100 | ACT VII, SCENE XI

P R E V I O U S L Y

The last thing I knew was that darkness, and after that darkness, I knew no more.

[TRIGGER WARNING: THIS CHAPTER IS LONG, AND VERY PAINFUL TO READ. I EDITED IT AFTER MONTHS AND HERE I AM, BAWLING AT 3 IN THE MORNING. BRACE YOURSELVES!]

[100 YEARS LATER, THE NIGHT OF THE NEXT CENTURY BALL HOSTED BY HOUSE LEVANE AT ELLESMERE.]

HARTINGTON CASTLE, ALNWICK, STORMHOLT.

TRISTAN

I TRIED.

I TRIED SO, so hard.

Heartbreak was a terrible, terrible teacher.

How else would I have ever known that death was possible without even dying?

Every second. Every day. Every week. Every month. Every year. Year after year, decade after decade, and still my eyes never stopped looking for that face in every person I ever saw.

It was unbearable. Excruciating.

And yet I never stopped looking.

Looking into the corner of every sea, into the depths of every sky, over the horizon of every field in the light of the deathless moon. The rings in one hand, my pain in the other - I rose every single day to go and find her.

One hundred years.

One hundred years seeking that glorious, glorious fire. One hundred years spent venturing alone into the ruins of that broken wasteland, once a home to monsters. One hundred years spent wandering the streets of the mortal world, my heart beating faster and faster with every step I took. With every woman I saw. With every blue green eye sparkling, or every strand of red hair flying about in the breeze, or every set of marble lips curling up in a wistful smile.

One hundred years, and no matter where I looked for her, for that sparkle that lit up her gaze, for that honeyed voice, for that sharp mind... it seemed that the universe just found me to be a huge, pathetic, helpless cosmic joke.

Eric had been devastated. Amphitrite - it took her more than four decades to slowly come out of her grieving. And Aidon... he stopped being. Stopped existing. I watched him crumble away into a quiet ghost in front of my eyes. Llewellyn and Helios - gods, they begged me. Begged me to stop. To put her to rest. To stop me wasting my days grieving, and wasting my nights wandering.

How does one stop, really? How does one stop hurting that bad? A person without a hand or a leg or an eye never stops feeling that phantom absence... but Edwina - Edwina was more than that.

Edwina was my heart.

And a person without a heart had no right to even be alive.

I had no right to be alive. No absolute fucking right.

And yet she - what she did. To bring back that one piece of light back into my life before it went to hell. To give Amphitrite her forgiveness in that one twisted, twisted way, so ironic that it made me want to pull out my hair and weep.

I couldn't.

Because what she did - what she did was... words had left me speechless. Tears had left me after all those nights weeping over her grave. And sanity... sanity had left me long ago, the day I saw that white, white body covered in those silks, drenched with that perfume which couldn't ever replace that scent of death.

The body, seeing that body, thinking about that body made me sick to the stomach. Thinking about that single, pale tear leaking out from under her eyelid as a final goodbye to the world - that day still haunted me every single night.

Where was she now?

Where was she resting?

In the mountains? The sky? The deep woods? Or under the sea?

Was she even at peace?

Would she ever be at peace?

Years had passed. Decades. And yet here I stood all alone in our room, a lone cigarette in hand as my eyes miserably roamed over the grounds. It had been one hundred years, but I would never come to terms with her death even after eternity.

And how could I, even? How could I even breathe, even dare to smile, to dream, to laugh - when that woman who gave her life for mine was being tortured somewhere else?

Somewhere I could never find. Somewhere I could never get to her. Touch her. End that suffering for her. Come back with misery and heart so heavy, yet certain of one thing - that I wasn't a total failure.

Because I was. I was a total failure.

I failed to save her.

I failed to keep my promise to her. To live.

I gave up.

And I killed her. As much as Ambrosine did. As much as Thanatos did. And all the rest too, Eric and Amphitrite and Aidon - they killed her just as much, if not more, by allowing her to go.

So many times... so many times had I tried to kill myself too for that. I couldn't be with her in life, I had to find her in death.

But she got Elodie back for me.

And she got me back.

And I - I could simply not throw away that gift, that priceless, priceless sacrifice she made so that I could see the sun rise once again. So that I could make peace with my sister. So that Amphitrite could hold her children in her arms again.

Edwina Valmont Tremayne.

Ed-wi-na.

That sweet, beautiful fool.

How I yearned to speak that name out loud. To reach for it with quivering fingers, to resist the touch of all temptation that drew me in as it ignored those warning bells.

Saying it out loud - that name - it ripped something inside my hollow chest. Learned that the hard way when I dared to speak it once.

The sorrow came first. Hit me like a rock. Hit me like a wave I never knew I could survive.

Miserable, crushing sorrow. Sorrow, and regret, and such horrible, horrible misery - such misery I had never thought I could feel.

And screams. So many screams. My screams, ringing in my ears. Over and over and over again.

Screams over this emptiness in my chest, the very lack of her life, that gaping hole in my chest where her soul and heart had resided. I wondered what was even left under my skin after all those years. Wondered how my heart managed to pump blood into my arteries, wondered how I wasn't dead yet with the grief.

And that... that was when I learned. Never say it out loud. Never, ever dare - not unless I wanted to revive that first nerve wracking night of fear I spent without her. Five people had dragged me back through the rain, hours after the funeral... hours which had felt like fleeting minutes as I wept in the rain beside her grave.

Then came the rage. Stifling, choking rage.

Stupid fool you are, Valmont. Could not even keep one promise you made to your wife.

Life. She could see it for what it was worth now.

What she gave me wasn't life. She gave me a dying eternity. Unable to kill myself, and forced to live every second of every day rethinking those memories, replaying those memories in my head over and over again. For if Bloodstone had any effect on my heart now, I would have driven the dagger into my chest the moment I saw her dead.

And I had.

But the Titan blood in my cursed veins kept me alive.

Nothing had helped. Alcohol. Pills. Suicide.

I couldn't even remember how many times I had tried to kill myself.

I had tried to sleep. Tried - and failed. When the darkness claimed me, she'd be there. And when I woke, she'd be there too. Those nightmares would begin all over again. And so would my screams that would bring Llewellyn and mother sobbing right at my door with half the rest of the Castle.

So I stopped sleeping. And I stopped - I stopped living. I just... ceased to exist.

I refused to come back to the castle. I refused to be. I haunted every corner of the universe like a grieving ghost, but even that grief wasn't enough to help me find her. This utter emptiness - this was all my fault. I should have fought harder. Longer. But I didn't. I gave up. I died.

And now she was dead because of me.

I had killed her.

The woman I loved.

Sometimes, I wondered why I didn't go mad. Perhaps I already was. When you're in your red room in hell and beaten into pain by guilt and grief and remorse, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the real and imaginary.

Aidon never wept. But his eyes... his eyes had the hollow look of a broken god.

"I wanted to stop her, Tristan," Aidon told me one night. "Gods, you know I could have. But you know what? Edwina was always the woman who made her own choices. And even... even if I had forced her to stop - if I had forced her to live - you know she would never have been happy, Tristan. She never would have wanted us to make that choice for her. And she went, knowing that her choice would give her one last bit of happiness. She chose to go out that way, brother. That was her decision. And she knew the consequences. And yet she went and greeted her death with peace because that was the last choice she would ever make."

She'd told me something like that too, once. Long, long ago. An eternity ago.

I love you, Tristan Valmont, because you treat me as your equal. Because you have always, always given me a choice. Not as a gift, but as my fucking right.

Her right, yes. It was her right. She exercised that right and made her choice, and we didn't stop her.

And she couldn't stop me.

No matter how broken I am, I'll always come back for you, Edwina Tremayne. We'll make it out. We'll fight our way out together, the way we always do. Because that's what we do, woman. We fight. We fight and we fight and we fight until we can't fight anymore. And then we stand up and fight back again.

Lifetimes ago.

Another lie.

Sometimes I'd see her. In the halls. As if she'd just walked past a minute ago, her perfume lingering in the air. Sometimes I'd see her shadow on the ground, perhaps hear the ring of her sword if I was lucky. Sometimes her rich laugh would ring in my ears and I'd close my eyes and savor the sweet sound for the few blissful seconds it lasted. But then I'd open my eyes and it would all disappear - like smoke vanished into thin air.

Sometimes, I'd open her cupboards and feel the fabric of her beloved dresses run through my fingers. The black velvet she looked so lethal in. The turquoise silks she never wore. The sheer golden gauze on her crimson sleeves under which she'd sneak her daggers. Sometimes I felt as if she resided in that cupboard, buried underneath all her dresses, watching me. Her sweet, heady scent was still on the fabric.

Sometimes, I'd sit on the floor and tell her all about my day. I'd imagine she was there, that she listened to me, that she smiled down at me from whichever star she was in the dark sky.

She was immortal to me.

To all of us.

Sometimes, Aidon and I would lie there in the grass and he'd tell me tales. About when she was young. About how she once uprooted a whole bush because she couldn't decide which flower to bring for her mother. About how she once had a pair of white swans who would pluck green leaves from the river bank for her when she fed them. About how she once spied on Irina from a tree after Aidon told her he liked her - and how she fell slipped headfirst on the ground with a bird's nest tangled in her hair.

Miriel's kitten would curl up next to me on nights that my tears fell the hardest. The little thing would climb on my chest and wipe off the tears with her tiny paw.

Geneva became the empress of the rebel states after her brothers died. She'd visit once every few months, and spend the night on my balcony, trying to cheer me up. Halette would try to drag me out every now and then, sometimes putting on the ring to the mortal world and pushing me into a café with her while she tried to figure out how to pay the bill. Eric would join us sometimes, stopping her before she began picking pockets. Deimos had become unusually quiet, working on rebuilding his kingdom, his venom and anger in check, still in shock at the loss of his son. Emerick would mostly disappear into brothels, the hollows dark under his eyes. Rowan and Everard took up residence in the now ruined Steffith to help build it again.

They all tried to help, they truly did. But none of it really helped.

I couldn't stand the bitter thing I'd become.

I was a ghost.

Death was bursting into tears every time I remembered her name. Death was seeing a bit of her everywhere I looked. Death was looking at the sun and thinking of the way her eyes would light up at sunrise, hazy with sleep and full of warm love.

Death.

Death didn't just come to me.

Death came to our armies, to our mothers and fathers and children. Emotion - happiness, hope, pride - emotion was a distant thing, a thing of the past, something that was hard to remember. We were lonely orphans and broken emperors living in a ruined island of misery, and lords, this was the cost of victory.

We had won the battle, but we had lost the war.

A Pyrrhic victory.

A victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to a defeat.

That was what this war had reduced Endollon to.

Nothing.

Where Steffith once stood, there was nothing. Castles gone and palaces burned down, cities wrecked and homes broken. The dust in the air still sang a lullaby of pain and death. All of Endollon's legacy... just crushed into a million, million pieces.

This wasn't my home. Not any longer.

Because home doesn't have to be a place. Sometimes, home is a person.

The first night had been the hardest.

I thought I would die from that crushing pain alone.

Because I didn't lose her once.

It happened over and over again. Every morning and every night and every morning again and every night again.

I lost her every time I saw her assortment of daggers lying on the table. I lost her every time I touched her favorite blue dress. I lost her every time I saw her untouched gold crown resting in its glass case. I lost her every time I saw the empty seat in the council chamber which no one ever claimed. I lost her every time someone spoke her name.

And I lost her every time I saw that wedding ring resting on my finger. That almost faded scar a silver mark on my wrist. A constant, constant reminder that she was not here. That she was gone forever. That I was hunting a ghost, as Eric said.

I would stretch out on my bed at night, looking up at the canopy and staring away at it for hours with tears running down my cheeks. I'd wish someone would hold me, or listen to me. The other side of the bed would be empty, the pillow so cold, as if taunting me with the absence of the woman who lay there. And when the sun would rise I'd still be there, and when I would reach for the empty space across the sheets, I would begin to lose her all over again.

Congratulations, a voice mocked me even as I stared longingly at the now faded silver scar on my wrist. You survived the war. Now live with yourself.

I lit another cigarette, watching the smoke waft out into the night before I pressed it to my lips and breathed deeply.

"You're not at my ball," Eric's disapproving voice drifted across the darkness. Irritation tinged through me, flitting across my brows as I did not move from the window, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do, Eric? Dance with my own shadows?"

"Who said you had to dance with your own shadows?" his smug voice pressed, trying to coax me out of the lonely room I had entombed myself in.

"And what do you mean by that?" I demanded sharply.

"There's someone here to see you," I heard him cross his arms as I took a sip from the glass of whisky beside me, watching the golden bubbles lazily drift to the surface.

"They can see me in the morning," my voice was throaty and hoarse as I crushed the butt of the cigarette into the ashtray, picking up another and clicking the lighter.

"Stop being a brat, Valmont," Eric muttered, sighing resignedly before clicking his tongue.

I didn't turn around. Valmont. Hardly anyone called me that now, fearing my wrath. Only one person would call me Valmont. I breathed deeply, replaying her voice in my head over and over again. The way the words rolled off her tongue, the syllables crisp and rich as she uttered them perfectly.

There was a sudden rustle of silk on the floor, followed by a light series of footsteps that I knew only too well. My heart began to race faster as my breaths came in short gasps at the sound.

A voice like honeyed whiskey sang in the darkness.

"Valmont?"

• • • • •

Guess who? Guess how? Guess when?

Haha, keep guessing :) though it'll get pieced together by the time the story ends. Seeing Tristan like this is seriously so scary. Seeing a person like him defeated. Which is pretty soon! It's really hard for me to finally be ending this baby, this monstrosity, this messy book which turned out to be such a huge emotional pit. Writing this took something from me. It gave me a lot too, yes. But Crown of Glass was the first thing I ever wrote... so I'm deeply attached to this. Scary stuff.