Page 13 of Kiss the Filthiest King

The All Goddess sets those unsettling eyes on me, and I have to straighten up not to flinch.

To my horror, she reaches out, her hand suddenly there, right against my cheek.

I shiver under the sheer jolt of power cursing through my skin...but while it's power, it's not skin. She has no flesh.

And that's what she—what they—want from us.

I remember my endless fight against the eldritch, who circle Ilvaris in order to come right here, into its heart, and take these primal powers for themselves. We can destroy their essence in their immaterial form, and they take a while to recover. But they come back. They cannot be killed. Not without flesh.

Here but not quite present.

"We've destroyed each other thousands of times, in millions of ways you couldn't begin to imagine," she tells me sadly.

"And after all that, you still aren't sated?"

"Never," she declares. "Not until he pays for his crime."

"It is time to end it."

End it.

End each other?

"Wait, you mean to kill her when she's flesh?" I laugh. "We're not going to kill each other. We're bound to each other."

"As are we," the Undoing replies, cold and unfeeling.

For the first time, I doubt this course of action.Marun, the human seer, said the All and Undoing were standing together. These two forces desire something else entirely.

"If we take you, who's in charge? You or us?"

And why would I take them at their world? But they've been plain enough so far.

"When our kind are lost, broken or forgotten, we're reduced to this. Power. Essence. Fleshless, but not without will."

A non-answer if ever there was one.

"Those who absorb our power take our will with them. What you do with both is up to you."

This is a dangerous path. It always was, but now, I truly understand the trick. If I want Darina to live, to take in that immense power, she'll possess the will of the All Goddess. And what she wants is to destroy the Undoing. Which would be me. I don't doubt they'll never make the deal unless both of us agree to it. And even then, I'd never let Darina hold this burden without taking in the power to stop her. To protect—her or the world, that's left to be determined.

The choice is simple. Either I let the high queen, my mate, die here and leave the fate of this world to Loch, the trickster, banking on him to never come here to seek this power for himself—or one of his descendants, in hundreds, thousands of years.

Or I trust myself, and Darina, to be able to handle it. I trust fate.

I see something else, Ry, right there by your side. That’s…everything. The All Goddess is right there next to the Undoing.

By my side. But is she there as my lover or my enemy? I try to recall the entirety of what I heard that day, every word, every intonation.

Nothing reassuring comes to mind.

And yet...

I think of the last hundreds of years, mostly spent waiting, bored, and imagine another eternity of that. It'd be kinder to kill myself now. I think of my brother, and the way he desperately clung to his own fate just to avoid the emptiness, the nothing that is the lot of immortals without purpose, without companionship.

The dead woman at my feet is the only future I could ever have.

Bottom line: I can let her die and destroy myself now, or I can take that leap of faith, and only maybe have to murder her later.

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