92 | ACT VII, SCENE III

P R E V I O U S L Y

"I bet I can make good use of my new weapo-" she leered, before I vanished into nothing, hurled right into Seattoria.

HEWE, STEFFITH.

TRISTAN

WE WERE LOSING.

BADLY.

THE army had begun to push us back.

I had barely been gone for an hour - an hour to help my wife. To kill him.

Him.

I did not know if I would grieve for the man whose blood flowed in me. For the man whose very existence threatened that of my wife. For the man who had lost even the last shred of morality and had doomed himself to hell and back.

I did not know. I did not grieve. I only carried myself back.

Back to the carnage.

The air was thick with dreadful black plumes of roiling, reeking power as it swirled and misted from Deimos's fingers, clouding and clogging in the smoking air. The number of men on our side had reduced to half, fighting and attacking even as I found him struggling to hold the front lines while trying to ward off the attackers.

"Quite a nice tea party you had while we fought for our lives here!" he roared, as I cut off a man running towards him with a flick of my wrist.

"Emerick betrayed us. Thirty thousand men, all gone!" I hissed at him, watching his face begin to go white. He thankfully kept his mouth shut as I climbed onto a vantage point, beginning to summon my power even as my eyes scanned the battle. I caught sight of a stream of soldiers in light blue and purple, as alarm bells went off in my head.

The LeVane and Everly soldiers - something must have happened.

"Come now, my dear," Celicca's laughs rang over the surging battle as she circled and mocked Drusilla, Aeneas at her back. "I'm sure we can replace your lovely crown with something a bit more... fitting."

She drew up her sleeves and glared right at Aeneas, her gaze clouding with a haze of exultant power. Drusilla's eyes went wide as the Titaness stepped over the bodies, happily trampling them under her feet as blood spurted out of their crushed corpses. They both took one step back, and another, and another, until they were pressed against a wall of the rotting dead, their flesh slowly rotting in the stale air. Celicca reached out for them both with open arms as Drusilla shot out stream after stream of brutal frost and pointed icicles at her, but it did nothing to dim the immortal being's power.

A sickening crunch rented the air as she broke Aeneas's spine into two.

The lines of soldiers behind him stood steady for a second, and then shattered into a hundred pieces.

We were doomed.

I incinerated the circle of foes approaching me with flashes of surging power drawn straight from the sky, until they were nothing more than a pile of flesh and metal shavings. Sweat trickled down my temples as I felt the heat boil within my armor, stifling me, choking me.

A river of red was slowly running across the battlefield.

Rowan was covered in blood from head to toe, backed by her mate as they fought off five men in three graceful strikes. My chest tightened as I saw my younger brother in the sea of corpses, trying to crush Quintus with a stream of boulders. The Titan laughed and laughed as Helios joined Llewellyn, his hair matted with dried blood. He shot flash after flash of blinding white light, but it merely bounced off the Titan's skin. Theodore, Nyx, Erida and Atherton had stopped a few meters away from Celicca, trying to channel their power and cast it as one, but even when the blast of red hot energy erupted from them, it had no effect on her.

Beasts were prowling and trampling on the ground, monstrous lions and ferocious tigers that ate up men alive. Edmund was heaving on the grass as he struggled to create more, letting out a cry as Quintus sliced a great mountain lion into two - a creature he had struggled to make since an hour, all gone in a matter of seconds.

Too many men - still too many for us.

I began to attack with thunder.

Clouds gathered in the skies as they answered my calls, summoned to power by their lord. Lightning thrummed under my skin, ready to be shaped and molded as per my will. The Thunderbolt appeared readily in my hands, as I flung it right into the heart of a massive group of black clad soldiers.

With divinity in one hand and desperation in the other, we fought.

Right in the heart of the losing battle, I fought, slashing off foes with one hand and flinging my Thunderbolt with the other, catching it as it rounded an arc about the field and returned readily to my waiting hand. The sky began to turn to a darker black, but the blood began to flow thicker, harder. The smell of it had become a part of me, settling into my skin, seeping into my pores.

When had my fingernails turned so black with that much blood?

"This is impossible," Deimos snarled from one side, crimson running down his temples as he struggled to retain the last few wisps of his power as it drained slowly from him.

I could not answer.

Someone crashed right into me head first, drawing my attention as I put a hand around the man's neck, ready to skewer.

"Stop - no!" Eric panted, his eyes wide, bleeding profusely.

"What-"

"-Romulus and Noire - they attacked Normount - they drove us out like rats-" he coughed, rivulets of sweat running down his face, clutching at his right arm. "- I sent - water - flooded the entire army and drowned them... she - she is too powerful-"

For his right arm was barely hanging on by a shred of tissues, broken bone visible through the crushed joint.

"What did - what did she do?" Deimos spluttered, as Eric almost dropped, drained of his last reserves of power.

"She - manipulated the men... began to turn them on each other - my men began to go mad and tried to kill m - me," his eyelids began to flutter, more blood spurting out of the wound as I tried to heave him to his feet, Everly holding off a circle of more soldiers. He must have called to Fayette, who must have called her sister, Erida, who appeared a moment later beside me, her hair astray, eyes wide at the sight of her son.

"I'll take him - get him to Emeline. She'll fix his arm," she whispered, supporting him with an arm and shoulder, his face white and blanched.

"Our armies - began to eat each other out - Noire chased the fragments here - very few left..." he breathed, making an effort to stand. He was completely drained.

"Fuck - fuck this," Helios panted, his eyes wild as sweat beaded on his brow. "It's already gone to shit with Leora and Celicca - if Noire arrives here, we're fucked."

But then, another horn sounded across the horizon, followed by the sound of hooves and a dull thud - thud - thud that filled me with dread.

Another army. So many men - so many men.

I caught the look between Rowan and Everard. I saw the way Alaric's face drained of colour. I saw the desperation, the hopelessness in Helios and Nyx's eyes as our sights lingered on the approaching force aimed right for us.

We had clearly underestimated the strength of our foes.

Because right there, charging across the field, lunging with angry faces and angrier hearts towards our losing men - was the rest of the Titan army.

• • • •

SEATTORIA.

EDWINA

The darkness ate me up hungrily, flinging me into a void of shapeless oblivion.

And when the oblivion stopped spinning, white hotness burned the very soles of my feet. Darkness weighed me down, like a great slumbering beast breathing down my neck. Streams of sulfur stung my senses, finally forcing my eyes to open even as they watered profusely.

Seattoria was a vast, empty, wasted land.

The sky was pitch black, filled with a dull ochre light. It was barely enough for my eyes to penetrate the darkness. A dim, vile moon hung low in the sky, the only celestial body in those wicked heavens for as far as I could see.

You don't know how lucky you are, Storm King, Leora had said. You don't know what it is like to feel your death rain on you in that dead world, where the empty, hollow sky above you burns like a stifling flame.

"Edwina!"

Alarmed, I turned around to find my brother and father standing behind me, faces thrown into sharp relief by the unforgiving light.

"What the hell?" I demanded, "you shouldn't have-"

"Suck it up," Aidon patted my back, grimacing slightly as I registered his broken nose. "Where do we go now?"

"Helios kept on mentioning a Hall of Titans," my father said quietly, casting his eyes over the vague, distant outlines of buildings rising around us. The empty, cold silence swallowed us up, like the walls rising high up around us. The bricks were red, or maybe they just seemed so due to the ominous light. And I could not shake off the feeling that someone was watching us from behind those walls.

"The third piece could be in the Hall," I answered, looking around at the darkness. "But this place is in ruins."

"It's the only thing we have," my father muttered, his face drawn and pale. "I suppose we look around for signs of life. The six children were chained somewhere around here," he motioned to the vast, shadowy clearing bearing the shadows from the grim, ruined pillars. "Pandora and Zadicus were kept in the Hall."

I took the lead with a silent nod, as we crossed the clearing carefully, passing from under the arches. Broken columns of mansions from long ago stood in ghastly ruins scattered all over. Our footsteps barely made a sound.

"Uranus, can you imagine being locked up in here for centuries?" Aidon whispered to me as we walked. "No wonder  those damn Titans are so bitter."

The mere size of the place was making me sick. It was so vast, so endless... I shuddered to even think about how many of those men were locked up here. And how many were out there, fighting our families on the battlefield. We passed a huge arch near a cracked temple, where a set of manacles lay in pieces on the cold floors - with a step of dusty footsteps leading down the stairs.

The prison. The place where Cosmo had chained his Titan nephews and nieces.

They'd been here - and they had managed to escape this.

And then, we finally came across something we hadn't seen before in all these ruins.

"An hourglass," I breathed softly.

It was a huge, enormous structure made of something that looked like glass, nearly as tall as a full grown adult. The upper and lower hemispheres were connected with an impossibly narrow, thin channel, through which something seemed to be flowing.

It looked like blood - thick, cold blood.

All of it had nearly drained from the upper half, only a trickle of it remaining as it ever so slowly flowed through the channel into the hemisphere below. There was no indication of what period of time this hourglass seemed to mark, only the huge, imposing structure as it silently counted down the seconds.

"In here," my father gestured to us both, drawing our attention to a set of jet black doors beyond. It was set with chunks of obsidian that gleamed dimly in the dull light.

I pressed my lips together, feeling the reassuring presence of my spear, before pushing the doors open.

The room was empty, save for two majestic, sculpted thrones.

And one of the thrones was occupied, the other lay empty.

The woman was breathtakingly lovely.

She sat there, perfectly still, no movement at all. Her face was devastatingly handsome, with an air of solemnity around her. She seemed to be reclining on her regal throne, her eyes frozen wide open, pitch black from lid to lid, but deep within them was a thin ring of silver. A huge ruby the size of a bird's egg rested at her neck.

I nearly threw up at the sight of her hair - that same, auburn chestnut that matched mine.

The ground threatened to slip from beneath my feet as the bile threatened to rise up my throat, and my brother's hand on my arm was the only thing that kept my vision from spinning.

Her clothes were even richer than what I had worn at my coronation and wedding.

They were patterned with silver and gold and crimson and every other colour imaginable, the needlework exquisite. More jewels were fastened in the silk and velvet in the folds of her dress, matched by a heavy, cold crown that rested on her head. Her eyes were so full of bitterness... and anger, and fury.

She sat here, proud in her skin, like a living tomb that showed her off for the world to see.

Pandora.

Here was the woman who had begun all this.

The third piece - we had to find it before she woke up.

"Her belt," my father whispered softly, his voice hoarse. "Look at her belt."

It was set with many more jewels of astonishing size and brightness, filled with rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds in every hue I could think of. The belt held the folds of her dress together, set against the shimmering fabric. And there, amidst all the precious stones...

...sat a tiny, golden screw.

My heart skipped a beat - we were going to win - we were going to get out of this. We were going to take it and win the fight and get a happily ever after, and no more war would come to wreck and trouble our lives. I reached out a shaking hand to carefully pry the golden screw from her belt.

Which was when a dull, resonating thud - thud - thud began to ring in the air. The heavy, ominous sound refused to die away as we stood there, frozen in fear, stiller than statues as we tried to locate the source of the sound. It grew louder and louder, a vague, disastrous sound that sounded like a person screaming in pain. The ground began to shake and rumble - a little at first, joined by the noise of more stones and buildings outside crumbling to ashes.

My blood ran cold when I saw that the upper dome of the giant hourglass had completely emptied.

And when I turned back to face the woman, I saw her standing up and glaring at me with livid eyes.

• • • • •

HEWE, STEFFITH.

TRISTAN

This had never been a battle we could win.

We would not - could not - survive this. Only Edwina could, perhaps...

...if we managed to buy her enough time.

The decaying, filthy smell of the rotting bodies was slowly making its way to my head, destroying any fragments of sanity still left. The battle had been dragging and dragging for hours, showing no signs of stopping. Not even a battle - this was a slaughterhouse. Anywhere I cast my weary gaze, I only saw broken limbs and dead soldiers. Soldiers who were fine, young men - men I had known.

Aries had landed in our midst, and had aimed right for whatever was left of our northern flank.

We were surrounded by five Titans, our army was eating itself out from within, thanks to Noire's sadistic tricks. Barely fifty - forty - thousand men remained out of the hundred and twenty thousand we had at the start of this day. More than half of them were dead. The enemy had pushed and driven out the immortals from every corner of Endollon before goading them into this tight little circle for whatever cruel end they planned to mete out to us.

We were trapped.

Rowan let out a string of curses from beside me, drained of her strength as she tried to keep the lines together.

"We might need to make a run for it, Tristan. There's no way we can get out of this."

"There's no place for us to run to," I said quietly, my voice rasped with exhaustion and thirst.

One the other side, I saw Rosalva barking orders at her temporary camp, a legion of Grendel soldiers stationed around her as the injured lay around her in hundreds. Erida had half dragged Eric to her before he fell unconscious on the sand. It had been Emeline who had gritted her teeth, motioning to her men to hold him down as she placed a bit over his lips before proceeding to fix his mangled, wrecked arm.

His muffled screams made me wince and close my eyes. His screams, and those of the dead and dying around me, the screams of our men as we tried to push back, the screams of my family as they fought with all they had.

We were going to die.

Unless Edwina got lucky and put together the Logogram in time.

"Men!" I growled, snapping those around me to attention. "Men!"

"There's no way out of this," Atherton grunted, his lips pressed together in a thin line. "We're going to lose. We're going to die."

"We won't," I said firmly, raising the pitch of my voice. "We're going to make it. We have to hold - just a little bit longer. Edwina found the ring. She's going to do the rest. We are going to buy her time."

"We can't hold for long," Theodore said, his words broken. "Many of us are dying. Many are dead. Fighting for you was something we should never have agreed to."

"Don't fight for me," I raised my voice. "Don't fight for me, don't fight for the Triarchy, don't fight for the crown. Don't find for your House, don't fight for your life, don't fight for your pride. But this," I roared angrily, raising a finger to the death, the destruction rolling over the field. "This is your country Zadicus wants to burn! The country where you were born. The country where you grew up. The country that has given you your life. Your love. Your gold. Your pride. If you don't fight for Endollon, who will? Who will fight for your homeland?"

A minute passed in dead silence.

Before the crowd erupted in a last round of cheer.

"Helios," I said quietly, my voice hoarse and cracked. "You and Nyx hold the remaining lines in place."

He nodded gravely, his eyes turning to meet those of his dark haired sister. She had taken an injury to her leg, which was bleeding profusely since hours - and yet still, she fought. Fought without waiting for it to heal. Guilt filled me up as she gave me a look of firm acceptance, picking up her sword with determination in her fierce eyes.

"Deimos, Atherton, Rowan," I turned to them. "Stop Noire from turning more of our men against each other."

"I want to help too," Eric's words drifted into the tight circle, as he strained to keep his balance despite the loss of blood. His face was wan from the injury, his arm wrapped in a tight bandage kept in place with countless splints even as Erida fussed over her son.

"You rest," I growled at him.

"I may have injured my sword hand," his voice shook uncontrollably, "but I still have the other hand. And I have my life, which is more than you can say for those dead men lying across the ground," his grey eyes bored into mine, darker than the ocean's waters.

Resigned, I sighed with a slight nod.

A dull thud had slowly begun to echo into the clearing, the ominous sound that began to trigger warning bells off in my head. My nerves tightened like a spring as my heart began to pound. The steady sound shook the very ground with each second, drowning all other thoughts out from my head. The sound ceased to stop - the rumbling was unflinching, unwavering, unfaltering. It did not yield.

It was the sound that preceded the death of thousands.

"Zadicus," Edmund panted, running to us, his clothes stained a dark red. "I don't know where Leora is... but Zadicus - gods - you know what he and Pandora are capable of."

Any drop of blood spilled by hurting him or Pandora - it would give rise to ten more men.

"No one touches him," Everard said silently. "No one brings a blade within fifty feet of him. We wait this out until Edwina does her job. Or this ends very badly for us."

The rest nodded, a silent promise, a farewell as we made it to our positions one last time. We would not be seeing each other again, I knew. Knew it in my bones, from the very first time I had set foot into this battlefield.

We stepped from our group to break into our ranks, and I drifted back to the front lines atop my stallion, weary of this battle. I gave a signal to motion the army - or what was left of it - into position.

A jarring horn began to pierce the air, ragged and cleaving. The sound made me sick.

Beside me, even Eric paled at the dreadful sight as three flags appeared behind the circle of foes, over the horizon.

My jaw tightened further as hundreds of eyes scanned the horizon.

The first bore the golden crest of the Dessari.

The second was the indigo blue of the other half of the Grendel army.

And the third flag... the blood red sigil of the Halflings.

• • • • •

SEATTORIA.

EDWINA

She was even taller than I had thought, as I stood there, frozen.

Pandora buried her hand in my hair as I pushed her off, and she gave me a predatory smile, slowly backing me into a corner with fire in her eyes.

"Ed - wi - na," she crooned, tracing the curve of my lip, her voice a satisfied purr. "You must not steal what's not yours."

I spat right in her face.

It only gave us a moment to react as my father flung a javelin right at her neck, which she turned around and caught without a second of hesitation. Aidon drew his sword to strike her chest, which she broke into two before the blade even touched her. I summoned the flames of Hellfyre that were stinging and swirling under my skin, but the fires did nothing - nothing - to harm her.

She was invincible.

In a quick, swift movement, she had the three of us down on the floor - us, who were among Endollon's deadliest killers. Her white fingers snapped as five sentinels appeared out of thin air, menacing and ominous as they bound our wrists behind our backs.

"That's better," Pandora sang softly, approaching me. She dropped to her knees beside me, tilting her cold white face to observe me clearly.

If I could just reach out a bit - get that screw from her belt... but my hands were bound.

"Looking for this, hmm?" she pulled out the golden object, bringing it close to my face, taunting me with it. Fire rose in my eyes as fury welled up in my chest, and I only had one instinct: to grab out for her throat and tear it apart with my bare hands. "To lust after another's belongings is a sin," she said.

"Fuck off."

She tipped back her head and laughed richly, the tiny golden screw glimmering in her long white fingers. I saw Aidon wince beside me as the sound wracked my nerves, like nails screeching against an iron door.

"You see, Edwina," Pandora's lips curled slightly as she settled herself on her throne. "This piece," she muttered, "comes with a price. I enchanted it myself, you know. Never been prouder of my handiwork."

"What?" I snarled.

She leaned back, steadily watching me with knowing, evil eyes.

"You must be really desperate if you're willing to make a bargain with me, sweetheart," she purred. "Are you?"

"Name your price," I hissed, trying not to recall Nyx's words when we had been talking a few days ago. She's a... vile creature, she had said. She'll play with you first - like a lion stalking its prey. If she's feeling generous, she might even let you win for a minute. And when you lose her interest... she'll finish you off.

"Well then, love," she grinned a ghastly smile, holding up the screw so that I could watch it glimmer in the dim light. "This piece comes with a huge sacrifice for the person who wishes to covet it."

And the price...

She pulled out two daggers from her sleeve; slim, pointed daggers that were made of Bloodstone.

"Kill them both," Pandora's eyes gleamed with delight as she nudged my father and brother with her boot. "With your own hands."

• • • • •

You know, when I was writing this book, I never really realized how much darker it became the further I went. There were moments of the occasional darkness, like the whole Century Ball disaster and what Edwina went through during that, but this... this is literally the worst thing that has been ever done to Edwina.

I'm honestly wondering why this story is so twisted. Honestly, seeing someone in this much pain would literally have me in tears, and I did cry a lot when writing the final chapters - but that didn't make it any easier. If she really does the deed and let's assume she survives, she would be dead inside. There's no chance you can walk away from something like this without destroying your soul.

So honestly, there would be no point in her surviving anymore.

I wish I hadn't put this woman through so much. Perhaps in another time, in another story - she'd have been happier and found a happier home. And here... it's all just blood and pain and tears. Same goes for Tristan, and it's not good on his end either - I mean, with Eric fallen... it's sort of hard to digest that all those powerful people have fought so hard that they can't do it anymore. And now that Noire is here and those three armies as well, we're in really thick soup now.

I love y'all amazing people ♡ btw, this chapter was chock full of references from The Magician's Nephew (and a few from GOT) because those two are literally my life. I honestly don't know what I'd do without good books, good music or good shows. God bless writers, singers and actors.

And readers. You all are my strength ♡ love y'all, and see you next time!