Born with a damaged heart, Leanna Weston has lived a sheltered life with little chance at adventure. When she hears that Finvarra's Circus is coming to her small town, she sneaks off to witness the magic first hand, sure that this is her only chan...
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Time and space vanished around Leanna, and her legs gave way beneath her. On her knees, she reached a hand to Finvarra, the other quavering at her heart.
"Fin..." she whimpered. She would have screamed his name, but she... she just couldn't.
Machina's dark giggle rumbled in the empty spaces of black around them. "What is there to fight for now? He cannot give you his heart and the curse cannot be broken." Kneeling down behind Finvarra, she rested her head at his shoulder and leaned into him adoringly. "His beloved circus can't ever go home."
Beside Leanna, Inara touched her flaming horn to the ground repeatedly, desperately, but the darkness was overwhelming and reaching hands ate away at the encircling light. Through their connection, Leanna felt Inara trying to struggle against her agony at losing Krinard, at never being able to go home. The sadness and doubt clouded her magic, and her circle of light drew closer, her magic waning.
"Why are you even here?" Machina asked, a purr rumbling in her throat as she leaned into the crook of Finvarra's neck. "After all he's done to you?" She lifted black lashes. "After he killed your mother?"
"Don't listen to her, Leanna!"Inara begged in her continued plight to dispel the surrounding blackness. "Climb on! Do not suffer our fate!"
Yet, frozen at Machina's words, at the sight of the blade through Finvarra's heart, at darkness trumping light, Leanna could only stare at all the magic she ever believed in, vanish.
"We are not so different, you and I—and I don't just mean this body." Machina turned her gaze to Finvarra's crystal. "Funny thing about these crystals, it binds our souls, yes. But just as my darkness bleeds into him, his agony, his guilt, his anger seeps into me," she said, stroking the black jewel with her human hand. "It is a cycle, you see. Sadly, your poor mother's heart could not withstand his sorrow... It was his grief and anger that made her sick. It broke her heart."
Leanna fought to ignore the words, but the pieces of this horrid puzzle began to make sense and the floor felt to vanish beneath her. Clearly she recalled her mother's broken heart, the many nights she cried uncontrollably from the nightmares that plagued her mind. Leanna remembered her own dreams of blood and murder, the terrifying screams and moans of all the girls that had lost their lives—girls she had never met yet saw so vividly. She had always known the deep sadness in her heart was not hers. Those dreams and the subsequent pain in her heart had been Finvarra's anguish and woe.
And just as her mother was bound to him and his sadness had broken her heart, Leanna realized that,
"He broke my heart, too," she whispered.
"And robbed you of a normal existence, of love, of joy. He took away your life, just as he took away mine," Machina said softly, a quiet lullaby in the heavy darkness. Machina gritted her teeth in feigned pity. "Poor, poor innocent. Had your soul not been so clean and pure, had you been more like your sisters, perhaps this never would have happened."
