The King Trials 2: Beyond.

Kelan and I ride through scarlet. A sweet surrendering scent of the moist morning dew cascades all around the sublime forest. The crinkling leaves from tall trees lay scattered on the forest floor; in the motion of turning a brittle brown. The dark shadows of the voluminous trees and overhanging bushes appear as thick as structures.

The rising sun ascends in a timely hurry, as if foreshadowing the imminent doom to come. The rays of first light reach for the sky, desperate fingers groping the aether, quick to rouse those asleep. Awake.

“How is your arm?”

Kelan’s voice is like a blade that cuts through the concrete gloom in my chest. The deep thrum of his baritone voice offers more than comfort. But a sense of certainty.

My mind strays to the ephemeral moment of passion we shared, one that required an eternity of waiting but even with such fleetingness it rewarded me with eternal bliss…. His skin warming mine, each muscle honed to lethal perfection, the strength of his touch both hard and gentle all at once. His lips. Oh, those lips. Such a galaxy of taste provokes me to ponder on when shall I sample them again.

“Aurora?”

I sniff sharply. “What.” My voice excessively high. I clear my throat too many times. “It is—I am well.”

“You are lying.” His breaths exhale long, sifting through my plaited tresses. “I saw you wincing when you were dressing.”

A blush creeps up my cheeks, my lips quirking. “You were watching me dress?”

“No—” he stops, his breathing quickens before he swiftly commands his composure. “I meant, when you were dressing the wound with a new gauze.”

“It is as I said before,” I say insolently.

With his arms encircled around me, he lifts his hand to test his observation by gingerly squeezing the top part of my arm, an inch above the graze and I squirm like a child being tickled.

“Yes, very well I see,” he says flatly.

I shirk him off with a rough jerk of my shoulder. His hand returns to the reins.

“Merely a flesh wound, I have suffered much worse at the hands of my masters.”

A compact silence envelops us, multifaceted with layers of tensions. I can sense his strongly. An agglomeration of old and new qualms that have merged to take a form of a colossal fiend, sinking its talons into him.

I steal a look over my shoulder. “What is it?”

“It would take either of the Four Legions days to reach the Pantheon, even with the armada of air warships,” he divulges. “Emikrollian forces have the tactical advantage if they are positioned in the triple frontiers, they can attack Avangard targets in mere hours to breach the front-lines. I can only hope that the battle platoons in the City of Old can hold them at bay just long enough for cavalries to arrive.”

Anger radiates from him palpably. “Then the might of the Avangard will dash them to pieces.”

I nod stiffly, failing to comprehend the magnitude of the descending peril. “Is there no way you can send a portal message to the closest… Vanguard garrison, even? Anything is better than nothing.”

“And by doing so we risk tipping them off, causing them to invade promptly. If they succeed and they kill the High King… the last of the Qhar line, it will plunge Urium into pandemonium, ripe for Regnum Ethane to take power.”

I release an explosive breath.

For a while I brace against the clamour of my own thoughts, pelted with a million alternatives of how this will culminate, and it all ends the same. There is only one victor, and that is death. Mustering will, I combat the adverse thoughts with seemingly unfeasible positive outcomes and possibilities.

The good is just as possible as the bad.

Is it not so? I need to believe that it can be true.

“Kelan.” He responds with a grunt. “Where in Urium do you dwell?”

“Across many great plains. I own multiple properties, but I choose to reside in a quiet place at the foot of a valley carpeted with trees, wedged between two mountains. The grass is evergreen, the forest forever lush with an occasional gold burst of a wildflower meadow.”

I can hear the tranquil nostalgia in his tenor.

“Fertile lands surround the quaint cottage, a glimmer of heaven.”

I can envision it clearly in my mind; I see his lone, hulking silhouette wafting through a knee-high prairie, submersed with golden sunlight that sets the blooms alight with an auburn glow.

I smile absently at the daydream. “When this is over… I would like to behold this quite place for myself.”

“Over?” He questions, his tone injured by doubt.

“Yes,” I say evenly. “When the war is won, our foes are crushed, and traitors are punished….” I dawdle off, recanting in my mind. Perhaps that is too hopeful, even for an idealist. “I do not know what will unfold, nor for how long…. All I know is that it will get worse before it becomes better, but I cling to that like a promise.”

“That it will be better,” I say with staunch belief. “As night betides and darkness comes, the promise of morning is on the horizon that the sun will rise again, that the light will always come. That is what I am certain about. The end. Because eventually it will end. I many not know how it looks like, but I only desire a future with you in it.”

I twist my shoulders to look at him from over my shoulder, gazing up to those eyes which hold a wealth of time, memories of past moments and many more infinite ones that we are still to create.

My eyes gripped by his arresting features. He smiles in full; brilliant and all too brief.

“Hera Aurora,” he says my name slowly. My heart aflutter, singing a ballad. “A highborn living in a little cottage, one unfit of her esteemed station.”

I snort a laugh and look forward, both of us fully aware that nothing interests me less than title or power.

“You know.” I grin fondly at the remembrance. “The evening that I learnt about the King Trials first. Seliah and I secluded ourselves in my bedchambers. She told me something that seemed bizarre at the time, that Armathis—even Regnum Valwa is my origins but it is not my true home.”

I rotate enough to reconnect our gaze. “I see now that her words were true. It is not my home; no place is my home. My home rests with those I care about it, with those whom I choose to be with.”

I tilt closer. A breath from his mouth, I move to turn but he grabs my chin and claims my lips as his own, my lips parting in a moan and I cannot help but smiling into his kiss, my body tingles with the awareness of him. I draw away and fix my gaze forward.

He drops his lips to my ear. “When it is all over.” The back of my neck prickles at his breath, sending a pleasurable jolt down my spine. “I will have but a time without end to explore every bit of you… inside and out.”

Heat explodes in my chest, engulfing me in an instant.

I liberate a short series of smattering coughs. “Who knew it would take—several—near-death experiences and Urium being at the cusp of disaster for you to make your…desires known.”

He rumbles a chuckle. Something about it is dark and devious. “And who knew that it would take an entire invasion and life as we know it under a threat, for you to finally see Vince for who he is.”

The retort renders me dumbstruck for a moment too long.

“I was not in nescient of the nature of his bloodline.”

“No.” Resentment tinged with envy pollutes his tone. “Only ignorant of its severity.”

I sigh defeatedly.

“What spell did he cast on you for you to draw so close to him?”

“You mean other than the life-threatening malignancy that rots my insides every waking moment?”

Kelan inhales deeply, viscerally regretting his words, haemorrhaging remorse.

“I told you before, but if you need to hear it again. So be it,” I concede. “I never sheltered feelings for him, in fact it was the opposite. When I glimpsed him at social seasons, I never liked what I saw. But in the Trials, we spent much time together… I suppose I saw a side to him that… perhaps was never there to begin with.”

I shake my head at my own folly. “The only thing about my feelings for him that had changed was that it grew from antipathy to platonic—,” I cannot emphasise that word more potently enough, “—fondness. Nothing more.”

He remains silent for an uncomfortable interlude.

“When did he start showing an interest in you?”

I think back. It forces me to recall Dario because that is when it all began. At the Orombuc tribe, after I flaunted my archery skills, when Dario and I made a trade agreement of sorts. Vince accompanied our lessons a lot of the time with the other tribesmen.

And that is what I tell him. But I can gauge by the frigid air around him that bites into my skin that he is not satisfied by something, as if I’m withholding information.

“Yes,” he says, discontent, trying to ferret out an admission from me. “But when did you… when did you begin to… tolerate him, if not to trust?”

I reflect, flipping through the book of recollections.

Every muscle in my body clamps.

The Cistern Citadel. The core of all my problems.

Tears well in my eyes, but they know better than to fall.

I should have known. Notoriety surrounded Rimnick about his… treatment, a litany of assaults that he had inflicted on other Heras, and I believed in them. And that was the perfect cover. Rimnick was ill-tempered, oafish and callous. But before my little bath time ordeal, he had never laid a hand on me. I assumed his petty outrage of me costing him a win; a motive to attack me, the reason for his vulgar and unspeakable retribution, it wouldn’t have been out of character.

But in some unexplainable way, it was.

Because Vince with his heroic timing came in to salvage me just when I needed it most.

Not undermine humility, but I prided myself in the skills I possess. A reason why my father was content with allowing Seliah and I to roam because he knew that we could defend ourselves, break any being that pushed their bounds with a mere twist of our hands.

But that time. That degrading, mortifying moment—I try to expel the traumatic sensations of my mangled neck in his seize, the collar of bruises he had left behind and the terror of not knowing where he would have stopped.

Could Vince have been that cruel? That revolting to have staged that entire ordeal merely to pave a way to me, to found a form of friendship through an obligatory instinct of gratitude for what he had done for me… or what he himself had caused.

That bastard!

“Aurora,” Kelan whispers, a salve that seeps within.

“Why are you asking?” Irritation spills into my tone, aggravated because that buried memory has been drudged up to the light. “What’s done is done and it cannot be undone. Vince is vile and cunning, grasping for power and with the backing of Emikrol…he may just obtain it.”

“Stop that,” he says, boiling with growing ire. “Every time that I have tottered around the topic, you shut me out. What happened the time I had to depart, when the convoy was still at Cistern?”

“What. Happened?”

“It is done,” I snap.

“What is?”

“Enough,” I utter, coming out as a plead.

“Why? Why should—” he cuts himself off.

Abruptly he yanks on the reins, forcing the stallion to a standstill. Whatever alarmed him, the horses senses it too as she begins whinnying anxiously, then it begins pacing back and forth fretfully. I lean forward to calm her with a few brush strokes on her neck.

I scan around. I hone my attention to all my senses.

But there is not a sound to be heard, only a presence to be felt.

In the depths of scarlet, the darkness blinks several times over and soon a maelstrom of burning crimson eyes stare back at us. Promptly, pairs of creatures skulk out, creatures of shadow and sinew, slavering and snarling. Their Hades-black coat lined with ropes of flowing lines like thick veins, the colour of scorching red and orange, molten lava coursing through the entire expanse of its body.

“Hellhounds,” Kelan and I say in unison.

He whips the reins, needing no direction from the horse as it blazes forward with a pack of hellhounds nipping hotly at the heels. My heart leaps to my throat as others converge to form a formation, flanking us. A dangerously challengeable speed of a horse, especially one weighted down by the heft of two riders cannot compare. With its fear-inspiring velocity, they could have easily toppled us over by now, but instead they control our movements, some advancing westwards to force us in a particular direction.

Unnaturally co-coordinative for mindless hounds.

In the treeline, a crag of rocks elongates, broadening like a wall, we mean to divert but the hellhounds do not give us a chance as we are forced to revolve, hemmed in by an arch of prowling creatures.

Kelan and I dismount hastily, each on the other side of the horse.

Frenziedly, my eyes dart to each of them, indestructible teeth bared at us in a snarl.

Terror mounting. I glance at my hands, light sparks in my palms like a troublesome flame refusing to burst. Trying to channel my fear into power but as I do, white-hot pain tears through my arms as punishment—I fight through it—an agglomeration of pent-up energy surges until an apex and I release.

I shoot my arms out and a projectile of golden energy blasts from my palms, aimed at the arch, exploding on impact as the explosion flurries out and engrosses them in a holocaust. The burst of light recedes to reveal shadows plummeting to the ground like the spillway of a black waterfall, but before I can draw a breath of relief.

The shadows rise again, knitting, reforming itself until the pack of hellhounds stand before us again, my attack rendered futile. A few of them paw the ground, slanting back as if ready to pounce.

A feral growl sounds. But it does not come from them.

Kelan surges forward, standing before the horse and I protectively.

“You told me once, you wished to learn who I am,” Kelan says. He looks back at me. His lips peel back in a pained snarl, he starts twitching erratically like something imprisoned inside of him wars within to break free. The black in his irises spills over like ink to consume the whites of his eyes completely. “Be careful of what you wish for.”

His head snaps forward.

Shadows soar from the ground beneath him, darkness steams from his shoulders, smouldering, black tendrils twisting all around him, submerged in an inferno of black flames. Kelan raises his hand to the sky before he brings his fist to the ground—waves of shadow burst forth in a blaze, eviscerating the hellhounds where they stand, erupting them into sparks of black before they evaporate into nothingness.

Stifling shock mutes my pain.

Kelan revolves to face me, as if he intends to do the same to me. My mouth goes bone-dry. His eyes afire with black shadows still swirl around him, tendrils flickering from his shoulders. Fissures of dark purple crack his skin like his mortal body cannot sustain whatever power dwells within him. Tributaries of it spread out from beneath his eyes, splintering its way to his jaw.

He breathes difficultly. He clutches his armoured chest before the black in his eyes recede into his irises in a flourish; the tendrils dissolve into his shoulders, shadows splash to the ground before disappearing. Kelan blinks fitfully, eyeing himself as he too is perplexed as to what had just happened.

He meets my gaze; he rushes a step forward, an artic spike of dread causes me to fumble a retreat.

“What…what are you?”

By the muscle throbbing in his jaw, the look of shared appal in his gaze. I already know.

“You are one of them—” both hands slap over my mouth, “—you belong to the Ulris.” Words muffled.

He says nothing, his gaze evading mine like the Black Death.

A tide of fury crashes over me, almost choking on my rage, purging my fear but filling me with it instead. “So, this is it… the thing about you, you were determined to hide.” My tumultuous emotions jumble my thoughts, my mind in a stew of deliriousness. “You were obstinate in withholding this secret—”

“It is not my secret,” he roars with fiery indignation. “It is my shame!”

This cannot be. Not him. Not this. Please, no.

“This entire time you acted as if withholding this truth, you were saving me, protecting me from some greater peril somehow.”

“I was,” he declares. “I was trying to protect you from… me.”

I turn away from him, I cannot bear to look at him a second longer. I pace feverishly, caught in a cyclone of thoughts and questions that sweep me up and away from reality, destabilising me from the one thing that was keeping me rooted.

“This is impossible,” I squeak out, tears try to sear their way out. “If you belong to the Ulris…you have wielded Alrosia crafted weapons, Alrosia is lethal… to… your kind,” I say, my lips twisting around the words.

“As a blade is lethal to any mortal, dependent on how it’s used.” He tries to reunite with my gaze, but the scald of my glower refutes him. “It is not as if I would be impaled by my own sword, as long as it never enters me, I will live.”

Distraught, I release a breathless laugh.

“You are an Avangard soldier, and I know they all go through rigorous examinations to inspect one’s candidacy.”

Kelan’s gaze sinks to the ground. “I was like a meta. Enhanced. Stronger, faster, so my capabilities were never questioned. As for my power… for a long time I thought they were gone, they were bound in a binding ritual… but…when I met you…it started…coming back… resurrecting itself.”

“Me?” I breathe. “What do I have to do with the abomination inside of you,” I say before I can stop myself.

Kelan’s eyes go cold at the burgeoning loathe in my voice.

“Did you ever to stop to think why we are so… connected? I will tell you that it has nothing to do with the fantasy of love at first sight.” A fearsome chill frost over his tone. “I told you, we are tethered.” That phrase that once warmed my heart is the cause of its destruction, poisoning me worse than the malignancy ever can. “By blood and by bone, we are bonded. We are soulbound. My kind call it…Albekai.”

Horror screws up my face, the agony of a hot poker lances through my gut.

A tear escapes my eye. “It was all a lie,” I wail, the pitch of my voice fluctuating. “Everything between us is a lie! Something fashioned from pure evil, every feeling, emotion—” I gasp from a pang of dread,“—I am disgusted.”

Hurt flashes in his eyes before it is deadened by a stoic mask. But I have had it all wrong this entire time, reversed. It was never a mask to conceal his true feelings; it was a cover to hide that he has none.

I grimace, gnashing my teeth. My rage unhinged.

This entire time the heartrending truth was staring me in the eyes. Thoughts assail my mind; our brief encounters are like a lashing. The way he could tread on the lips of darkness, silent-footed, the way he wears the shadows like a second skin.

Because that is what he is.

My insides tangle at the words Vince once proclaimed: ‘The only side I am on is my own, because make no mistake, we are fighting for one throne. There can only be one true victor and I intend that to be me.’

“Here I thought Vince was a cretin, a defector for conspiring with our enemy.” I take in him from head to toe. “But here I am, fraternising with it. At least Vince had the boldness to tell me to my face who he truly is and the fact that nothing would come between him and his aspirations. He told me himself so many times, but it was I who was deaf to the extent of his efforts.”

“You,” I spew his name like a curse. A bottomless pit of black, hopeless rage splits open within me. “You speak of protection, rejecting my qualms like your shame had nothing to do with me, where in fact it had everything to do with me, lying to me as easy as drawing your next breath. You. Are. A. Coward!”

“Yes, my actions were so!” he yells, grinding his words. Cold fury steals across his face. “When it comes to you. Yes, I am a coward. I was afraid of losing you.” He steps forward and my arm whips up, fingers splayed at him, pain knifes my forearm. He pulls back. “Afraid that if you discovered the truth… all of it. You would despise me.”

By the grace of the Almighty. The way he says it, as if there is still more to unearth.

My eyelashes flutter furiously, staving off tears. “And what more could there possibly be?”

His brows snap together. “We do not have time for this. For all know the Pantheon is under siege right now—”

“I do not care!” I bellow, my shout rips through the forest, sending fowls screeching before taking flight. “I do not care what it costs for me to learn the truth. If Urium is under siege; then let the heavens fall because by God. You will tell me everything. Now! What are you?”

Anger drumming through my veins, stirring a storm.

Kelan’s nostrils flare, his jaw set. “Sometimes we think we want to know the truth…and when we learn it, you will find that you wished you never asked.”

Wordless with rage, disabling my speech, leaving me to seethe silently.

A pained scowl deforms his face. “I told you before that an additional force was sent to Urium before Pavelia to locate the five centre points in Urium. What I left out was that another was sent when the war was being waged.”

His lips compress for a moment. “I was young then, an adolescent,” he says to his own defence. “Too young for battle, but old enough to learn. Before I was a solider for the Avangard, I was one for the Ulris. I commanded the shadows; darkness came when I ordered. My mission was to—” he angrily wipes his mouth with his hand, “—track down Vilnus’s greatest foe, his equal and his sole threat. I was sent to kill the Sagetai.”

I drop to one knee. A wrenching blow tore the air from my lungs.

This cannot be. I glimpse him. His steely features, his skin taut like a bolt of fine cloth. The Great Realm War was over hundreds, over a thousand cycles ago. If he was an adolescent then, how old is he now?

Nausea roils in my stomach.

“The only inkling we had was that Regnum Valwa was going to bore the First, so when we could not find the Sagetai, we prevented the possibility of it ever arising. I spilled Valwa blood, flooding foyers and halls with red. The only way to destroy a bloodline is to pull out the family tree from its roots.”

A pant of horror escapes me, boundless pain skewers out a gasping sob.

“When you told me that you were the Sagetai, the pieces fell into place, I knew who you were, and I know of the irredeemable and irreversible damage I have caused,” he says, his words spurting out with his shuddering breaths. “I suppose it was fate’s reprisal for my sins, to pair me with the very one that I had sought to destroy.”

The agony of Solaris’s death ravages through me a thousand times. Tears pour out my eyes, gushing uncontrollably. But Kelan is unable to look at me, his eyes everywhere and anywhere except for where it should be, to look in the eyes of what he has done.

Monster.

I wobble to full height. “All this time.” My words rattle, my body quakes like a volcano ready to erupt. “You have said nothing. You, the antithesis of who I thought you were, the embodiment of my dread and the sole cause of my entire line’s demise. My family. My blood! And you said nothing!”

A short, ear-shattering scream explodes from me. “And now you say I am tethered to the one thing in this world I most loathe!” I never thought such a fury was possible, fathomless, and overpowering. “Tell me. Do you remember your sins? In your long days, do you ever see their faces?”

After a moment stretches to a hundred eternities. He meets my gaze.

“No, I do not,” he says with soulless candour. “For longer than you can imagine, I have only been one thing. A weapon. The only thing that has changed is whom I fight for. I was… an empty vessel. The only thing I knew was rage…resentment…emptiness.” His ignominy warps into anger, infusing itself in his voice. “I never asked to be this way—I never wanted this—I had no choice!”

“There is always a choice,” I shriek.

“Not with me, not with what I am!” he barks. I nearly flinch at the ferocity. His eyes simmering with unfathomable, tortured grief. “I never knew the difference between good or evil, the only thing I knew was obedience, the blood of the fallen, the blood of war flows through my very veins. It took cycles to rid myself of his indoctrination, to learn how to feel, to learn what was good and not…. but you….”

I mop my face with my hands, drowning under his gaze.

“You are more to me than a soul-tether. You are my north star, a guiding point, your goodness inspires me to strive to be the same—”

“That can never happen!” I howl, a pendulum of pain rebounds from temple to temple. I clutch my head. “You think with all you have done, that you can be exonerated from your immeasurable treacheries. So much blood…my blood.”

“Aurora—”

“Do not say my name!” Wrath pounding like a mounting drumbeat. “Vince nearly killed me. But you. You eradicated my entire linage, whereas it was me you wanted to kill.”

I whip out both daggers.

Kelan’s eyes fly wide.

I hurl them, and in a flash of steel, they accurately puncture the ground at Kelan’s feet.

“Go on then.” My eyes gesture to them. “Finish your mission, soldier. Hm? What is the life of one more Valwa? The one who you meant to slew.”

“I would never—”

“You would never what!” I spit back. “Never hurt me? You did, more than your heartless being can ever realise.” I bring my trembling hand to my face, fingers curling in a fist. I dig deep, there I find it in myself to the right thing. “We need to leave; I will not let people die because I succumbed to my fury. We will do what we must and travel to the Pantheon, but after, grant me your perpetual absence. Even if it destroys me, I never want to see your face again.”

I spin around to move.

“I cannot do that.” His words halt me midway. “You are my Albekai, and I am yours. An everlasting covenant between you and I. Together we are stronger, apart we are weaker. And if you seek to sever our tether. We will both wither.”

I swivel slowly. “So, if I reject this bond… you will perish as well as a consequence?”

I feel the venom of scorn blackening my heart. “Good.”