Chapter 147 THE EIGHTH MONTH

Chapter 147 THE EIGHTH MONTH
KAI

He told me about the Academy ball. About telling Cadence how he felt and her telling him about the visions, the corruption she had been seeing, the girl with violet hair.

“Lyra,” I said quietly.

“Yes,” he said. “She was seeing Lyra. She told me something bad was coming, something she couldn’t name. Stormweaver kept telling her to ready herself. She was terrified, she wasn’t sleeping properly, she was carrying all of it essentially alone.” His voice tightened. “And I promised her I would protect her.”

He exhaled. “She agreed to be with me, to be mine” he spoke with fondness

“Then years later she told me she was pregnant.” The room was very quiet.

“My first feeling was joy,” he said. “Pure, uncomplicated joy. We were going to have a family.” He pressed his hand against the glass of the window. “But I had been watching Stormweaver affect your mother’s life from the beginning, the fear he produced in others, the pressure from the council, the sleepless nights from the visions. I had begun to see him not as her bond-pair but as the source of everything that was making her suffer. And when she told me about you—” He stopped. “I wanted to remove that source completely.”

I said nothing.

“I went to the council,” he said. “I told them everything. Her pregnancy, her visions, her plans about the realm. And I blamed Stormweaver for all of it. I told them exactly what they had been afraid of since the day he came down from the sky.” His voice had gone flat. “They made their decision immediately.”

“How could you do that to her?,” my heart fell.

“I would love to blame my age and how selfish I was” he exhaled, running his hand through his hair. He looked younger somehow, as if reopening the old wounds made him more human, flawed and filled with regret.

“They took him,” he continued. “She came to me in tears asking what had happened, and I told her what I had done and I felt no remorse for it because I genuinely believed I was protecting her. The council would permit our marriage. She would never have to carry the weight of that bond again. We would be free of it.”

I thought about what that would have felt like.

I thought about Zephyr being taken from me. Not corrupted, simply taken, by people with authority over me, while I was told it was for my own good. I thought about what the fractured bond would feel like without the corruption as an explanation for it, just the absence of him, the gap where he should be.

I thought about Lyra asking me what’s a Tempest from her dorm bed.

My chest ached.

“She begged the council to release him,” my father continued. “She fell to her knees and begged them. My words had already confirmed what they believed, and hers couldn’t undo it. I tried to take her hand to lead her away and she pulled free of me.” He placed his palm against his cheek as if he could still remember it. “She slapped me. Then she stopped speaking to me entirely.”

He described the weeks that followed, my mother deteriorating, refusing food, barely sleeping, confined to her room with the fractured bond making everything worse. He described going to her every day and being turned away. He described the fear growing in him not for the bond but for the child she was carrying.

“In the middle of the night, there was an uproar,” he said. “She had escaped her room. Stormweaver was gone from his confinements. They had fled together.”

He had gone to her room and that was where he found the letter in the empty dorm room.

“When I read it,” he said quietly, “I understood what I had done, fully. I was no longer of the impression I was protecting your mother, I had been telling myself I was providing for her. What it actually was, was betrayal, selfishness. Exactly as she named it and I had been the one that pushed her into the very realm I had convinced her not to go to.” He exhaled. “I went after her on my dragon. I searched all day. I didn’t find her.”

Months passed.

“On the eighth month,” he said, “she came back through the threshold.”

He described her landing on the Academy field. The swollen stomach, barely able to walk, Stormweaver landing beside her and folding his wings his as a way to protect her. He described running across the field. Pulling her into his arms.

“She wasn’t herself,” he said. “She passed out. I carried her to the healing chambers.”

He told me the rest in a solemn voice. The sickness, the healers unable to say for certain whether I or she would live. My birth, small, loud and alive, against all probability given what she had been through. The three months after, when he thought she was going to recover. When he told himself he would atone.

“She would not leave her room at all. She spent her time trying to write in her diary, only touching you, keeping you close to her, I tried to apologize, to atone for my since but.. She died in her sleep,” his voice came out strangled. “I found her when I brought you to see her.”

He looked at his hands.

“Stormweaver’s bond broke when she died,” he said. “You know the sound. You’ve heard it in a lesser form from Ripple and Zephyr. What Stormweaver made when the bond with your mother broke was nothing like that. It shook the foundations. He destroyed the chamber he was kept in. The sky above the Academy went black and the lightning was red, spreading and crackling across his scales and wings. He was in agony, a dark matter spreading outwards from his chest throughout his body. He ascended into the skies, opened the threshold and he was gone.”

The room was completely silent. “Till today, no one had ever seen Stormweaver again”

“Until Lyra,” I said.

“Until Lyra,” he confirmed.

I sat with everything he had told me.

The full story, assembled at last, every piece that had been held from me. He had been young, in love and afraid and he had made the worst possible choice and my mother had paid for it with her life.

And now Lyra was in the healing chambers with an ankle that was not healing. The thought hit me with the force of something I had been avoiding thinking about directly. 

Lyra had gone into the realm, Lyra had been exposed and crashed back into the academy.

Lyra’s ankle was not healing in the same way that my mother had not recovered from what the realm had done to her body.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and sat in my father’s office and felt the full weight of my fears arrive  “Lyra,” I said.