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The lake rages and swirls, crashing hard against the shores as Koschei rises up above them, ever the monster of death, using his horrid magic to cause the most chaos. The Illyrian Legion flies up on the Eastern shore, the Darkbringers, and the Valkyries heading up the Western shore, along with Eris’s legion.
Shields of blue, green, and red flare brightly trying to keep the crashing waves back. Waves that could easily drown them from the inside out with Koschei’s abilities. Gwyn yells out to Nesta as Koschei’s animated girls, hoards of them, fight against them.
The girls that he had brainwashed, cursed, and magicked to copy motions. An unfair, unwinnable fight. Like fighting yourself. Not to mention that the Queens themselves have been rotting with Hybern magic for the last three years, plotting their alliance with Koschei and Beron, who are now backing the evil God of Death as he threatens this entire realm.
If there was one thing that Beron could rightfully put down for, it is this. Maybe Eris will finally get his chance at the throne after all.
The soldiers that Eris had rallied, refusing to be on the wrong side of the war, are interweaved with the Valkyries, Eris paying more attention to covering Gwyn since knowing that she is his daughter.
“Nes! Nes—I think I know how we can get the box!”
“What!?”
“How!?”, Emerie interjects, her sword clashing and scraping against the metal of one of Beron’s warriors before she guts him with it.
“Trust me!”
Gwyn breaks away and pants, hard, wiping the blood and sweat from her brow as she makes her way through the fighting and bloodshed, careful to watch her own back. Eris shouts out to her and she looks over at him. “I’m fine! Fight!”
Reluctantly, he turns back to fight more of the evil warriors—both of sound mind and those that are being controlled. Once she is far enough away from the fighting and closer to the Eastern shore, she climbs up on one of the small cliffs that surround the lake, the now churning water crashing against it violently as she surveys the side of the monster they are doing their best to slay.
Except there is no way to slay his physical body. The only true way to take him down is to destroy his soul. It lies in that black box, hidden away at the bottom of this lake. Which on any other day, would be guarded by him.
Gwyn takes a shaky breath. “Not guarded now, is it?”, she murmurs to herself, her eyes searching the gray skies for her mate.
After searching for a while, she sees Azriel’s form, cobalt blue flares of light blasting down the animated girls, both proud and pained for it. Those girls are innocent, but Koschei killed them the day he took their minds and free will. That’s not on Azriel.
Whether it’s their bond or something else entirely, Azriel flies overhead, and their gazes lock for a moment. Horror flashes within them, as if he can tell what she is about to do, but knows he can’t take the time to stop her.
She is scared, but she will not be a coward. She will not doubt her plan. There is no time to doubt herself.
Koschei will not die without them having access to his soul—that onyx box that holds it within. This is the only time it will be unguarded by him, and she is the only one that can retrieve it. The only one that can breathe underwater for up to five minutes. They are losing quickly, and they need that box to destroy him. If Koschei is destroyed, the animated girls will be at peace and the Queens will lose their foothold.
She sees Azriel circle back around, but she forces herself not to look at him. There is no time for emotion, this is the time for action.
Taking off her spelled-stone necklace, she tucks in deep within her leathers. She inches towards the precipice of the rocks, looking down into choppy waves.
“Gwyn!”
He screams her name with fear and she swallows, ignoring him. Positioning her feet, she takes the plunge. Literally.
Diving deep into the roughened lake, her body transforms into sparkling teal scales and fins, her copper hair flowing behind her as she swims with ease, descending deeper and deeper under the waves. The roaring of them dull as she nears the bottom, a watery sense of peace.
She glides through the water with ease, her underwater eyesight sharp and clear in this form. ‘Four minutes left’, she mentally counts, pushing her gills to breathe in the water. It’s very rare that she enjoys her nymph form, and it is untrained, so her time without needing oxygen is less than the average nymph.
Using her speed ability, she searches fast and frantically for any place that could hold the onyx box—the soul box. Her powerful tail works overtime as she pushes herself to the limit. If she fails to find this box, some of her friends might die.
‘Two minutes’, she estimates, already slightly out of breath from straining. She has never swam in the sea—mostly in lakes and ponds and springs—and these depths are taking a toll on her unadjusted body already.
She must have covered miles of the lake bottom at this point, and still no sign of anything that could conceal a magic box. She makes her way through a cloudy portion of the lake, which makes her skin tingle and her vision worse. Definitely suspicious.
That’s when her hands hit rock, rough and jagged. Jagged enough to slice across her palm. She gasps a bit and immediately realizes that her time is quickly running out. Her blood oozes from the slice in her palm and she grunts, squeezing it in her fist as she looks around, realizing it’s a large cavern.
Bullseye.
Quickly swimming into the cave, she realizes that it is dark, but still light enough to see, the water and her vision clearing as she reaches a certain point within it. Her small gills flare, a warning that she needs oxygen soon.
Gwyn looks around, ignoring the nagging need as much as she can. A flaring light of the deepest blue-purple calls to her and sees to beckon, taking the form of a sphere, seeming to float in the middle of a watery altar.
Moving toward it, she reaches her hand out to that dark light, and it skitters away like mist in the water, revealing the shiniest box of black onyx, a latch of pure glittering golden magic on the front of it, and an aura of blue around it. Shadows. Shadows were protecting it. Shadows that can adjust to watery depths. Cool, dark, protective. Same as the fourth Dread Trove soul box. The one that was the twin to this one.
Koschei’s soul.
Gwyn suddenly finds herself gasping to breathe, even with her gills, straining too much. It hurts and throbs and she begins to panic, realizing that it’s at least another four minutes to reach the surface at her fastest.
Her next immediate thought is that she’s going to die. She’s suddenly struck with desperation and grabs the box, speeding as fast as she can out of the cave and smashing into a wall. Her eyes widen like saucers, the teal bright and glowing in this form as she slams her hands then her tail against it roughly over and over.
Not a wall. A shield. A shield of pulsating darkness that spiderwebs and flickers with each hit. A trap for anyone who dares to steal the box. A death trap from a death god.
All she can do is try and try to get through it, screaming through the water as complete terror takes over her, feeling herself slowly begin to drown. The downside to not being a full-blooded nymph.
.
.
.
Azriel and the Illyrian legion successfully blast back a portion of Beron’s army as they approached with the dark magic staining the mouths of the Queens who hide like cowards from the back. The puppeteers, not the ones in the thick of it.
Suddenly a sharp pain hits his chest and he nearly falls out of the sky but manages to catch himself before lowering himself down to the ground. Cassian sees this and automatically takes the lead, worried but focused, Rhys taking Azriel’s spot.
Azriel pants hard and grips his chest like something is trying to rip out his ribs. Her face flashes in his mind and his eyes widen. “Gwyn...”
“Gwyn!”
He uses all the instincts that roar at him to lead him to her, his shadows restless and all over the place before they envelop him and he’s shadow-drifting to her location. When they clear up, he’s underwater, and immediately claps a hand over his mouth so he won’t gasp a mouthful of water. He sees a flittering wall of shadow concealing a cave. It looks like a large-scale trap.
His shadows skitter as if they recognize it and Azriel’s siphons glow brightly, casting a sapphire blue hue to the water as he presses his hands against the wall of webbed darkness. His shadows swirl in an intricate pattern that seems to look like a skull, and before he can register what that means, the wall melts away, revealing...Gwyn. Gwyn in her nymph form, floating there.
‘She ran out of air’, his shadows whisper to him. ‘Save her. Help her. Rescue her.’
Protect. That’s the word that roars through him with the most intensity of anything he has ever felt in the entirety of his life.
Azriel is struggling to hold his own breath at this point but he swims forward and grabs her in his arms, his shadows once again surrounding him and drifting them quickly to the surface. Gwyn’s hold on the soul box loosens too much as it falls, from her grasp, drifting back to the bottom of the lake.
When they break the surface, Azriel gasps hard.
“Gwyn!”, he shouts over the roar of the choppy waves, Koschei’s dark magic making the lake as bad as a stormy sea.
“Gwyn!!”
He presses his mouth to hers and blows, pressing on her chest. Again. Again. Again.
“Please”, he whimpers. “Oh gods, please.”
He gives her mouth-to-mouth another three times before she splutters and throws up water, gasping for breath. Azriel lets out his own breath of relief.
“Gwyn!”
“A-Az?”, she murmurs, her eyes blinking up at him as he finally beholds her form, staring in awe.
She throws her arms around him and sniffles, stroking through his hair. Azriel clings to her tightly and buries his face in her neck, even as he struggles to tread water with his wings weighing him down like the heaviest soggy coat.
Gwyn pulls away and swallows, pressing a kiss to his lips as he gawks in shock before registering it.
“Thank you”, she whispers shyly, cupping his face.
“I—”, he clears his throat and swallows. “You dropped the box on the way up. I have to go get it.”
“No, Az I—”
“Stay. Here”, he growls.
Gwyn usually isn’t one to take orders, at least not anymore. But here is a seriousness in his voice, a ferocity, that she has never witnessed that makes her hesitate. “Okay. I’ll wait for you.”
“The cavern reacted to my magic. No doubt the box will too. And if not, I can at least grab it. Hopefully.”
She nods and he calls his shadows, which then surround him and take him back down to where they last saw the soul box. Azriel holds his breath and searches for it, albeit clumsily. His wings do not make swimming easy at all. In fact, the longer he’s in the water, the heavier and more unbearable they become, the tendons tugging at his muscles, straining his back until it’s in pain. But he tries not to focus on that or the burning in his lungs and instead looks for Koschei’s soul to destroy it.
After about twenty seconds, he spots it, his siphons acting as underwater flashlights. He struggles to move down to that depth. So much so that he can barely keep going. His shadows whisper for him to let them take him back to the surface but he refuses, pushing himself and pushing himself.
This can be how he proves himself finally. This can be how he earns all the good that had come into his life. He has to get this box. Fighting against his wings, his lungs, and his shadows, he floats further and further down, his ears popping uncomfortably.
Sixty seconds and he already needs air.
Scrambling for it, his fingers barely brush the box. In his sudden panic to breathe, he rips off the siphons on his hands and blasts the box with his magic, stirring it, the golden latch blasting open. That’s all he sees as his body betrays him and he involuntarily breathes—breathes in an entire lungful of water, causing everything to go dark.
.
.
.
Gwyn finds herself following that pull toward Azriel. That bond that she had kept hidden from him for so long. She didn’t want him to choose her just for being his mate. She wanted him to choose her because he fell for her. However, she can’t help but be grateful for it now, when it matters, when he’s in trouble the way she was. Except she is much more agile in the water than him as long as there are no traps.
She sees the glowing soul box, black light and glittering gold dust floating around it, a bright silver orb within it.
The soul.
Then she sees Azriel’s body on the lake floor and it takes everything inside of her not to cry. Speeding down, she quickly grabs the box and closes it—to hell if their struggles had been for nothing—before gripping Azriel tightly under the armpits, careful of his wings which she positioned herself between, as she uses all the strength and magical speed in her tail to rush them to the surface once more, then to the shore.
She tosses the box behind a boulder and claws her way up the shore, dragging Azriel by his shirt with one hand. Thank gods nymphs are stronger than High Fae.
Gwyn prays to the Mother that they survive this and can have the life they both need—both deserve after all the horrors they have lived through, both apart and together. Gwyn thinks back to the time she rescued Azriel from evil lightsingers in the lake near the library. Back when she only knew him as her Sangravah Savior.
Using the same water magic she had used back then, she focuses intensely and hovers her hands over his body, slowly and safely guiding the water out of his lungs and out his mouth as her slightly webbed fingers glow golden.
Azriel’s shadows twine around her in encouragement in thanks, as they had back then. Only, Azriel never knew that it was her who saved her previously. This time he will because she isn’t leaving his side.
He coughs roughly and rolls to the side a bit, his shaggy black hair clinging to his forehead as he vomits up more water. Once he is breathing again, he lies back, realizing Gwyn is looking down at him as he tosses he a weak smile.
“I suppose we’re even.”
Gwyn smiles and nods, rubbing his chest soothingly, unable to help herself. She’s so grateful that he’s alright and her adrenaline is pumping wildly.
Azriel lifts a hand to cup her cheek, stroking over the tiny blue-green scales that adorn her cheekbone. “You’re so beautiful”, he says breathlessly.
“You’re so handsome”, she replies leaning into his touch, both for herself and the bond.
That’s when he feels it. The tugging in his chest-- more insistent, tighter, tauter. The tug that beckons and makes him desperate to hold her closer.
His lips part and he gapes at her, his hazel eyes lighting up with swirls of enlightenment.
“M-Mate”, he murmurs. “Gwyn—y-you’re my mate.”
Gwyn lowers her lips to his and kisses him softly, trailing her thumb over his jaw. “I know”, she whispers. “I’ve known for a long while.”
He pulls back and furrows his brow. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well...because I wasn’t sure if it was right. Usually, the males feel it first and I didn’t know if it was simply because of my trauma that you were the only male I felt feelings for. And then because I didn’t want you to want me just because of a bond. I wanted you to want me for me.”
He groans and rubs his face. “I’m a fucking idiot. But right now, we have people to save, hm?”
Gwyn nods. “The box is behind that boulder. Blast him dead, soldier”, she smiles, flapping her tail lightly. “I’ll be stuck here until I dry off.”
Azriel pecks her cheek and pops up, grabbing the box from behind the rock, shadows going crazy around his hands and the box, even as the gleaming silver soul lays within it.
“Never again”, Azriel growls, placing it on the ground. His wings flutter so he can dry them out.
Streaks of potent blue power streak from his hands like lighting, matching the pattern of his scars as they whip out towards the box, connecting with the silver sphere inside and making it bigger and bigger, his magic current stretching it beyond measure. Koschei lets out an ear-splitting roar as he tosses about in the water, his screams causing the rest of the fighting to pause to look.
His soul explodes into billions of silver shards which float away into the breeze, and his body melts, turning into lake water.
The lake slowly ceases to rage, and the Queens let out horrified shouts, their only large foothold dead and gone.
Now, now they can finally take back their land and this war.
Azriel looks back at Gwyn who morphs back into her High Fae form, Valkyrie uniform and all as she stands up, albeit slightly shakily at first, and puts her necklace back on.
“Let’s finish this”, she says firmly, determined, unsheathing her sword. She holds her head high, looking over towards the girls who stand victorious in their own right, many of Beron’s army laying slain under their feet.
Azriel looks towards the Illyrians, Rhys and Cassian glancing down at him and Gwyn for a moment, pride and shock written all over their faces before they continue to face off with the Queen’s magically spelled human army.
Gwyn looks around and locates two flaring heads of red hair near her Valkyrie legion, both glancing toward her with broad grins. Her father and uncle.
Eris and Lucien. Her blood family. And they’re proud of her. A pang of happiness clangs through her as she looks back at her mate.
“Together”, Azriel says, holding his hand out.
“Together”, Gwyn affirms, grasping his hand before he scoops her up and flies her back over to the Valkyries, pressing a kiss against her mouth before he leaves her, flying back over to join his brothers.