"Stop... stop talking!" Aeryn screamed, her voice cracking as every word tore through her soul. But deep down, every cruel sentence was locking into place like a heavy iron deadbolt, shattering the soft lies she had clung to for survival.
"Your precious mother uncovered my ritual!" Maeron sneered, leaning close, his breath smelling of rotten ash. "She walked into the chamber and saw what I was about to do to you. She realized what I had become. She realized I was going to carve you open!"
"No... no, no..." Aeryn sobbed, clutching her head as a violent, blinding flash of memory tore through her consciousness, ripping open the vault locked away in the deepest dark of her six-year-old soul.
The grey expanse vanished.
She was six years old again.
She remembered the great grand hall of the sun palace. The marble floors were warm, bathed in golden sunlight. Six-year-old Aeryn was sitting on the polished floor, happily playing right by her father's legs as he sat upon his high gilded throne. She remembered laughing, wrapping her tiny hands around the hem of his royal robes. And standing right beside the throne was Queen Elaira her beautiful mother smiling down at her sweet child with endless warmth and tenderness.
It was a picture of pure, perfect love.
Until her father shifted.
Aeryn remembered looking up from his boots. Maeron's lips curled into a cold, sickening, dark smile a smile devoid of any human love. And right before her eyes, his bright regal gaze died. His eyes transformed into two hollow, pitch-black, darkened orbs pools of pure, liquid void magic.
Without waiting a single second, Queen Elaira saw those eyes.
Elaira didn't scream. She didn't hesitate. In a heartbeat of pure, instinctive motherly love, Elaira threw herself directly in front of six-year-old Aeryn. She did not press her child against her body knowing the catastrophic, suicidal fire she was about to unleash to stop the mad king, holding Aeryn close would mean burning her child alive. Instead, Elaira stood as a resolute shield between them, turning Aeryn's face away so her innocent daughter wouldn't have to gaze into the horror of her father's void-corrupted eyes.
Standing fiercely in front of her daughter, Elaira stared directly into Maeron's pitch-black, darkened orbs.
Elaira was a master fire-bender.
And Maeron was channeling raw, unholy dark magic.
In that terrifying instant, as Maeron unleashed his dark magic blade to strike them down, Elaira ignited her very soul releasing a roaring, desperate inferno of pure, protective fire to shield her child.
The volatile collision of raw fire and corrupt dark magic violently ignited! It was not an uncontrollable, mindless explosion that engulfed the entire grand hall; the unleashed power from Elaira knew with terrifying, exact precision who and what to burn. In a blinding flash, the dark inferno devoured only the gilded throne, the mad king, and the queen herself. The exact place where they stood was instantly burned into ash and coated in a sickly, liquid blackness, leaving six-year-old Aeryn completely untouched behind her mother's protective wall of fire.
That was why!
It all made sense now! The dark fire that had consumed her childhood wasn't just a random curse it was the tragic, targeted clash between her mother's desperate fire and her father's corrupt dark magic!
And through the roar of that memory's dark inferno, her mother stood like a towering, incandescent wall of protective fire between Aeryn and the dark magic, her trembling voice echoing softly through the heat one last time:
"My love, if one day I am not with you, don't you worry... I am always with you. Just don't be greedy, my sweet heart. I fear for you... I fear the greed that is consuming your father will cost you too..."
The memory shattered back into the silvery mist of the grey expanse.
The agonizing truth the tragic beauty of her mother's fire, pitted against the rotting, greedy monster standing before her erupted in Aeryn's chest with soul-shattering force.
"NOOOOOOOOO!" Aeryn screamed, a raw, primal sob ripping from her throat, echoing into the infinite void.
Before Maeron could speak another word, a surge of raw, violent malice burst from his hands.
"Dying memories will not save you!" Maeron roared. He thrust both arms forward, unleashing a swarm of razor-sharp spikes made of pitch-black, liquid shadow.
The shadow spikes hissed through the grey fog, slicing through multidimensional space directly toward Aeryn's heart.
Aeryn's eyes snapped open, blazing with a blinding white light. Channelling the ancient air-weaving of the Trinity, she swept her right arm in a sharp arc. A roaring tempest of compressed, silvery spirit-wind erupted from her fingertips, smashing into the shadow spikes in mid-air. The collision created a sonic shockwave that rippled across the floor of the void, tearing through the silvery mist.
Maeron gritted his teeth, his void eye throbbing with fury. He crossed his wrists and pulled upward, warping the very geometry of the four-dimensional realm. The ground beneath Aeryn's feet suddenly fractured, shifting violently into jagged pillars of dark magic that shot upward to crush her.
"You are nothing without your flesh!" Maeron shrieked, gliding forward through the shifting space like a lightning strike, a dark magic blade condensing in his palm. "Here, your crown is dust! Your lineage is weak! You are just a frightened girl who watched her mother burn!"
Aeryn didn't retreat. She leapt into the airless dimension, her white hair flaring as if weightless. She spun gracefully in mid-air, dodging the rising dark pillars, and summoned a long, incandescent whip of pure white-and-gold fire a flame forged from her mother's lingering love and her own divine soul-force.
She cracked the white-and-gold fire whip down with brutal precision.
THWACK!
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