There was no reason to keep it a secret, really, other than he felt somehow responsible for all his siblings born to their demonic mothers.
As if he could have stopped it had he been a better killer for his mother and her sisters. A better dragon.
Xyn had shared in that. She’d been born only a year after him. Together, they had tried to placate their mothers’ wraths.
And failed miserably.
The gods made vicious enemies, and the two of them had been bonded by their efforts to rectify the hatred. Bonded by their scars.
“Falcyn?”
“Yes. I was first.”
Medea swallowed at those whispered words. Her poor dragon. She couldn’t imagine the nightmare he’d been through. Her own was staggering enough. And here in this one moment, she felt closer to him than she’d ever felt to another.
“We are the guinea pigs,” she said with a sigh. “And as such, we’re always fried from the experimentation.”
He laughed bitterly. “True.”
With a ragged sigh, she glanced about the forest. “Where do you think the others are?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing. I’ve never been without my powers in this manner. It’s … irritating. And it’s not something I’m used to.”
She agreed. “We are such similar creatures, you and I.”
“For a Daimon and a dragon, you mean.”
“Both spawned by evil, to do evil. Like the Malachai.”
Falcyn considered that as they walked. The Malachai was one of the most evil demons out there. The king of them all, as it were. Luckily, there was only one of them left alive. The rest had been slaughtered long ago.
“Have you ever met the Malachai?”
Medea nodded. “The current Malachai served my father for a time. Killed my aunt. Have you met him?”
He passed a guarded stare toward her before he answered in an insidious tone. “I’ve met all of them.”
Her jaw went slack at that knowledge. The current Malachai—Nick Gautier—was merely the latest in a line of thousands of them.
And each one lived for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.
For Falcyn to have met them all would make him older than her grandfather Apollo.
Make him older than she could truly conceive.
Crap on a shingle … literally.
“Exactly when were you born?”
He gave her an evil, cocky grin. “Let me put it this way, I fought in the Primus Bellum.”
The first war of the gods …
Her jaw dropping, Medea froze as that knowledge staggered her most of all. And with it came another startling realization as she recalled something Urian had told her about Falcyn’s dragonstone and why it was so special.
“Your stone isn’t like the others, is it?”
He didn’t answer.
And by that silence, he told her everything. If he were that old and the son of two gods—even one who was cursed—his stone would have to be older than the others, too. More powerful.
Urian’s voice whispered through her mind. “Can even bring the dead back to life.”
That power was reserved for very few, and out of the few able to do it …
“Holy shit,” she breathed as all the pieces came together in a blinding realization. “You’re the ancient war god Veles.” That was why he could shapeshift when the others couldn’t. He wasn’t just a dragon.
As he’d said, he was a god.
“And that’s not a dragonstone you carry, at all … It’s the effing dragonsworn. The world egg!”
The birthstone of the original gods.
Staring up at him, she saw the truth that he didn’t bother to deny. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Falcyn started to tell her she was insane. Since the dawn of time, he’d carried that secret. Told no one the truth about himself or his stone.
No one.
He had no reason whatsoever to trust her. And every reason to remain silent.
And yet when he looked at her, he lost himself to the darkness of those eyes. The softness of her lips. Before he could think better of it, he nodded.
Because he was the first, and because Noir was his father, he held more powers than any of his siblings. And it was because of his father and his mother’s wrath that he’d been deemed and worshiped as the very first war god of the world.
“But how can it be?”
He shrugged at the simple, complicated truth of what he was. “When Chaos and Order spun together for the first time and joined to make life out of nothing, the egg came from the friction of their union. From that initial explosion, the north wind carried that first egg and set it down upon the earth to keep it from shattering. Out of the darkness sprang light that cracked it in two, and Shyamala emerged into existence first, followed by her other six siblings—though they often lie and mislead about who was born first and in what order. Never understood why, but apparently it’s an issue between them. The order, however and regardless of what they claim, is simple. Braith. Cam. Rezar. Verlyn. Lilith. Kadar. Three born of order. Three of chaos. Three of light. Three of dark. When Lilith was born, they say she slipped or was possibly pushed, and was damaged in the fall, thus causing her powers to mix back together. She was neutral in the beginning. Willful. Insatiably curious, and in an effort to repair herself, she took the pieces of the egg and fused them back together with their conjoined DNA. But she never told the others what she’d done. It was her secret.”
“Then how did you get it?”
“I was born from it, too, after Shyamala, or Azura as she’s now known, forbid me to be born from my mother’s womb. She made it so that my mother would never be capable of a live birth—that we’d be born dead. Contrary as always and determined that Azura wouldn’t get the best of her, my mother cut me from her womb and decided that I and my siblings would be egg-born creatures who could be hidden from Azura’s wrath. That way, even if Azura or one of the other gods killed the lilit mothers my mother had created from her own blood for the bitch to get in on her good graces, the cursed egg-born babies would survive without their mothers.”
Medea frowned as she tried to understand Lilith’s reasoning. “Why did your mother create the others, knowing the gods would try to kill them too?”
Raking his hand through his hair, he sighed. “The lilit were her decoys to distract Azura and the others from me and my sister. But my mother lost her sanity in the process and with it became the very demon they’d dubbed her. We were quickly forgotten as her children and became tools to be used in her war against them all.”
“And your father?”
“Is a worthless bastard who makes yours appear loving in comparison. All he ever wanted me for was vengeance against the other gods. I never meant anything to him, other than to be used as a tool. If there’s anything or anyone Noir values, I don’t know it. I doubt if he even cares for Azura. I don’t think he’s capable of caring about anything.”
“Well, from what I hear, world domination.”
Falcyn snorted. “Yeah. That would be it. The gods know, it was never his children or sister-wife.”
That made sense. Medea was silent for a while as they made their way through the forest. Her head reeled with this new information about Falcyn and his family. There was so much she’d have never guessed at, and it made her wonder something else.
“Why did you change your name from Veles to Falcyn?”
He shrugged. “I grew bored with pantheon politics. Was never much of a team player anyway.”
“Yeah, I remember hearing those stories about Veles.”
A playful light sparked in his eyes. “Probably all true. Especially the gory parts.”
“And you’re avoiding my question again. Why the name change?”
The light went out in his eyes and pain replaced the spark. “After the destruction of my last temple, I went to live in seclusion. It was my sister who renamed me Falcyn for the reaping-hook-shaped claws I have and because it was always my weapon of choice in battle whenever I fought as a human. Once she was gone, I kept the name to remind me of her as if it was all I had left of Xyn.”