Page 43 of Bright Blinding Ruin

But that’s not true. I don’t remember ever seeing that crystal until the night I was sitting on the roof and saw it flash across thestreet. It must have been thrown somewhere else while Krotas was severing the ties that bind our worlds together.

Empress Krotas… is mymom? She’s my mom and she left me with my dad thinking doing so would keep me safe. She didn’t know he’d die a decade later and leave me broken. There were so many things she didn’t know, and now it’s too late.

Krotas howls in pain, a broken cry that makes me turn my head away. Her rage is overwhelming. It literally boils the blood. She always prided herself on being a just woman, but inside she’s now a broken shard of what she used to be, having lost not only her love, but her daughter as well.

And the shard of Invictis.

When I look back to Krotas, I find her engulfed in flames. Her body, her clothes; everything on her is on fire. That fire pushes outward with a force that would’ve knocked me onto my ass if I was really in the room and not just a bystander in this memory. The fire is strong enough to disintegrate everything it touches; furniture, metal, and stone.

A bomb didn’t go off in the castle. Krotas did.

It’s so bright, the fire so solid and consuming, I have to shield my eyes for a bit to reorient myself. I hear walls crumbling around me, turning to dust. My ears hear a deep, growl of a howl, a roar that rocks me within my core, shuddering my lungs with its strength. I drop my arm and gaze upon what became of my mom.

Oh, my God.

She’s the dragon.

Chapter Sixteen

Immensely tall, billowing smoke, my mom’s dragon form stands tall amongst the destruction she brought during the change. Her pointed, horned snout lets loose a beam of fire into the sky, and her powerful wings launch her into the air. She’s huge, vicious, and pissed off beyond all belief, her mind shattered and broken by what she had to do, by what she lost.

In that moment, she’s nothing more than an animal, and it takes years for her to recover even a small shred of herself.

I blink, and suddenly I’m back at the edge of the crater. It’s like I never went down to the undercroft, never stepped foot in its darkness or saw any of those memories. The undercroft’s door is gone, nothing but pulverized earth below.

I have to lean on the wall to keep myself upright. My mind races with what I learned. Krotas was pregnant with me when she and the other empresses took a stand against Invictis. They kept him under wraps, hoping that, by separating him, the woes would stop and they would save Laconia.

They were wrong. They were so, so wrong, and now what’s left of the kingdom is a shadow of what it used to be.

And my mom… she did love me. She didn’t want to send me away, but it was the only thing she could think of to do. She didn’t know my dad would die and I’d be left to basically fend for myself. She didn’t know I’d be alone.

Krotas never wanted me to be here, in Laconia. It should’ve been impossible for Invictis to bring us here. But Invictis is stronger than the empresses, that much is plain, so even with her severing the threads that connect our worlds, it wasn’t enough to keep him away.

Empress Krotas is my mom. She’s the freaking dragon that’s saved me twice now. The first time we met, when thatshadowstorm raged, she mustn’t have believed her eyes. Maybe she sensed Invictis and thought he took over.

The more I think about it, the more heartbreaking it is, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to handle this information.

The memories. The feelings. I felt what Krotas felt in those moments. I know exactly what she was feeling when she said goodbye to me. I spent my whole life thinking my mom abandoned me, that she didn’t love me and pawned me off on my dad without a second thought… but I was wrong.

I was so, so wrong.

All I can say is, “Oh, my God.” It’s all too much for me. I need a moment to think, to lay down, to… to accept the truth.

I’m an empress’s daughter, but that doesn’t make me an empress. That shouldn’t automatically mean I have magic and can inherit all of the empresses’ powers. It still doesn’t make sense.

The sound of a dragon’s cry splits the sky like thunder. It is not the snarl of an animal in the midst of an attack. The opposite: the sound of a creature giving up—and it sounds as if it came from the front of the castle, where she portaled me here.

I push off the wall and retrace my steps through the broken castle, walking as fast as I can with the wound in my gut. The world around me spins; it’s growing more and more difficult to push forward, to act like I’m fine. My hands are cold. I’m… I think I’m losing too much blood. My stomach is on fire, and at the same time it’s like I’m slowly getting submerged into ice.

It’s not hard to retrace my steps thanks to the blood that dripped off me and fell onto the floor. I follow my trail back to the entrance of the castle, and the moment I step out of its massive front doors, I see a sight that nearly stops my heart cold.

Krotas lays in what, at one time, must’ve been a well-kept garden. Her wings are tucked tightly against her body, her massive frame slouched to the side. She’s bleeding all over, darkblood, a stark contrast to the greenery around her. The sound she makes when her angular, slit eyes spot me is a sound that brings tears to my eyes, a low, dull whine of a sigh that tells me just how tired she is.

She caught Invictis off-guard once. She wasn’t so lucky this time.

I hurry over to her, stumbling as I walk, needing to be there. Wanting to help her. I barely make it to her reptilian face before I fall to my knees near her shimmery eye. I swear, in my mind, I hear Krotas say, “Aurelia. I’m sorry.”

What can I say to that? What can I say besides, “Mom?” The word feels strange on my tongue. Anytime I ever said that word, it was to curse the imaginary woman who abandoned me. But here I am, kneeling beside Krotas—my mom—seeing her for who she is for the first time.

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