Page 119 of A Legacy of Wrath and Reckoning

But Ranon merely cast his gaze over Zylah’s shoulder to where his daughter’s remains had fluttered away with the wind. “Pity. She might have been useful—”

Holt moved. Magic erupted from him, twined with flame, but Ranon raised a hand and the fire merely passed around his body, as if he’d bent the air around him to evade the blow, not a single hair on his head out of place.

Not the air, Zylah realised. The aether.

Holt attacked again, and this time she joined him, threading her magic with his to reinforce the attack, but still, the Fae remained unaffected. At their backs, their friends fought against foe, vampires that had broken through the gate.

“Mora,” Ranon snapped, something rippling over their shield. “Mora!” Ranon barked again, and this time, both Holt and Zylah staggered forwards, weapons tumbling from their hands as the Fae’s command seeped through their magic.Aurelia’smagic. Nothing against Ranon’s, and the bastard grinned like he knew it. He took slow, deliberate steps towards them both, delight flitting over his features at the way they’d stilled.

Zylah’s stomach twisted. Aurelia had possessed a similar ability, and the memory of Holt kneeling before the Fae in the dirt outside the mine had her breath stuttering.

Rocks fell as Sira and Pallia fought, but Ranon merely raised a hand and the rocks turned to dust, cascading around them all like rainwater. The ancient Fae tipped the jagged end of his staff in Holt’s direction. “All good pets know more than a single command.”

Zylah swore under her breath. She’d only broken one command. But she could break another. With Aurelia’s magic buzzing through her veins, her threads wrapped tightly around her and Holt to weave a shield like the Fae’s, pulling at Ranon’s command simultaneously.

The ancient Fae paused, the only sign of apprehension he’d shown since their arrival passing so quickly over his features Zylah almost missed it. Holt felt the crack in the magic at the same moment she did, his roots shooting from the rock at Ranon’s feet and sending the Fae to the dirt with a grunt. But as Holt released another wave of his magic, something knocked Zylah off her feet.

Sira.

She turned to face the Fae with a groan, one hand clutched against her stomach where the magic had struck her. Zylah staggered to her feet and lifted her gaze to the ancient Fae separating her from Holt.

Only it wasn’t Sira.

It was Pallia.

Her grandmother came towards her, Sira unmoving in the dirt beyond. “Time to give what was promised, Zylah. We had a bargain.”

Zylah had only ever made three bargains in her life: one with Holt, another with Malok, and the third… “It was you. In Kerthen.” When Zylah had been in so much agony she’d have given anything to make it stop.

“I will take your pain and in return you will give me your assistance when I call upon you, without question, without hesitation, without consideration… I will ask for it, and you will give it freely. Do we have an agreement?”Pallia had asked her, when she’d had no idea it was her grandmother who’d offered aid.

“Why?” Zylah asked, wincing at the blows Holt deflected from Ranon, though he countered just as fiercely. “When you came to me all those months later, you told me to stop Marcus. To get the vanquicite removed from my spine.” She’d almost died at the hands of an Aster before her grandmother had appeared to her, just as otherworldly and ethereal as she’d grown up believing the gods to be. But what better way to have someone do your bidding than to offer them help when they needed it most? She cast her gaze at the lifeless priestesses, a fate that could so easily have been her own. “It was all for this. To set you free.”

Pallia wore her hair in a braided crown atop her head, her violet eyes the exact shade Zylah’s had once been. Her attention shifted to Sira’s body in the dirt, at the shattered statues they’d emerged from, pressing a hand against her strange tomb. “Confinement comes in many different forms. My daughter never possessed power to rival mine, so this was the best she could come up with.”

Zylah didn’t hide her surprise. “My mother put you here?”

Her grandmother merely hummed. “When she finally learnt the truth.”

“Get the stone removed. It was put there to keep you safe,”Pallia had told her. “She was trying to hide me from you.”

The ancient Fae chuckled softly, like this was all some strange game she’d been playing, like they were all pieces for her to strike out at her whim. “And it worked, for a while. But two decades was nothing against the centuries I had already waited for her to give in and provide an heir. Her love for your father was always her downfall.”

Zylah’s parents. Her parents who she had been so desperate to find, spoken of by her own flesh and blood as if they were nothing but inconveniences in Pallia’s plans. And an heir, because Pallia needed her own bloodline to release Ranon.

Both Fae and human history had gotten it so very, very wrong. Vilified Sira when all along it had been Pallia who was the true villain. And Saphi had warned them all, told them that Sira had begged her to stop during a ritual. Because they had never been Sira’s rituals; the priestesses truly had been Pallia’s from the beginning.

Pallia reached out a hand, and with a curl of her fingers, Zylah was lifted to her toes, dragged through the dirt by invisible hands and brought before her grandmother.

“You wanted this,” Zylah murmured, staring into eyes that should have been full of love, but instead she saw nothing but hate. Spite. “For Ranon to be free. For him to kill; to create enough power to free you.”

Pallia hummed, studying Zylah’s face just as closely, her chin tilted to look up into Zylah’s eyes. “It was always them he sought. First Sira. Then Imala. When I told him about Sira and Arioch’s child, when I looked upon his face…” She held a hand to Zylah’s, and Zylah couldn’t help but wonder if it was her mother Pallia saw. “I knew he would never want me the way he wanted her.”

“Aurelia was theirs?” Then Ranon had been wrong… or had known and used her to serve his purpose, anyway.

“No.” Pallia waved a hand at the statue that had shattered long ago. “Aurelia was Imala’s and Ranon’s.”

Beyond Pallia, Sira began to stir, but Zylah didn’t dare draw attention to the Fae, or to her own silent attempts to break through Pallia’s magic. Holt still fought tirelessly against Ranon, and if her shield around him faltered, if Pallia turned her attention to him instead… Zylah couldn’t consider it. She needed to keep her grandmother distracted. “Where is Sira’s daughter?”

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