Page 147 of Ashes to Ashes

FINNIAN

I can’t loseher to questions I don’t know are coming.

Three hours of trial preparation, and I still don’t have enough information. For the first time in centuries, I hate this analytical mind that won’t stop cataloging every moral boundary I’m about to cross.

What good is accumulated knowledge when it might be destroying the one person I’ve learned to love?

The scrolls say patience is power. But all I feel is panic.

In two hours, Ash faces a Trial of Truth designed to strip away every defense, every careful wall she’s built around her heart. And I—scholar, researcher, keeper of forbidden knowledge—don’t know what questions they’ll ask.

“Unacceptable,” I snarl, golden magic erupting around my fingertips in response to rising panic. The crystal fixtures overhead ring like struck bells. “Completely fucking unacceptable.”

Ancient texts spread across my desk, but the Crown’s honeyed threads trace patterns beneath my skin that spell out truths no book contains. Through the artifact’s connection to time itself, I feel the weight of approaching choice points—moments when everything could shift.

The Crown doesn’t just show possible futures. It shows me the consequences of secrets kept too long.

She’ll face the trial believing she’s alone, the artifact pulses against my chest. While three guardians who could save her maintain their careful masks.

I see myself in a dozen timelines, and in every one where I choose silence over courage, where I choose safety over truth, she dies. Not just her body—her spirit, her trust, her magnificent fire that drew us all like moths to flame.

The Crown shows me what happens to hearts that break from betrayal.

It shows me what we become if we lose her to our own cowardice.

I’ve spent centuries collecting information, studying patterns, predicting outcomes. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is protection. Knowledge is the only weapon I’ve ever mastered.

But tonight, knowledge isn’t enough.

Tonight, she walks into that trial vulnerable to attacks I can’t anticipate, can’t defend against, can’t prepare her for. And if she fails—if the magical backlash destroys our bonds, if truth constraints shatter her mind, if the courts decide she’s not worthy?—

I lose her. Forever.

“No.” The word erupts with enough magical force to crack the stone walls. Books tumble from shelves as my control fractures completely. “Not acceptable.”

The words echo off the stone like an incantation, but it’s not enough. I’m unraveling at the edges, held together by syllables and shattered protocol.

Books fall. Light flares. Logic fails.

And for the first time in three centuries, I don’t care about ethics or archives or damnation.

I care about her.

Because if she doesn’t walk out of that trial whole, I’ll burn every library in Faerie to the ground and rewrite history myself.

There’s one source of information I haven’t tapped. One person who knows exactly what the human military wants, what they’ve planned, what questions they might feed to sympathetic court members.

Agent Davis sits in Academy holding cells, captured during yesterday’s political nightmare. Military intelligence officer. Ash’s former handler. The man who’s spent years orchestrating her placement, her training, her entire fabricated identity.

He has answers.

And I need them more than I need my conscience.

The decision crystallizes like shattered glass behind my eyes. Moral qualms are a luxury I can’t afford when her survival depends on information only he possesses.

I gather materials I swore I’d never use—truth compulsion spells from ancient Seelie archives, long-range memory viewing devices, emotional resonance detectors designed to strip away every privacy a mind possesses. Tools created for interrogating dangerous prisoners who couldn’t be safely approached.

Each one represents a line I’ve defended for three centuries.

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