TKaK32

## Chapter 32

**Chapter 33** of **To Kill a Kingdom** is a dream sequence where **Lira** sees everything going wrong.

## **About**

### **Location**

* **The Saad**
* **Pagos**

### **Characters**

* **Lira**
* **Elian Midas**

## **Full Version**

THAT NIGHT I DREAM of death.

Seas run red with blood, and human bodies drift along the foam of my fallen kin. When the waves finally ladder high enough to stroke the night, they collapse and the bodies mangle against the seabed.

The sand bursts beneath them, scattering my kingdom in golden flakes. Amid it all, my mother’s trident liquefies. I call out to her, but I’m not part of this great ocean anymore, and so she doesn’t hear me. She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t know that I’m watching her downfall.

She lets the trident wither and melt.

Elian stands beside her, and the newly sunlit water parts for him. He has eyes like vast pools and a jaw made from shipwrecks and broken coral. Every movement he makes is as quick and fluid as a tidal wave. He belongs to the ocean. He is made from it, as much as I am.

Kindred.

Elian stares at the seabed. I want to ask him why he’s so fascinated by sand, when there is an entire world in this ocean that he can’t begin to imagine. Why isn’t he seeing it? Why doesn’t he care enough to look? I’ve seen the world through his eyes; can’t he see it through mine?

The urge to scream rips through me, but I can only remember the words in *Psáriin* and I don’t dare speak the language to him.

I watch him turn toward the sand, his face as plainly broken as my mother’s.

It’s only when I’m certain I might lose my mind from the anguish that I suddenly remember his language. I sift quickly through the Midasan and find the words to tell him. I want to explain how full of magic and possibility my world could be if not for my mother’s rule. I want to comfort him with the chance for peace, no matter how small. Tell him things could be different if I were queen. That I wasn’t born a murderer. But I find the words too late. By the time they become clear in my mind, I see the truth of what Elian sees.

He is not staring at the sand at all, but at the hearts that rupture from it.

*Don’t look*. *Don’t look*.

“Did you do it?” Elian’s eyes find mine. “Did you do it?” he asks again in *Psáriin*.

The razors of my language are enough to cut through his tongue, and I wince as blood slips from his mouth.

“I took many hearts,” I confess. “His was last.”

Elian shakes his head, and the laugh that escapes his lips is a perfect echo of my mother’s. “No,” he tells me. “It wasn’t.”

He stretches his hands out and I stumble backward in horror. I’m no longer in control when my legs buckle and throw me to the floor. I look at the heart in Elian’s hands, blood gathering between his fingertips. Not just any heart. His own.

“Is this what you were after?” he screams.

He takes a step forward and I shake my head, warning him not to come closer.

“Lira,” Elian whispers. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

I wake up gasping for air.

My hands clutch the thin white bedsheet, and my hair slavers over my bare shoulders. The ship rocks slowly to the side, but the motion that I used to find comforting makes me more nauseated by the second. My heart ticks madly against my chest, shaking more than beating.

When I unclench my fists from the bedsheet, there are scratch marks on my palm. Angry red streaks across the lines of my hand. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to catch my breath.

The image of Elian’s heart plays on an unsteady loop. The betrayal in his eyes. The punishing sound of my mother’s laughter.

I spent my life hiding from the possibility of being different than what my mother told me I must be. Swallowing the child with a desire to become something else. I was a siren and so I was a killer. It was never wrong or right; it just was. But now my memories are cruel dreams, twisting into merciless visions and accusing me of a past I can’t deny.

The truth of what I am has become a nightmare.