Ve'Rah Daa (The Ephemeral: Book 3)

Chapter 43

"And you may never," a hollow voice answered from the center throne, and I couldn't tell whose shivers it induced—mine or my host's.

But I didn't have to peer into the shadows to behold its owner. Only one man could instill such fear and anxiety in Regulas. Only one man could speak with such ease to a monarch.

With his chiseled bone structure, square jaw, and symmetric features, I could tell Godric Sterling had once been a handsome man. But his looks, along with the passion and charisma I'd witnessed in Will's memories, had long since faded. 

His skin was now the color of parchment, peeling off in flaky strips like the demons he'd recruited. His blue eyes resembled the icy pond I'd nearly drowned in, and his brown locks and facial hair had turned a ghostly white—the same shade as mine.

He looked like a man who'd died ages ago, preserved and frozen in time. A man missing his soul.

"I've given everything I have to this war, Regulas," he said, and those weathered, tattooed fingers curled over stone armrests. "I've asked too much of the netherworld, and because of that, I will pay the ultimate price. Soon."

I felt that ugly hole open up inside of Regulas once more. The one he'd never sewn shut. The one he'd fed and nurtured with hatred instead of its proper antidote. "But...you can't die," the prince got out, shaking his head as his world shattered all over again. "What am I going to do? The Order's gone! Asa's...gone. I don't know how to—"

"The Otherkind will assist you," Godric said calmly, as if he weren't leaving his son behind with an insurmountable task. "Stay alive, stay informed, and everything else will fall into place." His dead eyes drifted to the portal outside. "Stay here in the palace where you're safe."

Regulas paid a wary glance at the Pans guarding the entrance, their pale eyes shimmering like purple moons in the window light. "But..."

"You're the key to our victory, Regulas. From the day you were born, that much was evident." Slowly, as though the action caused him great pain, Godric lifted the crown off his head and fixed his gaze on his son. "With this title, seek justice, shed your greatness, and save our people. That is your duty as the next king of Rhea."

Panic seized the prince, and he fell to his knees. His voice cracked as he gasped, "Father, please—"                

"That is your duty as my son."

Regulas sucked in a breath at the sound of his father's approaching footsteps, his eyes widening at the crownless shadow growing larger and larger on the hardwood. Trembling, he removed his own crown from his head, and after an unbearable pause, a heavier, colder ring took its place .

"Do not fail me, Regulas."

Centuries-old encumbrance fused to his skull, and it was nothing like he'd imagined as a boy.

Nothing at all.

The memory evaporated, and I staggered backward in a tunnel of flame and misery, watching Regulas pass by Asa's empty bedroom over and over again, until he could no longer bear the sight of it. Until he lit the room on fire to kill the pain.

He'd preferred charcoal to Asa's traveling gear strewn across the floor anyway.

Next, I watched him distance himself from Lucy, because she looked too much like Sora, and she wouldn't stop asking for Onii-chan. What she needed from Regulas, he couldn't provide. The questions she asked, he couldn't answer. So he pushed her away, isolating himself to the point that she no longer recognized him as a brother.

And just before I escaped the king's hellish inferno, I caught a glimpse of him wiping at the gashes on his naked torso. Fighting exsanguination in a bathroom littered with bloody rags.