Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
His hands were mallets, his shoulders bunched hard and rigid, and his face so hot and red that veins pumped on his temple. “I would never forget her!” It was another roar. “I would never! She was my daughter!”
A daughter born too young while Aegaeon, too, had been so very young. A daughter who had died in his arms, her tiny body too weak and unmade to carry on. Aegaeon almost hadn’t gone on, either, his grief a black morass that threatened to suck him under.
He’d been so thin back then, a bewildered sapling who hadn’t expected fatherhood anytime in his near future. When it had come, however, he’d embraced it. Embraced Aaeva, this precious babe born thousands of years before Aegaeon became an archangel.
Endless millennia had passed between then and now. She could count on the fingers of one hand the people close to Aegaeon who knew and remembered Aaeva in this time: her and Sharine. Alexander, while of an age with Caliane, had been at a distant court throughout the entire pregnancy.
Sharine would never even think to bring up Aaeva, certainly not in the context of a looming war, but Sharine was infinitely soft of heart.
Caliane, however, had almost lost her son. She understood what Aegaeon didn’t.
Today, the very fury of his response told her she’d been right. He was old, Aegaeon. Not as old as her, but old enough that memory was a thing malleable and threads could become lost…especially when it came to anguish a person didn’t wish to remember.
“I hurt my child once,” she told him. “I broke him so badly that he was nothing but shattered bones and blood left on a field far from civilization, far from help.”
A hint of memory in his eyes, a remembrance of the agony he’d suffered as Aaeva breathed her last only minutes after her birth, but the tornado of water continued unabated around them.
Caliane hovered unflinching in that dangerous space, even as his thick fists began to glow as hot as his wings and the silver swirl on his chest. “Every time I close my eyes, I dread the dream that might come. Of seeing my precious boy, the babe I cradled in my arms, the toddler who gripped my hand in trust absolute, gasping for air and finding only blood in his lungs.
“Because of me. I did that. No one else.” She let her tears fall, let Aegaeon see her weakness. “He was so angry with me that day when we fought…but he cried, too.”
Raphael might not remember, but she did.
“My boy cried because he was afraid for me—and because I broke his heart.” She bit down hard on her lower lip in an effort to stop the quiver, but that same quiver was in her voice when she spoke. “Because despite all I’d done, all the horrors I’d unleashed on the world, he’d believed that his mother would never hurt him.”
The power around Aegaeon’s hands flickered, a candle hit by a blustering wind. “The boy will not even acknowledge me as his father!” Violent, loud, angry. “I held him in my hands when he was but newborn. I flew him in my arms across entire oceans! And he will not even call me Father! It is not the same!”
Caliane didn’t wipe away her tears. Her son deserved them. As Aegaeon’s son deserved Aegaeon’s pain—and the guilt he refused to feel because he was too arrogant to look his own mistakes in the eye.
“Did you give him his first sword?” she asked, knowing that she was pushing things to a perilous point, but she had to push, had to make him see. “Did you teach him how to make his wings stronger? Did you give him wise advice when he told you of his first love?”
Aegaeon’s eyes flashed. “I am his father.”
“No, Aegaeon. You were once. No longer.” She shook her head hard when he went to rage at her again. “As I was not Raphael’s mother when I first woke from my long Sleep. Do you know how long it took for my son to trust me? Truly trust me?” Her voice was jagged now, her throat raw. “It took until the moment I went into Sleep again as the ghosts of madness began to howl.”
Aegaeon stared at her out of the startling blue-green eyes that had been rimmed with red at the Refuge ceremony for Aaeva’s journey beyond the veil. Afterward, he and Aaeva’s mother had taken her tiny body to a peaceful hidden grotto deep in the territory where they’d first met.
“A beautiful place for our babe to rest,” Aaeva’s mother had told them all before they’d left. “She will sleep under the canopy of an ancient oak, surrounded by wild forest blooms.”
She’d been older than Aegaeon, but far more fragile. Caliane didn’t know what had happened to her, but she could guess—because she hadn’t returned from the burial.