And so its peers took it for granted. The ram allowed the serpent to befriend him in the sort of way that an older sibling begrudgingly lets a little one follow along, not seeing much usefulness or gain from the friendship. And the serpent was happy to play the role of powerless, adoring friend, but observing, always observing with his clever black eyes.”

Eli shifted forward in his seat, his eyes pinned on Elara. She shuffled her two cards left. “The thing that people always forget,” she mused, “is that power is not dependent on how strong or brutish or loud you are.” She placed the miscellaneous power card down. “Knowledge is power,” she mused. “Isn’t that what they say? Why put a sword to someone’s throat when you can manipulate them with a mere thought?”

Eli’s jaw ticked, and Elara’s lips twitched.

“The serpent was patient, yet another under-appreciated characteristic of his kind. He waited…and waited…and waited, a whisper in the ram’s ear here, a nudge there.

“Centuries they stood side by side as the world burned and the ram razed it to ruins. The serpent slithered beside him, and just when the ram had become comfortable enough to let his guard down, to forget that he, like any other animal, had a soft underbelly, the serpent struck. Tore that underbelly right out with his fangs and fed his venom into him.”

Elara drew the poison card, placing it down amongst the others.

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