Chapter 156: Vow

I swallowed nervously and nodded to my sister. For a brief moment, the absurdity of the situation popped into my mind: a paladin of Dhias marrying together an angel and a demon. It was like something out of a bad fantasy story.

Only it was real—and I was the demon.

Kartania opened, reciting a speech I recalled only fragments of from half-forgotten childhood memories. Seyari and I faced each other, and I had work hard to ignore the seething fury from the Church forces nearby, and the anxious tension from King Carvalon’s representative.

I’d make my words quick, then. But… I couldn’t let this occasion simply be a necessity of law.

Thankfully, Seyari went first.

“Zarenna,” she opened, her voice soft in a way I’d rarely heard. “There is much I could say about you, from your kindness to your stalwart belief in the capacity of others, from your wonderfully terrible sense of humor to the depths of your compassion. But I’ll focus on one singular thing: your love.

“Having heard all that I am, and all that I was, you accepted me. You trusted—implicitly—and forgave me in a way no one else ever dared to. You made—make—me feel like I truly have a future, and that I do not have to suffer under the burden of my past.

“And yet, for so long, I failed to reciprocate that trust. For that, I can never apologize enough. But here and now you have my everything, Renna. Once bound by my own chains of apathy, I am now, with you, freer than ever.

“I will be yours forever, Zarenna Miller.” Seyari smiled up at me, the expression reaching to her eyes and beyond. She’s beautiful.

I struggled through my tears, thankful for once that my indifferent body allowed me to push past the lump in my throat and speak. “As I will be yours, Seyari.” I took a deep breath and looked down at Seyari. Her golden eyes shone brightly despite the tears trailing from their corners, and her silver hair had blown wild and unkempt from the battle. I reached down and wiped away those tears, ignoring my own. “I see in you a woman who has discovered again the joys of life. Whatever role I play in this, I am not alone.

“And I do not wish to be alone. You’re brilliant, you mingle empathy with pragmatism, and you always speak your mind. Even if you’re too stoic to voice your own worries directly sometimes.

“I never doubted that you would trust me in time as I trusted you. Not from that night I saw you hanging outside my window. You rescued a stranger whom you had every right to believe would abuse you, after a lifetime of abuse. But even if you didn’t think you trusted me, you did. You had to.

“You helped me to trust myself, and to accept myself—all of myself. Thank you, Sey. I love you, from the bottom of my heart.”

Without needing Kartania’s prompting, I leaned forward and down. Seyari surprised me by jumping up, and I caught her with my lower arms even as she pulled my head down to meet hers. Our lips met, then locked, then tingled as our opposing magics clashed. The heat warded away the cold, and I felt Sey’s heartbeat, strong and fast, as her chest pressed against mine. Briefly, I forgot where we were, and she had to remind my wandering hands with a kick to my shin. Eyes closed, we kept up the embrace—and our kiss. Deep and warm, my tongue shifted between dominating hers and relaxing to become Sey’s plaything.

When we finally parted, with a string of saliva and a rush of warm air puffing condensation against the afternoon cold, Sey’s face had flushed a deep red; my own was surely the same. And not just because I was red.

We turned as one to look at Kartania, Sey’s good hand held in mine. My sister wore a big smile, but she looked a little green, and I blushed harder. Sorry, Sis, you didn’t need to see that.

Tania cleared her throat and offered our promises to each other. “Do you, Zarenna Miller, promise to remain by Seyari’s side, through all the tribulations of the world, as one half of the whole of your unity, until the end of your days?”

“Yes, I do,” I spoke the words with my full conviction, staring straight into Seyari’s eyes, and I felt something stirring in my chest. My magic, my power as a Sovereign Demon.

I stumbled a little, hit with a sudden urge to invoke my Name. But I knew Seyari didn’t want a contract with me. To our side, Kartania held her breath, and I felt the stump of Seyari’s bad arm acutely in my hand.

To my surprise, Seyari’s smile never faltered. “I know,” she said softly. “This is not the same as a contract. We are equals, and I trust you, Renna.” She waved her good hand, and a wall of wind roared to life around us, obscuring sight and sound from those outside.

From beyond the wind, I could only vaguely see my sister’s outline. I gulped, then leaned forward to whisper, but found I could only speak in a strong voice as if something guided my words. “Then I, Zerix’Arranthariel, promise to remain by Seyari—”

“Yothariel,” Seyari corrected. “It may no longer be my name, but the word has power.”

I shook my head. “No. Not anymore,” I continued, suddenly sure of myself. “I, Zerix’Arranthariel, promise to remain by Seyari’s side as her equal, through all the tribulations of the world, as one half of the whole of our unity, until the end of our days.”

Around us, into the wind, ropes of crimson fire and flashes of a familiar green snaked through the air. A weight of mana, gathered from us and the air, settled between us like static before a lightning strike.

Seyari hiccupped, and her spell wavered. Her tears started to flow now in earnest, and I pulled her closer. When she spoke, her words carried a soft sort of power. A confidence born of pain and hope. “I, Seyari—” The name poured out of her with an invisible weight to it, her voice tinged with that echoing, ethereal quality she tried so often to mask. “—promise to remain by Zerix’Arranthariel’s side as her equal, through all the tribulations of the world, as one half of the whole of our unity, until the end of our days.”

Together, we leaned forward and met in another kiss. The moment our lips touched, the magic in the air that had grown around us into a whirling vortex folded inward. Like a rush of hot air on a cold day, like the heart-soaring joy of meeting a long-lost loved one, our promise made itself manifest.

This was no contract, but a bond between equals. A promise beyond all else, uncompromising in its sincerity. The searing light of Seyari’s holy magic softened to an inviting glow, and her wind carried my fire, stoking it into the sky, to a great pillar of burning crimson. A sign to the world of a promise unseen in millennia. Truthfully, I had no idea the significance of what we’d done—but I could feel it in my bones, in the instincts instilled in me as a demon. And I found that I didn’t care.

All I cared about in this moment was Seyari.

Our lips parted, the kiss unusually chaste, and I dared to open my eyes. All around us, a pyre burned, kaleidoscopic, swirling familiar colors into something new. Crimson and green and pale, whiteish gold. As the magic entered me, the warmth began to almost burn.

I couldn’t see the ground, and I realized we were spinning, holding each other close. In front of me, Seyari opened her eyes which shot wide, glowing bright with her internal light. Her lips moved in a whisper, but the magic whirling around us, and into us, carried her words away.

But I didn’t need to hear them, or to read lips, to know what she’d said.

“I love you too,” I whispered into the wind.

I wondered if our smiles would stick, when Seyari shook, then seized. Panic gripped my heart until, not a moment later, Seyari shook her head and I felt her bad arm moving. Not the limb itself, but the end of the stump.

I let the limb go, and the wind whipped us nearly apart, my tail barely able to keep us close. Now side by side, I watched as Seyari’s hand regrew before my eyes. Visceral would be the best word to describe the process, like demonic regeneration.

Bone spikes burst from her stump, droplets of blood immediately wicking away into the vortex. The spikes grew, and muscle and sinew, blood vessels and flesh knit themselves over the bones. At the tips of each finger, the nails that grew were gold, like her eyes. And they were sharp.

Not quite the claws that I had, but… different.

In shock, Seyari flexed the hand, and I followed her arm up to her face. She hadn’t stopped smiling, and relief washed over me. That relief was short-lived however, as the dull burning in my core suddenly exploded into white hot agony.

The scream that tore from my throat didn’t even make it past my lips before the winds tore it away. My mana roiled and burned inside me, but the sensation began to dull from the familiar agony of holy magic to a comforting warmth. A specific, glowing heat I’d felt only once, years ago, from the hands of a kindly priest.

And then it too was gone, dissipating out into the vortex even as my mana shifted. Something had changed, but we weren’t done yet. Both Seyari and I could feel as much.

The magic around us was massive, dangerous, and all we could do was ride along like two twigs caught in a flash flood. Seyari’s grip on my arm tensed, hard enough that it was uncomfortable. She turned, aided by my tail, and took my other hand.

Now with a good look at her face, I could see tension, and pain. A thin sheen of sweat, constantly wicked away by the wind that whipped our hair around us, coated her face. Our eyes met, gold into blue, and for a moment the power of our promise seemed to pause.

As if in thought.

As if trying to do the impossible.

As if to grant wings again to an angel who’d lost them long ago.

Then, in an instant, in the time it took me to blink, the tower of magic around us twisted itself into twin tendrils of power and rammed into Seyari’s lower back. She screamed, and this time was heard. Her sharp nails dug furrows into my skin, but I held her.

Tail and four arms, I held her as my wife seized. I held her as we fell toward the ground and my wings tried desperately to flare to life only for the wild magic of our promise to rip them away. For a moment, we shared the most beautiful view.

The mountains around us glittered in the late afternoon light, the ancient peaks uncaring for the whims of mortals, demons, and angels alike. Defiant of even the gods in their quest to scratch at the firmament with glaciated stone.

Below us, lights twinkled around a small town and its surrounding farms. A dark castle overlooked the land, cast in encroaching shadow. We were higher than I’d ever flown, but we were falling, and the view around us started to spin.

I tried to right us, to get on the bottom to land first, but Seyari had a death grip on two of my arms, and my body, flush with power, seemed to lock up against the unfamiliar sensations. So I did the only thing I could: I held onto Seyari with all my might and heart, and against all damn reason I prayed to Dhias my wings would work or we’d survive the landing.

Under Seyari’s skin, I could feel the muscles in her back roiling. Under twin scars, tension gathered and bones snapped.

I barely moved my hands away in time.

From Seyari’s back, twin crimson-feathered wings exploded. Seyari’s head threw back into another scream, and blood trailed droplets from the tips of her feathers and into the sky: crimson against the pale. In my arms, my wife slumped, and her eyes fluttered.

We spun again, and her wings cast us in shade. As they stretched out, feathers ruffling in the wind, I realized that each wing was almost twice her height in length—three meters or more.

With a shudder, Seyari tensed again, hands flexing and wings twitching. Gusts of wind battered us as she opened her eyes. Exhaling a shuddering breath, she surprised me by pulling me in for a kiss.

For a third time, we locked lips, this time while tumbling to earth. Feathers brushed by me, soft and warm, and the wind around us slowed. The rushing noise faded into a silence that left even my ears ringing for a moment.

Seyari flapped, and we righted, beginning to glide. I let her hold me, surprised by the power of her wings. With a glance my way and a smile that showed her pearly-white teeth and longer canines than I remembered, she dipped, and we fell into a dive.

Panicking, I gripped onto her even tighter and Sey grunted before the sound turned into a laugh.

“Ready?” she asked, her voice’s echo prominent against the rushing air.

“For what?” I shouted back.

“Our vows!” Seyari replied, glancing below us.

I followed her gaze. Down below, the same standoff we’d left had gathered into a crowd, each of them watching the sky. From her glinting armor, I picked my sister out even as we dove toward her. I wished I could have seen the look on her face.

“Go after me!” Sey shouted again.

We swooped down, and Sey drew in a breath. Moving fast enough to blow away the snow mere meters under us, we whipped over the shocked heads of everyone below. My sharp eyes caught a smile forming on Kartania’s face, and I knew what Sey had in mind. Quickly I took a deep breath.

“I DO!” my wife shouted at the top of her lungs, banking the turn close enough that Kartania stumbled and others bowled over into the dirt. Her echoing voice was carried by wind magic, and I hoped I could do the same.

“I DO!” I shouted, feeling my magic move. Burning wind carried my words, bathing Kartania in sparks that fizzled into nothing.

The moment we were past, Seyari banked again and brought us up with a single flap, infused with magic. I felt a pleasant warmth, and saw thin trails of crimson fire flowing from the tips of her primary feathers.

Did our magic combine?

Now wasn’t the time to think about that, though. Now was the time to celebrate. We were married!

“Can you fly?” Sey shouted, vibrant and playful. “You promised to go flying with me, Renna! It’s not fair if I’m doing all the work!”

I choked up at her voice. I’d never heard Sey so happy. Not with the undercurrent of carefree sincerity she now had.

“Renna!” she shouted, feigning annoyance.

“I don’t know!” I reached for my magic, and found it ready and waiting. Still roiling, from excitement, our vow, or both, I didn’t know. But I knew one thing: “Yeah! I can!”

“Marvelous!” with a melodic laugh, my wife let me go.

Immediately, familiar wings of crimson fire flared to life behind me. After a stomach-lurching moment of freefall, my wings caught, and I pushed upward toward Seyari. Already, she was a crimson-winged splotch above me, brilliant against the sky. She banked toward a nearby mountain, then tucked her wings and picked up speed away.

Fast as I could, I rocketed up after her, giving chase.