Ruban jerked, almost involuntarily, in Ashwin’s grip as Tauheen uttered the last few words, gave Subhas her ultimatum. At some point during her speech, Ashwin’s hold on him had slackened without him noticing. Now, his arm slipped easily out of Ashwin’s unresisting fingers. The Aeriel looked transfixed.

Ruban didn’t know when he had decided to do what he did next. He didn’t think he had – not consciously anyway. But then, his ability for logical reasoning had deserted him the moment Tauheen brought Hiya up in her venomous diatribe. Rationality had never been his strong suit when it came to those he loved, and this situation was so far beyond the realm of any logic that Ruban felt as though he was stuck in an alternate reality.

One moment he stood behind the latticework, peeking out at the entrance hall below, the next he was flying down the stairs like a man possessed, with every intention of lunging straight for Tauheen’s throat. His sifblade hung forgotten from his belt, everything he had learned at Bracken taking a backseat to the sheer, primal need for violence, for vengeance. He craved the satisfaction of feeling the Aeriel’s life snuffed out under his bare hands.

Ashwin, apparently resuscitated from his stupor, raced down after him, grabbing him from behind moments before he had reached his target. “Get off me!” he snarled, thrashing in the confines of the Aeriel’s stranglehold as he fought to get close to Tauheen. Close enough to kill. “Get off me you bastard! I’m going to kill her. I’m going to fucking end her. Make her pay for what she did to Baba, to Miki, to Aunt Misri. For what she almost did to Hiya. Dammit Ashwin, she has to die!”

“And how would that noble purpose be accomplished by your untimely demise, pray tell?” Ashwin snapped behind him.

“Ruban!” Subhas exclaimed, stumbling to his feet. He looked like the earth had burst open under him. “Ruban, what are you doing here?”

“Don’t you dare talk to me, you bastard!” Ruban roared, turning fiery eyes on his uncle, the Aeriel Queen momentarily forgotten. He felt like someone had reached into his chest and torn his heart out. It hurt, the pain almost physical in its intensity. But even more potent, more immediate than the pain was the fury, and he let it take control. “You betrayed me! You killed my father, burned my home to the ground. Almost killed me! Hell, you’d wanted to kill me, hadn’t you? That was the plan. To destroy us all. And for what? So you could sleep with some Aeriel whore? You left your own daughter to die for this wretched harlot–” at this, he turned blazing eyes on Tauheen – pure, unadulterated hatred suffusing every pore of his being. “If it hadn’t been for a random stroke of luck, Hiya would be dead now! Dead like Baba, like Aunty Misri and everyone else these foul creatures have murdered. And after all that, you have the fucking audacity to say my name, to talk to me like nothing’s changed!”

When he spoke, Subhas’s voice sounded wrecked, defeated. He looked like a man awaiting his own execution. “Ruban,” he said again, and it came out in a broken sob. “Gods, Ruban, it’s not like that. It wasn’t like that. You don’t understand. I-I don’t expect you to understand, but I was only doing what had to be done. I had no choice. Safaa needs to be defeated, needs to be killed. She killed your aunt; she was the one who tried to kill Hiya. And she will kill us all, destroy the earth if she’s not stopped. I had no choice but to do what I did,” he blanched, as if burned by his own words. “It’s unforgivable, what I have done to you. And I don’t expect you to forgive me, to understand. But it had to be done. This is bigger than you or me or any of us. It’s about the fate of the entire world.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

For a moment, Ruban just stared at Subhas, as if he was seeing him for the first time. Then his lips parted, and a broken, jagged little laugh seemed to tear itself out of his throat – a bitter, humourless thing. “You really believe that, don’t you?” he finally gasped, wiping tears from his eyes. He supposed someone who saw him now would think he had recently escaped an asylum. “You really believe all the ridiculous lies she’s been telling you. Safaa didn’t kill Aunt Misri, uncle, Reivaa did. By Tauheen’s command. She said so herself, moments before she died. Moments before we killed her to save Hiya, whom she had abducted, also at Tauheen’s command. Do you know what she said? Do you know what she said before we finally put the blade in her gut? She said that Hiya had her mother’s eyes, and that she would die screaming like her mother did, when she’d killed her and made it look like an accident. By Tauheen’s orders!”

Subhas was shaking his head, refusing to meet Ruban’s eyes. His entire body shook like a leaf in a storm, and he looked like he was about to retch his guts out. Shoulders slouched, eyes bloodshot, he looked nothing like his usual, commanding self. Ruban could almost believe this was a different man he was looking at, a stranger wearing his uncle’s face.

“No-no, that’s not how it happened. Not how it happened,” he was saying, repeating the words over and over again like a personal mantra, an anchor in a thunderstorm.

“That’s exactly how it happened,” Ruban snarled, unrelenting. Some part of him, something deep within the dark crevices of his mind, was deriving a perverse, twisted kind of pleasure from this; from seeing Subhas as broken as he felt. From being the one to break him. “You don’t have to trust me. Why would you? I am the son of the man you murdered in cold blood.

“Call Hiya, why don’t you? Call her right now and ask her what it looked like – the creature that kidnapped her from school. The creature we killed at Zikyang to rescue her. Ask her if that Aeriel had two red marks on its wings. Ask her what it called itself. Ask her what it said about her mother.

“For once in your life, stop being a bloody coward and face the truth that’s right in front of you. Call your daughter and ask her who took her. Ask her what happened at Zikyang. Ask her who tried to kill her, and who was there to fight for her life. You would trust your own child, wouldn’t you, you fucking hypocrite?”

Subhas looked as though each one of Ruban’s words was a blade piercing his body. He was still shaking his head, flinching at every word that left his nephew’s mouth. A small, distant part of Ruban, a kinder part, thought that it would perhaps be a mercy to kill him. A larger part of him revelled in his suffering, in the pain etched clearly on his broken face.

In his fury, he had almost forgotten about Tauheen, who still stood, unruffled, beside his uncle. When she spoke, her voice jerked him out of his frenzy like cold water splashed on his face, raw and disorienting.

“He’s lying, love,” she murmured, a hypnotic quality to her dulcet tones that made Ruban’s blood boil. “He’s lying, trying to turn you against me. They’re Safaa’s agents, all of them. He has betrayed you. Betrayed humanity. We have to kill him.”

For a moment, Ruban thought his uncle looked conflicted, torn. Like a rag doll pulled in too many directions at once – battered and helpless. Trembling, he turned pleading eyes on the Aeriel.

“We have to kill him, my darling,” she said, touching a gentle hand to his cheek.

Subhas snarled, “You keep your hands off him, you lying bitch!” He lunged at Tauheen, unarmed, a madman rushing to his own death. “You keep your hands off my family. I will kill you myself before you so much as lay a finger on him.”

And for a moment, despite everything, Ruban thought that he really would. Subhas’s fingers closed around Tauheen’s delicate, exposed throat and for a split second Ruban was sure – against all logic – that she would die. That he would kill her.

And then Tauheen raised one delicate, slender hand and flicked her wrist like she was swatting a fly. Subhas’s eyes widened, going almost comically round, before he went flying across the room like a broken doll thrown away by a bored child.

His body crashed against the opposite wall – more than twenty paces away – and he crumpled limply to the floor, unmoving.