Lydia the Siren's Arc

Chapter 19 of 37

Morning light spread across the cabin floor. Lydia had not slept. She sat on the bed with the clear vial pressed to her chest, right where she had held it all night. The painted stars on the ceiling had faded with the dawn. Bastion stood by the table, his notes still spread out, waiting for her word. She uncurled her fingers and looked at the glass. Inside it sat the wings that carried her from the arrows. The scream that dropped a knight where he stood. The hunger that made her hunt. The cave that had called her first, so long ago she could not remember choosing. All of it. She thought of the beast as a thing apart from her. It was not. It was her. Losing it meant losing the part of herself that had crossed a kingdom. "You are quiet," Bastion said. He did not push. "I keep thinking it will feel like cutting off my arm," she said. "It might." He crossed the room and knelt in front of her. "But an arm can't get you killed." She looked at his face, at the eyes that had studied her wings without fear, and she understood that he was not asking her to become nothing. He was asking her to stay alive. Outside, far down the road, she heard nothing. But she knew Gregorio was walking. She knew what he did to beasts. She had felt his sword at her throat. She had felt his arrows in her back. He would find her the way he found every monster in the kingdom. And when he did, the wings would not save her. She choose herself. She had spent a year hunting the wrong man's love. Bastion had given her his bed and asked for nothing. The choice was not really between woman and beast. It was between living and dead. Lydia pulled the stopper. The small sound seemed loud in the quiet room. "You do not have to," Bastion said. "I know." She raised the vial. "That is why I am." She drank it. The liquid was cool and tasted of nothing. For a moment she felt only her own heartbeat. Then something turned over deep inside her, like a fire going out. The pull of the cave, the itch under her skin that had never once left her, the hum that answered her hunger. Gone. She reached for the beast the way she always could and found empty space. She gasped and pressed a hand to her mouth. "Lydia?" Bastion caught her shoulders. "It is quiet," she whispered. "For the first time, it is quiet." She looked up at him, human..