Page 106 of Antiletum
Because it has been.
The very name that I’ve kept cradled near to my heart. The name that, for years, I would only allow myself to say when calling it into a mirror—using offerings of moonwater and flesh and blood and tears to amplify my necromancy—trying to bring his face back before mine, even from beyond.
But he never came.
The true reason why is right before my eyes, falling apart as thoroughly as I am. And it has not a single thing to do with him refusing to be summoned by the person who brought about his demise.
Valledyn—Sebastian—stares at me, witnessing the truth settle over me like the lid of my coffin after all these months of refusing to see him.
Sad.
Just like when I first ran into him on that fateful day. Grabbed his arm, asked for help, and altered the course of our lives forever. It’s so clear now, my precious denials were weak and foolish. Refusing to accept that the person I had been hurting for over the course of a decade was, indeed, still impossibly alive. Right in front of me. And I couldn’t allow myself to simply reach out and take him.
At some point, I’ve gravitated forward in order to lean against the abandoned altar. To keep myself standing. Closer to him.
“How?” I’m too dizzy, my stomach rolling fiercely, grit from the altar digging into my palms. “I thought you were dead.”
“I told you it wasn’t the end,” Val says quietly, occupying the window bench with one long leg bent at the knee, resting an arm over it. His wedding ring winks at me in the moonlight. “I told you—Foryou… For you I’d change the world.” He stumbles over his words a bit, like he often does when he’s nervous. Just like he did that very first day, when he tried to compliment my eyes.
Likening them to eyelets that amplify the intricate beauty of nature.
Val stands from his bench, taking a single slow step towards me. “I’m sorry it took so long. To make it back to you.”
My hand covers my mouth, hardly able to breathe.
Our need to spill our truths, to relive the past, has flipped. Me now silent and Val’s flowing like a thunderous waterfall. Powerful enough to swallow me in its current. To hurl me over its edge.
“After I followed your carriage to The Citadel, as my owl, I then flew nearby to try to recover myself. I didn’t know what to do. But then Llewellyn ven’Sol came along. I told you, he was a tracker. Same as my brother.”
Val gives me a sad smile. Because his father and brother weren’t his family at all. At least not by blood.
“Him, Heath, and Blair had just made it to Omnitas for my father to take over the role ofAlter. He found me in that park. Coaxed me down to talk to him, offered me a different life. A chance to change the world. Use my magic to fulfill a generations-in-the-making coup—masquerading as his bastard son. And I took his offering. Without thought. Renamed and remade myself. Because that was my way back to you.”
An internal bruise aches within me, the remorse I’ve nurtured for my angry words about Val’s father when we first fought. Seeing now just how conflicted he may be about the man who took him in based on what Val could offer.
He takes another step closer to my frozen frame, overtaken by the past and the present and all of my grief. All tied to him, for endlessly different reasons.
“I didn’t know until recently that you thought I was dead. ThatRainahtold you I was dead. She never bothered to correct herself. And that is what made me choke the life from her. More than the threat of having to make her my wife.”
Val’s betrayal brought by my sister is clear across his face. Disbelieving. Endlessly agonized. “Sheknew. She knew for years, just as well as my father, who I was and what we were to each other. And neither of them let me know that my father had a decoy brought before yours to be slaughtered. Forgotten. And you were needlessly whittling away at yourself with your mourning and your guilt. All alone. If I’d known…”
Val shakes his head, voice clogging with emotions, his eyes steadily becoming glassier.
“He had been on the search for people like us for years. Necromancers. But I kept your secret. Never told anyone. I tried to lie to my father. About being aware of your magic when after two years of being kept apart, I told him I didn’t care what he said and he couldn’t stop me from seeing you anymore. That was when he told me he had originally been trackingyouwhen your scent separated from your family’s trail.And I was too smitten to realize we were being followed, my senses dulled with how wonderfully overwhelmed I was by you. He told me I had to keep waiting. It was the only way to keep you safe. That if your necromancy was revealed before the time was right, Parliament would kill you. And the years just kept slipping by. So I took that time. Building myself up. Making myself into a man that could deserve you.”
Another slow step. A loud sob falls from my lips, unable to keep it all in.
“But it turns out, I haven’t earned you at all.” An anguished epiphany falls across Val’s face. “I’ve wondered for months how different things might have been. Had I not been so selfish. If my firstinstinct hadn’t been to kiss you, but to show you who I am as well. If you would have known I was out there. That I never left you here alone. I was fighting for you, the whole time. I was never gone. And I was always yours. I’d hoped maybe you’d recognize me, that you’dknowme anyway. At our wedding. And for a moment, I thought you did.”
The way Val clung to me after our wedding, when we made it to our room, slinks across my memory. How instead of trying to bed me again, without the witness of self-sacrificing priestesses, he held me close. Promised me I was safe. That I had him and he had me. That he would forever take care of me and no one could stop him. The desperation behind it was mind boggling at the time.
It all makes sense now.
I can’t make myself voice that he was right. That Ididknow him when I saw him, draped in wedding garb and waiting for me at the Heartstone. Beautiful and mine in the moonlight. But I had convinced myself I was imagining what I wanted to see. What could have been with the person I chose as mine before we were stolen away from each other.
“When I woke up alone, I knew I was wrong.” Val’s dark eyes sparkle with his tears, unshed and pooling in his black eyes. “I should have been honest with you the way you were me. Right here.”
Val gestures to ourspirlinary.
