Page 58 of Branded By Shadow
I didn’t think. I didn’t calculate. It was a surge of blind, primal rage against the soul-crushing logic of his public lie. I lashed out with every ounce of strength the severed bond had left me. I slammed into Alexander, a desperate, furious shove that carried the weight of my entire shattered world.
“Don’t you touch me!” I screamed. “You destroyed him! You destroyed everything!”
Alexander didn’t even flinch, his body a solid, unyielding wall of muscle and infuriating calm. He simply looked down at my hands, still pressed against his chest, and then back up at my face. There was no anger in his eyes. Only a look of profound, calculated pity that was more insulting than any blow could ever be.
“We destroyed an illusion,” he said, his voice a low, reasonable murmur meant for me, but loud enough for Julian and the others to hear. “The people of House Hades are corrupted by nature. Blackwood was a creature of the void long before I came along. You only survived him at all because of Helena.”
It was a masterpiece of misdirection, a twisting of the truth so skillful it almost made me doubt my own memory. He was reframing Damon’s internal battle not as a noble fight, but as the last twitches of a monster that was already dead. He was erasing the man and leaving only the abomination.
“You’re a liar,” I choked out. "And you disgust me."
“He would have let you wither and die, Cora,” Helena said, stepping forward, her voice trembling with what sounded like genuine, maternal conviction. “That bond was not a prize. It was a death sentence. A direct conduit to the void that was drinking your life away. I saw the future of it, a slow, withering death. He was an anchor dragging you into the abyss, and I chose to cut the rope.”
She reached for me again, not to touch, but in a gesture of pleading. She was not just playing a role. She had convinced herself that her betrayal was a heroic sacrifice. The absolute certainty of her righteousness was a wall I could never hope to breach with mere anger.
“I choseyou,” she whispered, her voice cracking with emotion. “I chose your life, your mind, your future, over the monster you were bound to.”
Her gaze swept from me to Julian, then back, ensuring everyone in this broken arena saw the tears welling in her eyes. “What I did was a brutal, terrible choice. But I would do it again to save you.”
Her words hung in the air, a perfect, unassailable fortress of righteous justification. She had saved me. She had chosen me. How could I possibly rage against an act of such profound, selfless mercy? The logic was a cage, and its bars were closing in around me.
The others all listened to her and understood what Helena had done, and what had actually caused Damon’s rampage. I saw realization dawn on Julian’s face, and the Artemis guards fidget slightly in discomfort.
But House Hera was the ultimate authority on bonds. If Helena said this had been necessary, for all of them, it was the absolute truth.
I looked at her tear-streaked face, at the genuine, heartfelt belief in her own heroism. And I felt the wildfire in my chest sputter and die, extinguished not by reason, but by a new kind of horror, fiercer and sharper than the rage had been.
It was the horror of being utterly, completely misunderstood. They hadn’t just murdered a part of my soul. They were now calmly and reasonably explaining to me why it had been for my own good. The clinical, detached mercy of it was a greater violation than any act of malice could ever be. They hadn’t seen a man and a woman, bound in a fragile, terrifying, and beautiful new reality. They had seen a problem. A corrupted asset and a valuable resource. They had made a pragmatic calculation and decided which piece was worth sacrificing. The most profound experience of my life had been reduced to an equation on their political ledger.
“You didn’t save my life,” I said, the words now flat, empty things. “You just chose a different way for it to end.”
Helena’s face crumpled, and she flinched, as if genuinely hurt. Alexander’s expression hardened, the first crack in his practiced facade. He saw what she didn’t. This wasn’t the gratitude of a rescued victim. It was a rejection, absolute and final.
But their reactions were distant things, echoes from a world I was no longer a part of. I turned away from their faces, from the whole sickening performance. The anger that had fueled me, that had held me upright, was gone. It had burned itself out, leaving me utterly depleted and hollow. The weight of my grief, which the rage had held at bay, came crashing down.
My legs gave out from under me, and I sank back to the floor. My bones turned to lead. The grey edges of my vision crept inward, dragging me down toward the dark.
I was no longer fighting them. I was no longer fighting anything. I was just empty.
“Sister.”
The voice was soft, patient, and full of a gentle, earthy strength. Lyra knelt in front of me, her green robes pooling on the stone. She had approached in the wake of my collapse, seeing an opening where the others had only seen a final surrender. She didn’t try to touch me, didn’t offer platitudes. She simply waited.
“Your grief is a winter,” she said, her voice a soothing balm. “But winter is not the end. It is a time of rest before new growth. Come with us. Come home. We can teach you to understand your abilities, help you discover what you’re truly capable of. Your gifts… they are the part of you that wants to live.”
Her words were a powerful, tempting offer. Family. A place to belong. A path forward that wasn’t paved with ashes. I could feel the warmth of her Demeter energy, a gentle, living heat that called to the part of me that had made flowers bloom. It was a promise of healing, of a future where this agonizing, hollow space in my chest might one day be filled with something other than pain.
But as I knelt there, on the stone where he had been unmade, I felt something else. A competing sensation. Beneath the warmthof Lyra’s presence, a deep and unnatural cold was seeping up from the marble. It reached through my skin and touched my bones with the chill of a place between worlds.
And in the silence of my own mind, I felt a pull.
It wasn’t a memory. It wasn’t a thought. It was a phantom sensation, an echo from a severed nerve. It was a silent call from a place that wasn’t supposed to exist.
My breath caught in my throat. I had a choice. I could turn toward the warmth, toward the living world Lyra offered. Or I could turn toward the cold, toward the desperate hope of that phantom call.
I looked at Lyra, at the genuine compassion in her green eyes, and I made my choice.
“My family is waiting for me,” I whispered.
