“I forgive you,” he says with impassioned sincerity. “But Vothe, you called me those things because you didn’t know me. Just like you don’t know my sister. She’s with us in the fight against Vogel.”

“This isn’t so simple, Trystan,” I counter, incredulity rising. “Ask me how many people in my family were killed by your grandmother during the Realm War!” My teeth are gritted, elongating. I can feel my horns releasing from my head. “Ask me.”

Trystan looks straight at me, holding my gaze even though I can see the pain in his eyes and sense the agony strafing through his magic.

“Many,” I snarl. “And practically every household in the East lost people they loved to your grandmother’s fire. So don’t act like this is a clear, easy choice for me.” My voice fractures, the enormity of what I feel for him breaking through. “Don’t make me choose between you and the entire Eastern Realm.”

“I would never ask you to make that choice,” Trystan bites back, his expression hardening with a furious, cornered defiance. “Xishlon’vir or my guard, Vothe. Choose.”

I can feel my heart breaking. “I want you, Trystan,” I say as devastation rips through me. “But it has to be guard.”

Trystan’s invisible power explodes, and I feel that detonation straight through my core as he gives me a look of sheer agony, then turns, throws open his door, and steps into his room. I move to follow him as he falls back to sit on his bed, his face dropping into his hands as he clutches his blue hair.

“Stay out,” he orders, and I freeze in the doorway.

The hallway’s thick webs rustle and a giant spider emerges, gracefully lowering herself to the floor before scuttling toward me, her legs clicking against the stone tilework. Sylla gives me a mournful look as she enters Trystan’s room.

Everything in me yearns to go to Trystan as Sylla climbs onto the bed beside him and morphs partly back into human form, save her extra sets of legs. She throws a human arm and one of her huge spider legs around Trystan.

Trystan grabs hold of the insectile leg as if grasping a lifeline.

“How did the world get to be this way?” he implores, his face hidden in his palm, his voice fractured. “How did this happen? Why are we all bent on killing each other? How does Gardneria happen? How does Vogel happen? How does one religion enthrall a whole land into hating everyone else?”

“The same way it always happens,” Sylla says, a world-weary sorrow in her eight eyes as she embraces him. “By following a flawed story as if the whole of it is true.”

Trystan

“Is Vothe gone?”

Sylla nods, her eyes searching mine as her dark Death Fae mist encircles us.