Page 38 of Ever Dark Academy: Vol. 3
She lifted a delicate eyebrow. She was a beautiful woman with the intelligence of ages behind her eyes at times as she remembered herself as Wyvern most likely.
“I cannot imagine what you have to thank me for,” Fiona admitted.
“For what you said to me that time before the Ring,” he explained.
“Ah.” She inclined her head. “No thanks are needed. I just thought, knowing a bit where you were coming from and heading to, that I could offer some… encouragement.”
“You did. And I thank you for it.” Ryder inclined his head.
“Both of our Masters were children of our War,” Fiona said with a sigh. “Yet I still wanted to weep with the unfairness of it all that I had to give her a Second Death.”
“I only regret not eliminating Lawson earlier,” Ryder admitted. “He caused so much pain and damage.”
She studied him quietly. “You exiled most of your Bloodline.”
“According to Amaris and Kayne, they were already exiled,” Ryder said.
“Ah, old names. Old blood. I don’t remember them exactly, but I sort of do.” She nodded.
“I feel the same way. But it was a shock to me to find out I was born into a bunch of exiles,” Ryder snorted.
“Haven’t we all been so far? You were born to Lawson, just as I was born to one of the War Children and so was Balthazar,” she pointed out.
“I’m not sure I want to draw meaning from that if there is any meaning to find,” Ryder admitted with a grunt.
“Our just desserts? To see up close the damage we caused?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. She wore a cropped rose-colored shirt and a long skirt of a slightly darker red. Strappy black sandals were tied up to her knees. There was a broach made of diamonds around her throat. She looked elegant and civilized as could be. As far from the War as he could imagine, but she spoke of it with the bitterness of having been in the thick of it.
She was, Weryn whispered. She could go behind all enemy lines even when the cities were locked down given time.
“None of my fledglings accepted the new ones that were born in the War and after. They still stay distant, but some are coming back,” she murmured. “I’m not sure what I want. When I meet them, I study their faces to see what they think of me, to glimpse in their eyes the crimes I committed against them and others that I cannot remember.”
“Cannot? Or don’t want to?”
Her silver eyes lifted to his. “You and I have the same problem, Ryder. If I remember I will likely lose who I’ve become. Fiona Darksilver will be buried under a million metric tons of memories. I will be like a candle flame in a hurricane. I will be gone and it will be as if I never was.”
“And you like who you are?” He was genuinely curious, but he shouldn’t have been surprised as she seemed so very comfortable in her skin, even in leading.
“Sometimes.” She smiled. “But other times I think I am just afraid to know who I was. So I cling to what I know and can control. It also allows me to claim ignorance and not have to apologize. Too much anyways.”
He grunted. “No one looks at you as if you are the Devil though. There is that.”
“I am an Immortal and I was a Confessor in the Order so in my own eyes I should be right up there in the Devil’s pantheon, thank you very much.” She softened the sting of her words with a smile.
“We all know that Kaly may have started the War, but I turned it into the conflagration that it became,” Ryder said, surprising himself how he so honestly admitted and owned this. Fiona was incredibly easy to talk to and he wondered if they had been friends.
Yes, Weryn whispered. She sees much further than we do. She was our Scout.
He put that to the side though. It interested him to see who fought together and who did not. But he didn’t want to make only those connections again. Grayson was right that they all had to come together as one, as Immortals, now to face the threats that were against them all.
“King Daemon is content for us to live in the present and make a new future,” Fiona said, tapping her chin with one black painted nail. “He doesn’t speak of the past at all. Yet I sense no anger from him about it. No blame. Not at us in any case.”
Ryder nodded. “Shouldn’t he be angry though?”
“Probably.” She flashed another smile. “Definitely. We let him down. We forgot him. We allowed him to starve while we destroyed everything. As much as I now hate what the Order truly was–Kaly’s construction to control us–it might actually have saved us.”
“It might,” he admitted reluctantly.
