Chapter 915: Phei Fabricated Visions: Fate’s Grand Plan
Chapter 915: Phei Fabricated Visions: Fate’s Grand Plan
There were too many things hammering at the back of Eira’s ancient skull, and every fresh hour she spent prising at the wreck of Phei’s parents’ death only added more fists to the door. Questions stacked on questions. A cairn of them, growing, top-heavy, threatening to topple and bury her in their own accumulated weight.
And worse — far worse — for all her singular gifts, for all her capacity to walk backward through time and pull the ghost of a thing out of the silence it had been buried in, everything that touched Phei and Melissa came wrapped in a darkness Eira in al her power could neither see into nor pass through.
’An absolute, seamless black.’
Not the natural murk of a thing simply forgotten or well hidden, the kind she could brush aside like cobweb. This was deliberately made by someone or something.
It was as though fate itself had reached down and draped its billions upon trillions of its impenetrable strings across the whole affair, threading them so close and so dense that no eye might see between them, no hand might part them, no power short of the thing that had hung them dared even try.
The fact that Phei’s own mind had been hauled bodily back into that sealed past — that he’d been permitted, somehow, to watch the men in the truck — was not a small thing.
It was a miracle, or its uglier cousin.
And miracles, in Eira’s long and disenchanting experience, were rarely free, and never random.
She knew what he knew: the killers were errand-boys. Messengers of higher forces, hands at the end of much longer arms.
And the forces they’d both identified crouching behind the deed — the Heavenchilds and the Maxtons — were, to put it with the bluntness her station permitted, not nearly strong enough to hide anything from Eira.
Not from powers Phei didn’t even know she possessed. She could have unstitched a Maxton cover-up in an idle afternoon, between yawns.
Which was the crux of the thing that kept her awake in a body that didn’t strictly require sleep.
When Phei had described his vision to her, Eira had felt something she very rarely felt anymore.
Surprise.
Because — and she’d hardly believed it herself — she had already been there.
Weeks ago after he’d awakened and she came to be, Eira had seen all his past and the accident too; she had walked that exact stretch of sealed past with her own senses and watched the whole horror unspool, and she had never once seen what Phei saw and that was something considering Eira had been revisiting that past over and over again but she saw no shit.
Not the figures riding in its cab. Nothing.
So, the instant he’d told her, she’d gone back again. And again, and retraced every fraction of that day from where it started to where it ended with the obsessive care of a creature who did not make mistakes — and watched the same horror loop and loop and loop over and over again before her, and saw nothing.
She would rewound time, make it move faster, zoom in ono the whole darkness-filled cabin of the truck, she did it all but she saw nothing.
Nothing like what he’d seen; it was as though they had visited two entirely different pasts wearing the same date.
And that left her exactly two conclusions, neither of which she enjoyed the taste of.
The first: that whatever lay hidden in that day had been buried by something genuinely, catastrophically stronger than her. Fate, perhaps, in the literal sense. Some entity of an Ancient Realm stage powerhouse, maybe a Primordial even — had a hand so far above her own that it could seal a moment shut, and she’d press her whole self against it and feel only smooth, patient, immovable dark.
The second — and this was the one that made the small hairs lift along her arms — was that what Phei had seen had been fabricated. That the vision had not been a window dragged open onto a buried truth at all, but a stage. A production built and lit and handed to him precisely so he’d believe it.
And if that were so, then she feared what it implied with her whole ancient heart:
Because whoever had gone to all that obscene trouble wanted one thing and one thing only: for Phei to turn his terrible growing power against three Legacy houses and reduce them to ash for murdering his parents: The Heavenchilds. The Maxtons.
And the Ashfords.
Because how else did one account for the presence of the goddess’s uncle in the middle of it all? The Ashford butler, riding alongside Maxton and Heavenchild men in that truck? It defied every grain of sense she possessed.
Why would an Ashford — any Ashford, much less one so beloved, so close to the matriarch’s own heart — lift a single finger to aid the very houses the Ashford Legacy had spent generations despising?
It didn’t fit. It refused, stubbornly, to fit.
So, everything she’d dredged up from those weeks of patient digging, Eira took with a grain of salt the size of a tombstone and believed precisely as much of as she could verify twice over.
She’d found a great deal and she’d told Phei almost none of it.
Oh, she’d handed him the other mysteries readily enough — the lesser knots she’d untangled with ease, the secrets that were plainly real, that bore no fingerprints of fabrication.
Those she gave freely and she could trust were right and not fabricated.
But the rest she kept; sealed behind her own teeth until she was certain.
Because she could not exactly turn to the boy she’d bonded her whole self to and tell him that his mother — his real mother, Mei Lin —
Sigh.
Eira let it out slow, the breath of a creature older than the grudges between these families and chose her words the way one chooses where to step in a minefield.
"I found something," she said quietly, "when I looked into Aldrich. But none of it is black and white, my dear Master. Nor blue and green, however neatly it all seems to arrange itself." Her small fingers smoothed once against his collar.
"Let us discuss it after we’re done with this beautiful day. Shall we?"
He wanted to press. Of course he did — she felt the want move through him, the pull of a man who’d spent his whole life being lied to and had developed a starving appetite for the truth as a result.
But Phei’s curiosity was a blade he’d learned to keep sheathed, because he understood, better than most, that some knowledge was every bit as dangerous as the lies it replaced.
So, he’d wait as she’d asked.
And there was a colder strategy folded inside the patience, too, one he didn’t bother to hide from himself: the longer he could hold that knowledge at arm’s length, the longer the fragile, fraying strings between himself and the Ashford family stayed intact — and the more time intact bought him.
Time to find whatever vast thing that was circling his goddess, circling Elena, circling the whole warm impossible life he’d built trying to ruin what he was creating. and the time he founf it he’d slide a wedge into the very heart of it.
’And then kill it.’
He nodded. Said nothing. Went on stroking the pale gold of Amber’s hair where she dozed against his shoulder.
And right on cue — because the women in his life had a way of arranging themselves around him like iron filings around a lodestone — Elena shifted closer. Eira saw her coming and lifted off his lap without complaint, fluttering up and away to give the princess her place.
Elena folded herself into his other side, her midnight silk hair — better than the blonde lie she’d worn for years, only a shade lighter than her mother’s — spilling loose across his shoulder, pooling down his chest at the front and his back behind, and she let her eyes drift shut with a small contented breath.
It made a picture, the three of them. The two legacy girls tucked into either side of the Young Dragon, all of them quiet, all of them safe. The women of the cabin glanced over and softened at the sight, the conversation dropping to something gentler, and even Sierra let the corner of her mouth give.
Eira watched it from the air above them, and the ancient thing inside her ached.
Because she wanted this to last. Wanted it with a ferocity that would have embarrassed her a few centuries ago. She did not want to see Elena anywhere in this world but folded into that chest — and the goddess, especially the goddess, she did not want to see anywhere but exactly where she was, lit gold and laughing and oblivious to the blade Eira was carrying away from her throat that fate had created to end her.
’Fuck,’ she thought, with great and uncharacteristic simplicity. ’I want to keep seeing Master and that beautiful goddess. Just like this. Forever, if forever’s on offer.’
She did not want a single thing to come between them. And she had a creeping suspicion that something already had, and was only waiting for the right hour to announce itself.
Which decided her.
There was no sense sitting prettily at her master’s side keeping it warm.
He didn’t need a bodyguard — Phei could shield his women with one hand tied behind him, and where his own strength ran short, his stalkers would close the gap.
’How many are trailing the convoy now, anyway?’
She’d lost the exact count somewhere past the third, which was its own kind of comedy.
No.
Her time was better spent in the dark, prising at fate’s strings until something, somewhere, finally gave.
She flitted down, pressed a small cool kiss to her master’s cheek.
"I’m going to go gather more," she murmured. "Be good. Try not to collect anyone new before I’m back. I do no want to miss it!"
Phei turned his head and watched her go, that small ancient terror vanishing out toward the secrets she alone could chase, and he smiled despite everything pressing on his heart.
’What would I ever do without her.’