The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 429

Chapter 427: A Dream Yet to Happen

SYLVIE INDRATH

“Arthur, you’re not going to make it.”

My voice sounded distant to my own ears as I reached into Arthur’s thoughts. He tried to push me out, tried to keep me from the worst of it, but he was too weak.

I didn’t shy away from the desperation and despair I found there. I wanted to, but I couldn’t, because he couldn’t. He thought he knew how this had to end, believed with his entire silly, brave heart there was only one way forward.

“The portal isn’t—it isn’t going to stay stable for much longer, Sylv. P-please, I can’t have you die too.” Instead of continuing to shield his feelings, Arthur suddenly reversed course, flooding me with his desperation, sadness, and despair. And hope. So much like my bond, to give me hope, even when he held none for himself.

The pocket dimension Arthur had conjured shivered and twisted, but I held back, not allowing myself to be moved through it as Arthur tried to force me into the same portal Tessia and the others had gone through.

Don’t worry, papa. I’ll always take care of you. Reaching for my true draconic form, I embraced it, simultaneously unleashing and containing myself. My thin human frame radiated violet light as I expanded outward, fair skin becoming dark scales until I was towering over my bond.

“Sylv? What are you—”

“Try to keep yourself alive while I’m gone, okay?” I said, giving him a wide grin to try and ease his hurt. Why did I phrase it like that? I wondered, distant and disconnected, in the back of my mind. There was no coming back from this. Still, though, it felt…right. Better than goodbye. Suddenly I felt stronger, more decisive. No, this isn’t goodbye. Just…see you later.

I hope.

“Sylv, no! Don’t do this!” Arthur reached out, pressed his hands into me, shoving, but the process had already begun. His hands passed straight through me.

This…wasn’t magic I’d been taught. As if anyone in Epheotus would care enough about a “lesser” to do what I was about to. No, this was something inherent in our bond. It unlocked within me the moment I understood that Arthur was about to die, like that knowledge had been the turning of a key.

Everything that made me was intrinsically, inseparably linked to him. We were one and the same. My body, my magic, my vivum arts…they could save him, but only if I gave it up for myself.

I didn’t receive this insight in a flash, like thunder from the mountaintops or the quaking foundations of my beliefs. No, it was just there, as if it always had been. He was my bond, and I could always help him, even now.

Even now.

My physical body had become ethereal as I gave up my dominion over it. Gold and lavender motes of pure lifeforce floated away from me to stick to Arthur, until his whole being was glowing inside and out.

I could still sense his pain. His body had been shattered by overuse of my mother’s will, and now it was being reforged, and every mote of me felt like hot coals and hammer blows to him. I’m sorry, Arthur. If I could take away the pain too, I would.

As he sagged, I scooped him up and pushed him toward the portal he’d created.

“Until we meet again…” I said, my voice distorted and somehow incorporeal, and I could only hope he heard me.

The portal drew him in, then began to collapse, taking the pocket dimension with it. I knew that when it was gone, I would be too, and the last of my essence would be picked up by the warm wind blowing through the ruined city to be carried off and spread throughout Dicathen. Knowing I would be in the grass, trees, leaves, and water of Arthur’s home made me feel at peace, and I let go of the last vestige of resistance that was keeping me together.

Only…I was caught.

The collapsing portal was pulling itself apart, and my claw, which I’d used to push Arthur through the portal, was being reeled in. I lacked the strength to resist or the awareness to understand what might happen next. I could only give in.

Irresistible force pulled at my essence, dragging me in two different directions… _{ƒrēewebnovel.com}

Everything became stardust and the ever-expanding universe. Suns caught fire, stuttered, then blazed. Constellations formed, faltered, and then fell from the sky. Everywhere I looked, people flickered in and out too fast for me to see. And all the while, I was being drawn through it, plunging like a shooting star in the night sky, insensate with wonder, too awestruck and alienated from my own perspective to even be confused.

The expanding universe became nothing but a tunnel of light, every color of it feltso bright it burned my spirit. I felt myself simultaneously racing—pulled inexorably toward some distant source of gravity—while also going quiet and calm, like I was sleeping.

The light faded.

I was in a small, sterile-white room. There were people there. A woman in a white uniform with a white mask over her face was standing over the room’s single bed, staring at a clipboard. A pale woman with mousy brown hair was lying in the bed, breathing heavily as she stared up at the woman in white. Tears were streaming down her face. An overweight man with sad, tired eyes sat on a stool on the opposite side of the bed.

The door behind me opened, and a masked man in a light blue paper gown strode in. I stepped back to avoid him, but he was moving too quickly, and he bumped into me.

Or rather, he passed right through me as he marched to the bedside. He said something, then began checking strange artifacts, but I was staring down at my own hands.

They were small and pale, like I remembered them. I ran them over my face, hair, and horns, but nothing seemed different. Except…

Reaching out, I touched a tray that was sitting on a small, rolling table. My hands passed through it.

What am I?

Suddenly the woman burst out with a piteous, raw growl, and the man—a doctor, I realized—hurried to the foot of the bed. I only then became aware of a soft gold and lavender light radiating from the woman’s belly, which was swollen.

The doctor started giving orders. The overweight man clumsily reached for the woman’s hand. The nurse seemed to be doing five things at once, but it was all so confusing…

And then, almost before I fully comprehended what I was witnessing, it was over.

The nurse held out the baby boy, swaddled and cleaned and crying, to the woman, who took him carefully and nestled him into her arm. He was glowing, radiating that same gold and lavender light.

I stepped closer, leaned down to him, and took his tiny little hand in my incorporeal fingers, shaking even as I smiled.

The woman stared at him for a long time, as did I. Then, like tearing her gaze away from him was also ripping something inside her soul, she looked at the man. “A-are you sure? We could—”

He shook his head, and she made a sound like a knife had just been shoved between her ribs. He looked down and away, clearly unable to bear it, and a single tear flowed down the crease between his nose and cheek. “You know I wish we could, but we’re already struggling as it is. Without a parental grant…what kind of life could we give a child. He’ll be cared for. Trained even, to fight for our country. And then, maybe…” He swallowed hard. “Maybe in a few years we can try again?”

I saw the light leave the woman’s eyes as something broke inside of her, and knew beyond all shadow of a doubt that they wouldn’t, but they didn’t hold my interest. They weren’t my reason for being here…he was.

My gaze drifted down to his round, red face, and I didn’t take it away again. Not as the baby was taken from the parents he would never know, or as he slept and was fed in a bright room with a dozen others, and certainly not when he dragged himself along the hospital floor for the first time—though no one else was watching except for the other infants—or when he took his first, shambling steps.

I followed him when he was relocated from the hospital to a small orphanage, watched him watch the world as he grew and learned.

Years passed, and I watched him. Incorporeal, sleepless, empty of all desire except to keep my vigil, I experienced the young boy’s life with him, step by step. I was by his side as he made and lost his friends, as he trained and was guided toward becoming king, as he was manipulated into striking down his best friend, as he waged war for the defacto mother figure he lost.

I did not look away. Even as he diminished, losing the spark that had driven him to become king, floundering in a world that was ill-suited to him and didn’t deserve who he would become, I knew it was a necessary travail. Without these experiences, both success and failures, this sad king would never become my bond. The detachment and weakening link to humanity he felt now would define his worldview in the next life as he set himself in opposition to it.

But he didn’t have to suffer long, because, even from the moment of his birth, the long arm of fate had been extending toward him. And I was there for that, too, the end of his journey as King Grey.

I stood beside him, my incorporeal fingers feathered through his hair—not yet the auburn he would inherit from Alice Leywin—as I sensed doom approaching.

The rapid passage of time—meaningless to one who does not sleep, eat, dream, or even live—came to a sudden and thundering halt, and I felt the presence as my own pulse in my throat. Like the black claw of death itself, my father’s magic manifested, clutching at the sleeping king.

I found myself helpless. I was present in awareness only, lacking both substance and power, and could do nothing more than clutch at the spirit being drawn from his body by the looming, dark claw of forced reincarnation. But…I knew, even if I’d been given the ability to do so, I wouldn’t have stopped what was happening. Because this moment was bringing Arthur a step closer to me, even as I was already walking beside him.

Agrona’s methods were cruel and awful, and yet he brought me Arthur. Or…was bringing me Arthur? After so long on Earth, drifting along in Grey’s wake like a haunting ghost, it was sometimes difficult to keep sense of time. My life felt like a dream yet to happen, my death like the beginning after the end…