Page 120 of Stars in Umbra
He remembered her whispered murmurs in the night.
Where she cried about being the lover of one of the most influential and wealthy beings in the galaxy.
Regardless, she died with nothing, and he had been left behind.
More agonizing questions, those that persisted since his childhood and caused the deepest wounds, rose like bile in his throat.
Why had Sulfiqar abandoned them? Weren’t they worth claiming?
He’d spent years carrying his invisible scars.
During LeCythi’s Father’s Day street festivals, as every crowded household celebrated the gift of family and love, he flitted alone, a shadow forgotten and discarded.
He’d witnessed with envy his schoolmates and friends celebrate birthdays, wedding feasts, communal laughter around hearths with a father at the helm.
He’d eyed it all from the outside, unable to understand the texture of joy without it being tinged with abandonment issues.
Sometimes he’d even made up tales of an explorer father to explain the absence and to feel normal.
Most times, the resentment bubbled up, ugly and alive, always catching at the back of his throat, along with jealousy when he spotted other young men with their fathers.
Then shame would crash over him like cold water.
How dare he resent anyone for having what he didn’t?
Still, after his mother died, he started pulling away from old friends, skipping or turning up late to neighborhood gatherings and seeking solitude in back alleys, in minor offenses, in danger.
The streets never asked questions. The underworld required no joy, nor did it hold any expectations.
He’d found more lost souls like himself and made his home among killers and ghosts til his handlers recruited him.
Now here he was, the son of a Most High deity.
Not cloaked in glory or crowned in light, but guilty asfokk, carrying inside him a ruin of unloved years, and the heft of unimaginable crimes.
The flyer banked left, as Rina glanced at him, concern written all over her face.
‘How are you going?’ she murmured.
Mo didn’t have an answer, disoriented and shattered by the revelation.
It wasn’t just the bone-crushing reality of a divine legacy that was breaking him.
It was the agonizing realization, and the ache of that long-ago abandoned boy.
One who had waited a lifetime for a father who never came, only to find he’d been a pawn in a celestial game all along.
21
A Crystalline Stallion
MOLAN
‘You’re coming home with me.’
Mo resisted at first, out of pride.
His broad shoulders stiffened, his jaw set as if carved from granite.
