The woman spoke calmly, “I am Calandria, and although I am one of the Asai, I am not your enemy.” As she spoke, a calm breeze washed over Viri. She instantly realized it was Calandria. She shook her head to snap herself out of it. “If you want to convince me that you’re not my enemy, using your power on me isn’t helping your case.” Calandria smiled. “I figured it wouldn’t work much now that you have your full powers, but it was worth a shot.” Viri didn’t smile back. Instead, she asked, “What do you want from me?” Calandria shook her head slightly. “It’s more like what I want for you.” Viri just glared at her and waited for an answer. Calandria’s face became more serious as she said, “I want you to take your rightful place as the Vermillion Queen of the southern continent and the leader of the Four Guardians. I want you to renew my mother’s legacy and stop the reign of the Asai on this continent, as well as disband the hierarchies that have developed on the other continents since the fall of the Four Guardians. I want you to restore balance to our world before it’s too late.”

Viri’s mouth gaped open. Leader of the Four Guardians. She thought that was just some old wives’ tale – even more ancient than the stories of the Asai. They’d been removed from most of the history books now, but she’d read about them in some of the books Morgana had lying around at the shop. She swayed and Calandria floated a chair out to the balcony. She sat in it as Calandria floated another out for herself. Calandria waited for her to steady her breath some before she spoke again. “I know it’s a lot for you to grasp right now, and I'm sorry that you have such a heavy burden. Truly I am. But Anzel and I saw no other way to stop our brother and sister from becoming too powerful.” Viri’s head snapped up. “But you all killed your mother. You killed the last Vermillion Queen.”

Calandria’s brows rose. “How do you know that?” She immediately shook her head. “Never mind. You’re mistaken about what occurred.” Viri glared at her. “I saw the memory as a vision from her with my own eyes.” Calandria raised her hands in apology. “Sorry. I never meant that you were lying; just that what you saw wasn’t the whole story. If you’d be willing to hear it, I'll tell you what happened leading up to that day.” Viri nodded. What else was she gonna do at this point? Jump off the balcony?

Calandria nodded to herself and began explaining. “Our mother wasn’t the first Vermillion Queen to have children, but she was the first to put her children before her duties. She became lax several thousand years ago because there had been such a long time of reigning peace thanks to the Four Guardians. They were formed long, long ago to keep great darkness at bay. They pushed it back initially and stopped it from grabbing the hearts of the inhabitants of the four continents. Since then, they’ve been reincarnated to maintain peace and keep the darkness from forming again. By the time my mother came to be, so many millennia had passed that she and the other guardians stopped believing in darkness. My mother’s generation disbanded entirely. They didn’t believe in the ancient stories, so they didn’t bother passing them down to make sure the future reincarnations knew what they were up against. They grew too accustomed to peace. My mother raised four children alone because our father passed away when we were young. She carried a broken heart for the rest of her life. The continent forgot she existed because she refused to govern them, so we stepped up and ruled them in her place. She was so enveloped in sadness that she didn’t notice the monsters my brother and sister were becoming. Anzel and I never paid much attention to our mother’s history as a guardian, but Thundryl and Alicantas were obsessed with power. They read the ancient text that my mother kept on the guardians and their duties as the strongest deities in the world. As time passed, our mother’s health waned, and we all knew it wasn’t long before she passed away and a new Vermillion Queen was born. Anzel and I had always thought that we would find you and serve you like we did our mother, especially since there wouldn’t be anyone else around to teach you about your history and duties. Thundryl and Alicantas had other plans. They went to Anzel with a plan to kill our mother and keep the next Vermillion Queen captive and weak so that the four of us could rule the southern continent instead. Anzel played along out of fear that they might kill him if he disagreed. He came to our mother and me and told us their plan and begged her to stop them. She had become wearier by the day and felt like she didn’t deserve to stop them from killing her. She’d neglected her duty to keep the darkness at bay and it gripped her children. She could feel it slowly growing on the continent and imagined that it was the same on others, though she hadn’t spoken to her comrades in ages. She felt herself growing weaker and knew that her time would come. She told Anzel that he had to be the one to kill her, but she also told him of way to harness her power so that he could make sure a new Vermillion Queen was born safely into the world and kept out of the hands of our siblings so that she could right the wrongs of the guardians that came before her. She said that Anzel had to store the power until the other guardians had passed away. He wanted to refuse, but I convinced him to do as she said. I saw what Alicantas and Thundryl were becoming. The light I possess began recoiling at the very sight of them. He grudgingly agreed and enacted the plan that you saw take place that day and created an elixir of a fraction of the power for your mother to drink during conception. We both agreed that it’d be best not to give you the full power from the start for two reasons. One, you would have been easily found at full power. You would have never been able to grow up under the radar and you’d already be a captive next to your father under the mountain. Secondly, we needed to make sure you were raised with love and compassion before power came into play. With fractioned power, it would have been easier for the magic to hibernate in you, and you could grow up and see the beauty and dysfunction of our world firsthand. It is that compassion that would make you a great queen – better than our mother, and the leader the new generation of guardians needs. Anzel and I secretly watched over the other guardians with help from our friends on the other continents. We’ve watched them grow and guided them as best we could. You are the missing piece, and you need to give them a reason to rally and follow you. You need to become worthy. I’m sorry that we couldn’t guide you as we did them, but the risk of you being found and captured was too great. So, we asked Morgana to be our eyes and ears.”

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Viri’s head was swimming with the overload of information. Morgana knew. Her mother knew. “Did everyone know who I was except me?” Calandria looked at her with sadness in her eyes and said, “tell me, if you knew who you were, to begin with, could you have known the life you did? Would you have been able to see the world without the bias that power gives you? Would you have been able to not let that power corrupt you? If you honestly believe that you could have done all those things, then I am sorry that we kept it from you. But if there is any sliver of doubt that you have in answering those questions, then I would do it the same way all over again.”

Viri stared at her for a while. “That’s the frankest anyone’s ever been with me. As much as I want to, I can’t be mad at it. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have made the same decision in your shoes?” Calandria’s brows rose. “For you to be so young, you seem so mature.” Viri cracked a small smile. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t become that cliché girl that’s too stubborn to see the light or too afraid to follow her heart. Although lately, my emotions are beating the hell out of me, that promise is one of the few things I have left now.”

Calandria’s face softened. “You’ll soon see that you have so much coming to you when you’re ready to accept it. Life’s funny that way. But I am glad that you smiled a little. That’s the first smile I’ve seen in the four days you’ve been here, granted you were asleep for most of it.” Viri choked. “FOUR DAYS? I’ve been asleep for four days?” Calandria sent a calming breeze her way and she accepted it. “Yes. That’s what happens when you burn out and get a huge magical increase on top of it. I’m surprised you even woke up today. I expected you to sleep for at least a week. Sleeping to restore your magic is necessary. It will claim rest when it needs to and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It’s a deep sleep.”

Viri took a deep breath to settle herself. She spoke more to herself than anything, “I guess that explains why I didn’t have any dreams then.” Calandria realized it was a rhetorical statement and simply looked toward the stars. She stood after a few minutes and kissed Viri on the forehead, to her surprise. “Whether you realize it or not, I’ve loved you as my niece since the moment you were born. Even if I couldn’t be there to show it. Now get some more rest. We get to work in the morning.” Viri’s brows arched. “Work on what?” Calandria spoke as she breezed out of the room. “On making you the queen you need to become.”

She heard Calandria close the door and walked towards the balcony railing to stare at the moon. She sighed. “Will this pain ever go away?” She jumped when a voice answered, “It never fully ends, but it eases.” She looked to her right and saw where the voice came from. He was standing on another balcony a few feet away with his back to the moon, leaning on the railing. He had olive skin and snow-white hair that framed his forehead. He looked over at her and she noticed his eyes were swirling silver. He had muscles for days, but he wasn’t bulky. He was shirtless and had a chest tattoo of silver ink with two paw prints in the middle. He would’ve made her look twice on a normal day, but after everything she’s been through, he was just another piece of a puzzle that she hadn’t decided if she wanted to solve or not. He switched positions and leaned his forearms on the railing. “Sorry for eavesdropping on your moment. I just came out to get some fresh air.” She shrugged. “It’s okay. I just wasn’t expecting anyone else to be here. What’s your name?”

He looked up at the sky. “My name is Jin.” She nodded and said, “I’m Viri.” He smiled a little and responded, “I know.” She felt it then. There was a tug between them as if a string extended across the space and connected them. She cocked her head at him. “You’re a guardian?” He looked surprised, but he instantly cooled his expression to look slightly bored. “I’m the White Tiger of the West. Calandria said we’d all feel a connection to each other, but I didn’t know what she meant until I saw you when we interrupted Alicantas’ killing spree.” She flinched at the words, and he must’ve realized because he immediately said, “Sorry.”

She remembered then that he was the one who carried her away before she blacked out. He got up off the railing and said, “Well, I guess it’s time for me to see if you’re as worthy as she claimed you are. Good night, Viri.” He was gone before she could say anything back. She had some small spark of emotion at his words, but it was nothing she could grasp or comprehend because the layers of grief on top of it were so heavy. She couldn’t even feel the heaviness of everything Calandria laid on her. She needed to rest. She leaned into a breeze and caught her scent on it and almost gagged. First, she needed to bathe.

She walked back into the room and found a nightgown folded on the bed for her. She turned on the bath water and stripped out of the clothes she’d had on for four days now apparently. She bathed herself with a lavender soap bar that was there and washed her hair with jasmine shampoo. She struggled to work her way through the tangles for several long minutes. When she was done, she avoided all mirrors while finishing up in the bathroom. She could only imagine how rough she looked. Normally she would’ve sat and enjoyed a luxurious tub a little longer, but all she wanted to do was cry and sleep. She put on the silk nightgown and put her hair into a bun and climbed into bed. She noticed how comfortable it was. No wonder she’d slept for days. She laid her head on the pillow and let the tears fall freely as she whispered, “Aly, I miss you.”