Burned Read Free Page B

was a discordant melody with no fire.
    Again, he wandered. Edgy. Alone. Seeking something he couldn’t name.
    On a tiny world in a tiny corner of a tiny and utterly unimpressive universe he wasn’t even certain why he’d visited, he found her. Unpredictable, high-tempered, happy on her own, and nearly untamable, she was a challenge to seduce. It hadn’t helped that he was broody, arrogant, selfish, and a god.
    She didn’t want a soul mate, she told him. And she certainly didn’t want one with wings and an attitude problem.
    Yet she’d not run. She stood her ground and watched him circle around her looking for a way into her heart. They fought, tested each other, challenged and demanded.
    She knew what she wanted: the best.
    He knew what he was: the best.
    They enhanced each other’s finest qualities, as true love will. He opened her provincial mind to galaxies of opportunity. She reminded him what it was to feel wonder and brought freshness to creations gone dull and stagnant. Together they spun universes more beautiful and imaginative than anything he’d created before.
    Yet his happiness was tainted by something he’d never felt. Heloved. He could lose. Human, she possessed a mere fifty more years at best, and with the passage of time would wither and die.
    Unable to bear her mortality, the king constructed an opulent cage beyond time where death could never touch her.
    Wild at heart, she’d despised his cage, but loved him more and agreed to dwell within it until that day came she could no longer bear it. They met in a shared boudoir of shadows and light and their love knew no bounds.
    Still the king could not rest. He knew his woman’s high temper, her need for freedom, and wanted her to have no limits. He sought the Seelie Queen’s aid, but jealously she refused to use her magic to make his lover immortal.
    On that day, he vowed to re-create the Song of Making himself, if it took him half of forever and cost him all that he held dear.
    Vows, like wishes, are dangerous things.
    Precision matters.
    In time, the king came to understand part of the song’s essence, glimpsed the fundamental building blocks. The fragments he melded into the partial song that birthed his dark, imperfect Unseelie were composed of exacting frequencies that interlocked seamlessly and made of their parts a far richer melody than their individual notes, chords, and vibrations.
    Eons passed while he worked, until the day came he rushed to his lover’s chamber with the results of his latest experiment, so certain of his success that he’d brought a vial of the new elixir to her himself—only to find her dead by her own hand.
    Or so a treacherous enemy had made him believe.
    They are replaceable, one and all , the Fear Dorcha, dark traveling companion through the king’s subsequent madness, had insisted. You will forget her .
    But he never had.
    Grief will pass , lisped the Crimson Hag, one of his more exquisitely terrible creations.
    But it never did.
    Even the grotesque Sweeper, who fancied himself a god, collector of broken, powerful things with which he liked to tinker, had lumbered beside him for a time, offering solace or perhaps merely studying him to see if he, too, could be collected, fixed.
    He, who had once been whole, was halved, without hope of ever being complete again. And when you’ve known that kind of love, to endure the creeping passage of time without it is to live a half-life where nothing ever feels real.
    He fabricated their reunion in countless illusions, slipping in and out of insanity, talking to her as if she were beside him, answering.
    He’d lived lie after lie to escape the unbearable truth: she’d left him by choice, killed herself to escape him.
    She’d left him a poisoned barb of a note that to this day infected him still: You have become a monster. There is nothing left of the man I love .
    He carried it still, a small scroll tied with a lock of her hair. Despite Cruce’s confession, he would