Page 73 of Fallen Stars

Elara felt herself nod. “I know. But it will be worth it.”

Ariete shrugged, turning to the door. “I hope for your sake it is.”

The Moon bowed her head, and Elara’s view was met with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, jewels adorning every finger.

“Oh and before I forget,” Ariete said, and the Moon raised her eyes to him. Ariete extended a card between two fingers. She took it, the familiar red and black foil shimmering in the light. Ariete’s eyes flashed from red to hazel as a different voice echoed through him. “Your future,” Isra’s voice purred, so disconcerting in Ariete’s body.

Elara turned the card over, still sitting on the throne, still the Moon, as Ariete began to stroll down the throne room. She recoiled, though her body wouldn’t move.

‘Death’ was written in a curling script, and the image showed a skeletal horse with a rider atop it. The rider was a woman—hair ink black and flowing, the face grotesquely blank, no features at all as it stared eerily back at her. A hand was raised, and shadows poured from them. She scanned the rest of the card and saw in the background a body and a figure hunched over it, dead bodies surrounding them both. The hunched figure seemed to be crying. She peered closer, morbid fascination taking over as the card began to whisper to her, calling her in. The figure weeping washer.

Elara shivered, trying to pull away from the card. But colour began to seep out of the card, tendrils of it wrapping around her as it pulled her into it, the surroundings shifting around her once again from blues to greens and browns and reds. She looked up once to the now familiar throne room, Ariete with his back to her, hands in his pockets as he reached the door. But just as the room spun, the Ariete from this memory seemed to turn his head and look right at Elara.

The world shifted, and Elara tumbled into the next card. She cowered instantly, the sound of battle assaulting her. The sky glared red, lighting a battlefield—barren and coated in mud and blood. She looked around her. She was kneeling in the dirt as the cries of the dying reached her. Her face was wet, body shaking, and Elara realised she was crying. Her shoulder throbbed, and looking at it, she saw the blood pouring out of a wound. But then her body became aware that her arms were in the air, holding something up. She raised her head, seeing what was held between her hands. A sword. The same sword that had appeared to her in Botis’s dreams. Its hilt still curled like a dragun, a sapphire the size of an egg at its center, its blade pointed down. She trembled, tears still falling down her cheeks as she followed the blade down, finally seeing who was beneath her.

Ariete coughed, a shadow wisping from his mouth as he lay, glittering blood and dirt marring his face.

“It’s okay,” he said, his tone soft, and the Elara within, who was observing the whole thing, jolted, the tone so foreign in the god of wrath’s voice. “You have to do this.” Blood and shadow leaked from the corner of his mouth, seeping outwards.

“I can’t,” Elara wept, her arms shaking as she held the sword there.

“It’s the only way. I’d rather die by your hand than hers.”

“But what about—”

Ariete gripped Elara’s armor, hauling himself up as he cut off her sentence. “To die by sword in battle is honorable, Elara. I welcome it. Already I feel her shadows wrapping around me.”

He coughed again, and Elara could feel it then—the vile energy that poured from his mouth in heavy black smoke. It smelled like decay, felt like death.

“It was always supposed to be you,” he croaked, his head slumping once more to the ground. Elara squeezed her eyes shut, heard her name being roared by someone on the battlefield, and with shaking arms, she drove the sword into Ariete’s chest.

“Thank you,” the god rasped as Elara wept anew, her body covering Ariete’s. He pressed something into her hands, and she blinked through her tears, seeing a card in it. “Your present,” Isra’s voice murmured between his lips, and Elara snatched it, the overwhelming sense of grief suffocating as she turned it, the life in Ariete’s red eyes slowly leaving him.

‘The Devil,’ the card read. The painting showed Ariete, curling ram horns growing from his temples, his eyes closed, a faint smile on his face as his arms stretched from either side of him, raised in supplication. Yet attached to those hands were two golden ropes and a prisoner on either side of him, kneeling, the rope around their throats. One was Elara, eyes empty as she stared up through the card. And the other… Though she was still within the future, her heart called out, wailing as she saw Enzo, face devoid of hope as he looked right at Elara.

The world spun once more, colours making way for purple and red once more as they blurred and swam, before Elara opened her eyes, gasping as she was thrown back into the fortune teller’s tent.

Ariete was sitting across from her, not Isra. The god was turning the Devil card in his hands, a sharpened canine glinting as he grinned, watching her. But more than that, he wore a cord around his neck—golden and glowing. Enzo’s tether.

“You,” Elara snarled and launched across the table at him, a dagger already conjuring in her hand.

Ariete leapt back, sprinting around the table as he laughed, the Devil card still in his hand. The table upended, and Elara was sent sprawling as a flurry of cards landed around her. They spun, a swirl of them picking up as she lost Ariete, trying to make her way through the maelstrom as he disappeared out of the tent.

Cards flickered past her.

The lovers—Enzo and she reaching out towards one another as shadowed hands pulled them back.

The Star—a woman whom Elara didn’t recognise with deep red hair holding a spellbook as she gave a knowing smile, pouring a cup of blood into a river.

The Wheel of Fortune—a ship’s wheel that looked to be inscribed with symbols of the Stars upon it as it sank through a dark ocean.

She batted them all away, clawing herself out of the whirlwind that surrounded her as fury laced her chest, but once the cards settled, she was no longer in a fortune teller’s tent. She looked in alarm to the horse beneath her—as skeletal as the one in the death card—and then searched around her, seeing that she was now outside the tent and on a spinning carousel. She squinted ahead and found Ariete on another, the poles of the mechanism rising and falling as Ariete turned back to look at her and winked.

With a bloodcurdling shriek, she threw her shadows out to lance around his throat from where she was sitting before hauling herself up by the pole and shifting to the next horse.

The moment the shadows left her, she felt the dreamscape shake, a tremor running through it. Ariete, who had been grinning, suddenly dropped his smile, his eyes widening. He was no longer looking at Elara, but to the skies as thunder rumbled. Elara gritted her teeth as her shadows seemed to lose control, spinning in a frenzy rather than wrapping around Ariete’s throat.

Elara continued to crawl from horse to horse as Ariete tensed before he leapt off the carousel and thudded onto grass. He didn’t spare a look back as he began to run and Elara growled in frustration, jumping after him. Her ankles jarred as she landed on the ground, but she ignored the pain as she set off at a sprint, giving chase.

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