88 | ACT VI, SCENE V

P R E V I O U S L Y

"You're already at the end of the road. Are you ready to face the consequences... dear mother?" Mirel breathed harshly, before plunging the dagger right into Drusilla's heart.

CALCHESTER CITADEL, STEFFITH.

TRISTAN

"DON'T FUCKING TELL ME," ERIC spat, his gaze venomous as it flicked over the immortals.

Edwina strode in, her hair flying behind her as she hauled a bitter Drusilla and Miriel in, eyes blazing with sheer frustration. She stopped and hurled them both to the floor as the crowd stepped away at once.

"You," she barked at Miriel, forcefully tilting her chin up, "what the fuck did you just call her?"

Drusilla drew herself up, spitting ice that curled and froze on the cracked marble floor, her eyes purple with livid anger.

"She lies!"

"I clearly heard her call you her mother," Edwina snapped, fury on her features as she withdrew a blade from her belt. "What in the name of Uranus? You have a daughter?"

"Stop," Deimos thrust everyone aside to come to the front, "stop manhandling my daughter!"

"Keep your mouth shut," Edwina snarled at him, grabbing the scruff of Drusilla's robes and holding her knife to that white throat. "Now," she said quietly, "you will tell me who she is to you... before I cut out your tongue."

"I don't know the damn child," the goddess spat. "I don't have children."

"Oh, she is most definitely an Everly," I said coldly, putting a finger under Miriel's chin and examining her face. The innocent, golden haired child I had found that day - gone was the delicate child, and in her place was a livid girl whose face was contorted in anger. I pried the bloodstained knife out of her fingers, standing up.

"Who is the father?" Eric demanded, his jaw hard as he wrapped a hand around Drusilla's pale white neck. The grey of his eyes had vanished, replaced by a pure, rippling back.

"She's not mine!"

"Let go of my daughter!" Deimos brusquely advanced, his voice ringed with threat.

"Not until she confesses the child is hers!" Edwina swore in his face, before turning back to Miriel. "This child has been living in my home for nearly a year. Not once have I questioned who she is - now, I will have nothing but the truth!"

"Who are you, Miriel?" Everard inquired quietly.

She looked up, blood still dripping from her fingers. The fine strands of her hair caught the sunlight, melting into threads of pure gold. Gone was the distress, the innocence in her indigo eyes, replaced by nothing but lethal cunning and revenge. Gone was the child who had roamed in the gardens with her kittens, replaced by a young goddess whose skin shone like flecked marble.

"I am Miriel Everly, the goddess of karma, daughter to Drusilla and Alaric Everly," she hissed at last.

The ladies gasped. The colour left the faces of the men, and I saw Deimos reel back with shock, Eric letting out a cry of despair.

The eyes - the purple eyes, the set of her jaw, the slant of her neck. And the golden hair...

"Fayette has golden hair," Edwina had once told me. "Golden hair, and purple eyes. A form visible only to Deimos. Any other man sees her only as the woman he finds the most attractive."

...Fayette.

The golden hair, the delicate figure... Miriel got that from her grandmother - Fayette.

Fayette had always appeared to me as Edwina. To me, and to many others as well.

"That's..." Nyx whispered, horrified. "That's not possible."

"Why didn't you ever tell us?" Emerick strode to Alaric, voice hoarse. His face had gone whiter than snow as he stared at his sister, both of them exchanging a wicked glare before returning their gaze to their daughter.

"She bore me for a reason," Miriel said quietly, her eyes boring right into her mother's. "She performed a Blood Ritual to be Queen, ten years back. And the most important ingredient of that Ritual? A newborn immortal's blood."

Edwina looked like she had seen a ghost.

"You... what?" she breathed, sucking in a sharp breath.

"She gave birth to me in that storm," the golden haired girl continued, unwavering. "That very night, she cut me, took my blood, and did the Ritual. They cast me in the slums a day later. And that was where I lived for the next ten years," her eyes brimmed with tears. "Until you found me, grandfather," she snapped, turning her gaze to the now frozen Deimos.

"By the heavens," Eros whispered, turning his head to me, eyes wide with recollection. I sucked in a breath, feeling as if someone had punched me right in the gut.

Deimos had been selling and beating her. And the whip - he had nearly used it on his own granddaughter.

"You bastard," I let out a hiss. "Do you remember what you did to her?"

"He beat me," Miriel said unwaveringly. "He beat me, whipped me, and sold me into slavery. So I burned down his river."

The hall had fallen so silent that you could have heard a pin drop.

"How dare you-" Alaric whispered, his voice so dangerously low that my ears strained to hear it. "How dare you?"

"You treated me like I was scum!" she shouted, blazing and fervid with fury. "Now watch as I destroy you!"

You gave up your own blood that night, didn't you? Leora had taunted Drusilla. Now watch your blood give you up.

The truth had been in front of us all this time.

"I - I have seen you before," Edwina cut in, striding to us. Her knife was still gripped in her hands, which had begun to shake. She pushed aside the livid Everlys to make her way to the young goddess standing on the marble floor. "You... you tried to sell me an amulet."

"That was a reincarnation of me that wandered the mortal world," Miriel coolly answered. "I was homeless. I had hardly discovered my powers. But you," her gaze glistened with tears, "you helped me. You gave me all you had. That is a debt I can never forget till the day I die. So I captured Celestina for you."

Utter shock rippled through me.

Eric and Amphitrite, both had their mouths open. Edwina had turned a sickly shade of green. The Everlys looked at the girl with unbelieving anger. Rowan let out an amused laugh as she watched Emerick and the remaining Rotavelles slowly go white.

"You mean to say," Therese rounded on her, colour draining from her cheeks, "you are the one who captured my daughter?"

"She was a murderer," Halette swore coldly. Theodore looked at us gravely, shaking his head in despair.

"You have made a very big mistake, Drusilla," Edwina said quietly, advancing past the crowd, blade still in hand. "A very, very big mistake," she hissed, bringing the blade to her neck. "Don't," she glared at the rest of us, gripping her throat so tightly that the bone could have snapped.

We watched in empty silence as the Queen Regnant took off her crown.

"You were so desperate to get this crown, weren't you?" Edwina whispered, furiously gritting her teeth. "So desperate, that you left your child to die?"

"Watch your tone when you talk to me," Drusilla snapped, her eyes a pitch black.

"I should kill you already," my wife went on, nodding at me. "but that would be too easy. You deserve to suffer after the terrible, terrible things you have done."

"I will not scream," the Everly goddess responded, even as Eric and I gripped one of her pale white arms, the flesh freezingly cold to the touch. Deimos advanced at once, drawing his sword, but the brute, hard force of Helios stopped him in his tracks.

"You won't be able to, cousin. Not after I am done with you."

The metal of Edwina's crown slowly melted away at the first lick of the flames. Gemstones and diamonds clattered to the floor in a death rattle, leaving only sharp steel behind. The remnants cracked and splintered as the heat sucked out of it, forming spires of frosted ice with points sharper than knives.

"Death will be too merciful for you. I should chain and stake you to the ground, devoid of your powers, and let you burn in the sweltering flames. I should watch you decay, inch by rotting inch, and see you waste away and return to dust." Her voice had turned to venom, deadlier than I had ever heard before. "Instead, I will watch this crown of glass stay on your head until the day you die. And everyday at sundown," she lowered the pitch, "I will watch a vulture swoop down and eat out your eyes only to have them grow back to be eaten again the next day."

She placed the decayed, rotting crown on her head.

"You beat me, stabbed me, hurt me. But here I stand, alive. Never broken. Never defeated. Always victorious. I thank you, Drusilla Everly," Edwina said softly, "for all that you have taught me."

Drusilla's scream tore through the hall like thunder ripping across the night sky.

The moment the crown touched her, she let out a sound that made the very hair on the back of my neck rise. Her face turned chalky and blanched, her fingernails digging sharply into my arm. It was the type of scream that made your blood run cold, bordering on the edge of sheer anger and terror.

The Queen seized Alaric by the collar, more flames erupting out of her.

"And you, Everly," she snapped. "I, Edwina Valmont Tremayne, Queen Regnant of Endollon, hereby strip you of your powers on grounds of insolence, for assisting your sister in what you very well knew was a crime punishable by death, and for joining in a banned Blood Ritual that is the very reason we are presently in this terrible, terrible position. I curse that your wounds never heal, and that you watch yourself shrivel and wither and grow old as your life dies away."

And when she stepped past him, livid with anger - the crowds flinched away from her as she stopped in front of Miriel.

"This girl will take Thanatos's position as head of the Elder Council," she snapped. "And she stays under the eyes of the Triarchy... lest she develops her mother's lunatic tendencies," Edwina let out a loose bark, before storming out of the room, ripping the golden pins out of her hair.

"I... never imagined it could come to this," Vanessa said at last, her voice faint and badly shaken. "For Edwina to go to such lengths to protect the law."

"Now you know," Rowan replied, her face as impassive as stone. "This is going to end very, very badly."

Two days later, the first blackthorn in the garden drooped.

• • • • •

This is it. We are here. The war is right at our doorstep!

Leora promised we will come for you when the blackthorns start to wither. Well, here we are. All the next chapters are a completely new level of crazy, so get ready!! It's a disastrous journey ahead :)

Coming to Miriel, we know who she is. At last. We know who burned the river. Who captured Celestina. And who was the girl in the very first chapter, we know that too. In fact, the history of Endollon chapter is a conversation between Tristan and Miriel (it also hinted at the murder Tristan committed if you noticed) so we can actually say that Miriel is one of those characters who was introduced the earliest in this book xx as for Drusilla, she will not take lightly what Edwina did to her. Let's see what happens of she goes ahead to take some sort of revenge ;) see y'all next time for chapter 89 of Crown Of Glass!!

Also, title reference, anybody? Now you know why the book is named so :)