Page 80 of The Unseelie War
If he knew he could win.
If he planned to kill them all.
If he was, therefore, a threat.
Ava watched as Serrik straightened slowly, pulling the threads tighter around the tree. “Brother,” he said calmly, as if this were a casual meeting rather than a confrontation that would decide the fate of three worlds.
“Brother,” Valroy replied, his voice carrying centuries of accumulatedhatred. “I believe you and I have some unfinished business to discuss?”
“Yes. I suppose we do.”
The two demigods faced each other across the clearing, and Ava could feel the weight of their accumulated history pressing down on them all. Here, at the heart of everything, with the fate of existence hanging in the balance, it would finally end.
One way or another.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The silence stretched like a held breath, broken only by the whisper of wind through the twisted branches of the tree that had been Valroy's source of power for so long. Deep in his mind, he remembered what it was like before he was flesh and blood. The part of him that wasother.The part of him that yearned for the return to the void.
But it was like a dream upon the rise of the sun’s first rays. Fleeting and ephemeral. And in this moment, utterly pointless. He stood facing his half-brother across the clearing, shadows still wreathing his form like living smoke.
Valroy felt the crushing weight of solitude settle over him like a burial shroud.
He would fight with no one at his side.
Alone.
The word echoed through his mind with the finality of a death knell. When had it come to this? When had he become the singular figure standing against the combined will of almost everyone he had ever claimed to care about?
How grateful he was that Anfar was absent from this ordeal. He could not take the leviathan’s brooding and disapprovingglares. Nor would Bayodan be with him. Nor Cruinn. Nor anyone else.
Alone.
Abigail knelt in the grass behind him, her red hair matted with dirt and blood, her green eyes filled with a sorrow so profound it made his chest ache. She had chosen. And she had not chosenhim.Hiswife. The one person in all of existence who should have stood beside him through anything.
Alone.
Alexandra hung limp against the base of the tree where the dark magic had deposited her, her purple hair darkened with blood, her body pierced and drained by the roots. She had been Izael's love, and Izael had died questioning Valroy's methods, choosing some abstract future over the glorious present of war. Another betrayal, another voice raised in opposition.
Alone.
And there was the little Weaver, clutching her precious book, tears streaming down her face for the dream-constructs he had been forced to erase. Did she not realize how much greater the sacrifice his had been, destroying his own people? Destroying those he had known for far longer?
Did she not realize how much his own heart ached at their deaths, much more than hers could for those vapid whispers she called friends for barely more than a few weeks?
She looked at him with such hatred now, such absolute condemnation, that it was almost beautiful in its purity. Even she—a creature he had helped create through his actions, whose very existence was tied to his so intrinsically—stood against him.
Alone.
But it was Serrik, strangely, whose enmity hurt the most.
For who should agree that all should die more than him?
Who had been wronged more than his half-brother?
His half-brother. Another pawn of the Morrigan’s schemes. They should have been allies, should have understood each other in waysno one else could. They were both abandoned children, both shaped by the Morrigan's design, both creatures of such terrible power that the world feared them simply for existing.
Yet there stood Serrik, his golden eyes cold as winter stars, his multiple gazes fixed on Valroy with the promise of violence.
