Chapter 417 Gifted Ones

Chapter 417 Gifted Ones
Darius seemed to remember and he held onto my hands tighter. “You saw everything?”
I nodded, tears forming in my eyes as I recalled how broken and lost little Darius looked in that cave, all alone.

“Do you still wish to be… to be married to me?” His voice broke.

The tears free fell down my cheeks as I pulled Darius into my arms, cradling him to my chest. “None of it was your fault,” I whispered to him, pressing a kiss to the crown of his head.

His hands wrapped tightly around my waist as he buried his face into my neck. “You were just a child. You did not know what was happening to you. Please, stop blaming yourself. I am right here. I love you and I am not going anywhere.”

I held onto him as he sobbed into my neck, and I cried as well, thinking about everything he had to go through alone. For centuries he lived with guilt, he believed it was his fault, he believed he was undeserving of love or sympathy. My poor baby. I would heal him. I did not know how exactly just yet, but I would find out.

I will find a way to use the powers the goddess gave me to heal my husband, my Darius.

I understood why he did not want to tell me. He thought I would leave, that I would blame him as well. But now that I knew what my purpose was, I will fulfill it. I will fight for him and this empire.

~

The sun rays beamed brightly, painting the palace garden in beautiful hues. Finally, winter was over.

We sat under the gazebo together, in front of a table of cakes and an assortment of biscuits, holding hands. Darius watched me carefully. He was surprised that when we had woken up, my fever was gone. He thought I was hiding the pain I was going through, no matter how many times I told him I was fine.

Turning to him I caught him looking at me intently, his eyes searching my face. “If you continue like this my king, you will make the maids think that you are seeing me for the first time.”

Darius refused to look away. “Let me look at my queen however long I want. I just… I want to be sure you are not in any—”

“Any sort of pain,” I finished for him, cupping his cheek. “I am fine, my love. Your mother simply showed me your origin. She turned herself human and gave your father a human form as well. They fell in love and she conceived you, but the sisters of fate came to put a curse on you as punishment for your mother’s actions. And then I saw the carnage, it was as if I was right there”

Darius’s breath caught. “Y-you did?”

I nodded. “It was gruesome and I could not stand to see how utterly shattered you were after everything. You were all alone.” Another wave of tears threatened my eyes. “I forbid you to ever think that was your fault.”

Darius simply smiled. It was a little curve of the corner of his lip but it was something and it warmed my heart a little. Then the moon stones came back to me. “Your mother told me about some sort of stones that you had shared your powers with?”

Darius blinked, obviously surprised. “Yes. I, I was trying to keep them under control and so I fed them to these crystal stones in the cave of the Highlands. But what do you mean by moon stones?”

“Two centuries after you had gone into hiding, common folk stumbled upon these stones and began to mine them. They crafted them into betrothal necklaces for their mates. But because your powers were in them, whenever any of these women wore the necklace during conception or while they were pregnant, their babies grew up to possess these powers. Just like Ryker, Arya and Lord Anthony, the gifted ones,” I told him.

“I always wondered how my powers were getting distributed so much, but I never thought…” he trailed off, glaring at the table cloth. “Ryker’s mate had the powers, but I had to take them away from her in order to save her life years ago.”

“What?” Darius could take back the powers?

Darius glanced back at me. “She had lost control and caused her manor to collapse on her. Ryker and her family thought she was dead, but I felt her life source draining. I had to go to her, and when I found her she was barely alive. None of my treatments worked because her powers were sucking the life out of her, and so I had to take it back.”

“You can take back the powers?”

“I did not know before that moment. I do not know how to do it without killing the person. Elara was on the brink of death, that was why I was able to do it,” Darius said.

“Elara?” I repeated the name he had just said. “Who is Elara?”

“That is Arya’s real name. Elara of the Forgotten House of Cortez. After Elara brought her house down on her, rumors had begun to circulate about her powers. While she recovered I had Allistair make a potion that could induce memory loss so that her new identity, Arya of House Rosenthal could be protected and she could live a normal life with Ryker,” Darius explained.