Page 101 of A Fate Everlasting

My breath caught. Hope hit hard and bright, like a falling star. My father was alive. He hadn’t died that night, either. The accident was all a fabrication.

The torches flickered in the still-burning remnants of ether, warping the room. My fingers curled into fists as the weight of those words settled over me like the tightening of iron chains.

This wasn’t over.

The High King had not gotten what he wanted, and now, he was playing a different game. And I had no leverage, no loophole. Only the rules he had written, and a choice.

“That means you have a year,” Dante called, already striding toward the chapel doors.A year.“A year to graduate. To make the Fall. To present yourself to his court… properly, this time. When you are of age.”

I drove my nails into my palm. One year. As if that were achoice.

“Dante!” I tried, but he was already through the doors. I broke Dorian’s grip and raced after him.

“Where are you going?” The words broke raw from my throat. “You can’t just—”Leave me. Not like this. Not again. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t look back. Didn’t say a word. I should’ve felt hatred, but all I could feel was the echo of empty space as he turned away.

The Thread hissed in the back of my mind then retreated somewhere I could not feel it, a ghost of the force that had pulled me back from death. The Archangels had been sealed away because their power threatened the High King’s rule. My death had shattered that seal. I’d brought the Archangels back to the After, and now the High King would stop at nothing to make me pay for it.

I could feel it then, the shape of the year stretching ahead. A cage of ordinary days, bars warped around an inevitable future. I would have to return to Evermore, pretend nothing had changed while my father and Ruby rotted in Elsewhere.

I dragged my hands through my hair, tearing loose the elaborate curls they’d forced into place. My fingers stilled on the raised patch of skin behind my ear, still burning.My mark.

“What is it, Dorian?” I asked, as though I did not already know.

“A crescent moon,” he said sadly.Pity.His hand rested lightly on my shoulder.

My mark. I’d Fallen. I was halfway there, but the final Fall, the one that would seal my fate as an immortal, could not be so easily taken. It had to begiven.

As the smoke curled skyward and the wind howled through the ruins of what we’d survived, I realized. There was no way forward that didn’t end in ruin, but maybe my life could still have meaning.

Now I knew there were things worse than death. I used tofear it.Dying.But in the end, I envied those who still could. They would grow old, drift into sleep with full hearts and faces lined like maps of memory. They would get to drift peacefully toward their end, while I would never reach mine. I had been marked by something far crueler, an eternity without rest.

Death was my beginning.

Epilogue

The summer heat clung to Evermore like an embrace, thick with the scent of blooming wildflowers and sun-warmed stone. The college grounds were empty, silent in a way they never were during the year.

The students had all gone home. There were no whispered conversations winding through the corridors, no clipped footfalls echoing against the chapel steps, no murmurs of shifting ether in the Crucible’s glass heart. For the first time in what felt like forever, Evermore was still.

I lay stretched across the grass outside Ariel Hall, the fabric of my dress sticking to my skin. My lips were blushed cherry-red, kissed raw by sharp teeth. A warm breeze curled through the field, stirring the daisies that had sprouted up between the cracks in the stone pathway, their white petals swaying like tiny crowns in the afternoon sun.

Somewhere in the distance, a mourning dove cooed. Dorian sat beside me, one arm thrown lazily behind his head, his violet eyes tracking the slow crawl of a cloud across the endless blue sky.

It was nice. The kind of moment that felt stolen, fleeting.One that shouldn’t exist after everything that had happened, but somehow did.

“You’re fidgeting,” Dorian muttered, eyes fluttering closed.

I hadn’t realized I was twisting the loose threads of my dress between my fingers, my thoughts tangled in a thousand restless knots. I sighed, rolling onto my side to face him. “It feels like we shouldn’t still be here.”

A smirk curved at the corner of his lips. “We shouldn’t. But where else would we go?”

I huffed, plucking a daisy that stood too tall and tossed it at him. He wrinkled his nose but didn’t pull away, letting the tiny flower fall into his lap. He flicked it toward me.

“What if we ran away?”

“Arabella,” he said, his tone scolding. Then his eyes glinted devilishly. “Where?”

I hesitated. Because the truth was, I didn’t know. I just wanted to go somewhere safe, somewhere we could forget about everything. Nothing was holding me back, but I was still bound to Evermore out of obligation.

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