Page 48 of Queen of the Wicked
Curse you Adelasia. You shall be cursed. You shall suffer.
“No,” I say to her. “No more suffering, for anyone.”
I take the blade and wrap my left hand along its razor-sharp edge, digging it into my skin as I draw blood.
“I am Adelasia, Queen of the Wicked, the New Age Goddess of Magic and Misery, and by this blood and blade, I undo all curses and evil from this world, and the next. I banish your rot. I reject your malice. I claim the debt of a soul for a soul. My soul for yours. And you, Eternity, shall be nothing but echoes.”
No!
Shards of Eternity scatter, dissolving into ash, and blackness swallows us whole.
The ground quakes. The air shudders. And then—
Silence.
Not the silence of the grave. Not the silence that haunted me in the desert. The silence of peace.
When the darkness fades, I am on my knees in the palace once more. My lungs burn. My body shakes. For a moment, I can’t tell if I’ve been destroyed too.
But then I look at my hands.
The black rot is gone. My skin is lined with nothing but the scars I’ve earned by living.
I press my palms to my chest, and I feel my own heartbeat. Not borrowed. Not cursed.Mine.
Kaius collapses beside me, gasping. His fangs are gone, his eyes human green, his hair naturally dark, his chest heaving with the strain of lungs he hasn’t needed for centuries. Rowan falls on myother side, clutching at his back where the phantom weight of wings no longer haunts him. He laughs once, broken and wild, and the sound makes my tears spill.
Human.
I drag myself forward, into their arms. We collapse together, our bodies shaking, our tears soaking into each other’s skin.
Kaius clutches me so hard I think he’ll never let go, his forehead pressed to mine, his lips whispering my name like a vow. Rowan’s hand knots in my hair, his mouth trembling against my temple, murmuring promises I can’t even hear over the rush of my heartbeat.
I thought I belonged to death. To rot. To Eternity. But here, wrapped in them, I know the truth.
We are free.
Epilogue One
Adelasia
The North is quiet in the winter.
It’s not a harsh winter either. Snow drapes over the rooftops of our little village, but it’s soft and gentle. Hard, bitter ice has no home here, only the kind of snow that children laugh in and the kind that melts evenly into fresh water on your tongue.
The air is also clean here. Crisp and fresh. It settles into my lungs differently than it did in the palace. The air there was cold too, but in an uninviting and lonely sort of way, where the cold here makes for soft memories by the fireplace.
It’s been nearly a year since I defied my destiny. Since that defiance cracked open the earth and swallowed the last of Eternity’s plight on this world and dragged her evil into the depths of nothingness.
And since, despite all odds, I somehow survived becoming the thing that Dark Goddess wanted me to be.
Magic is gone now. The Well, the Vampires, the Blackwood, the demons, the Coven. All of it disappeared when Eternity did, making for a long, bloody section of history books.
Though I wasn’t inhuman for long, to return to the body and soul I was born with feels so…new. Like my life started over the moment magic was wiped from the earth.
But the newness does not come without hardship. I still dream of marble halls lined with blood, and I still feel the phantom aches of Eternity’s rot in my fingers. Sometimes Rowan wakes up gasping in the middle of the might, clawing at the remnants of pain left behind when the Priestesses tore his wings from his back.
And Kaius, even now, still stares at himself in the mirror for long periods as if his hair will return to the silver-white I met him with, and his eyes will return to that of monsters.
