He awoke with a quiet start, body slumped against the entrance to the Goddess's temple and the uneasy sense that he was not alone. Yet when he looked around him the grove was quiet and clear, not even a rustle of leaves broke the dark silence. A windless, airless, nothing that had always cemented this place as not quite of the mortal realm.

It had felt as though he'd closed his eyes for a only a few moments but above him the sky was black and the moon a beacon for the night that had fallen upon Leoth as he slept.

Under its cool glow the night air tinged with its familiar sweetness. The sweetness of home, the sweetness that called to his flesh and blood and bone. He hated leaving Leoth but the contentment that filled his body on his return was always the reward. The sweet moon-infused air bled into his lungs and he soaked it in for a few stolen moments. That contentment. For it was soon chased away by a bleak hopelessness. For it had failed, then. His plan. His attempt to awaken this thing - this gift - that had lain dormant inside him. It slept still.

The moment the thought solidified in his mind, he felt it. A prickling across his neck. The distinct presence of something...other he'd felt upon waking growing stronger.

A sound behind him had him on his feet in an instant, sword unsheathed and ready. He turned to face the inside of the temple. The moon's glow lit the Goddess's sculpture in a spill of pale blue but everything else was dark, silent.

He lowered the hand that held his steel blade and turned slowly, back to face the clearing. His breath caught like fire in his throat, his heart turning to stone in his chest as he drank in the female figure standing there. She stood in the centre of the grove, still, hair blowing gently around her though he no wind blew through the clearing. She wore the dress he had given to Fara the day Paeris had come for him, and it fit her as it should have. Skimming the gentle curves and long limbs. She was as beautiful as he remembered. She was exactly as he remembered.

From somewhere he found his voice. Though at that moment it sounded nothing like his own. It sounded small as a child's.

"Mother?"

She smiled, soft and close-lipped, sadness moving into her eyes as she gazed up at him where he still stood atop the temple steps.

"Inasa," she whispered. His heart shuddered with the name. He had buried it. Forgotten it in the grief of his mind. Little love. Had she really called him that once? Before she'd called him darkness and destruction had it been Inasa. His head felt light as he stood there. "Come to me," she said softly.

His hands and legs shook as he staggered towards her, down the steps and onto the grass. His blood pounded between his ears, in his chest, and through his veins. A roar. Like the midst of battle.

He took a step closer, then another, terrified yet unable to stop his feet from moving. That roar grew stronger the closer he got to the presence of his mother, to Ishilde of the Twelve, blood rushing wildy inside him. It felt like power. Quiet and ancient. It moved towards him as he moved toward it, wrapping itself around him, enveloping him. Then it pulled him to his knees.

Tears swam in his vision as he stared down at the grass, unable to lift his head to look up at her. When she reached out and tipped his head up, her touch was cold. But then he remembered she had always been so. He blinked open his eyes to look at her and he felt the tears burning in them, making his vision gauzy and unfocussed.

She looked at him with love. Not fear and hate. Gods, how had he forgotten she'd once looked at him like that? How had he forgotten that it had not always been as it had been those last moons before her death. There had been a time when she had held him and sang to him; when she had kissed away the grazes on his knees, and wiped the tears from his eyes. There had been a time when she had loved him. When she had called him Inasa.

It tore his heart in two to remember it now. He felt that love return to him now, warm and tender, protective and strong. A mother's love. It bled into his mind and forced out all of the doubt and pain and grief he had long carried with him. What settled upon him was a feeling of such peace that it stole his breath and thought from him. Tears tracked down his cheeks as he sobbed openly. He clutched at her skirts and buried his head in them, her hand settling on his head and stroking him there.

He never wanted to leave this moment, wanted to stay here in it forever where there would be no war, no death, no loss, no vengeance. Only this. Always. A child wrapped in its mother's love.

"My child, my brave strong child, do not cry," she said, her voice fragile as the stars. "You must be strong now. As you have always been strong. For your greatest trials are still ahead."

"I cannot..." he managed through the sobs that still wracked him. "...I am not the successor...I cannot be." He knew how weak he sounded and was as she tended his hair, soft cooing and gentle strokes as she had done when he was a child. Her scent too was as he remembered it. The scent of Sweetberry and ripe Polonia. He clung to her harder. He knew it was not her, could not be, but it did not subdue the want in him. The necessity of clinging to her then. As important as breathing.

"You were chosen, Inasa. This is your path," she sounded proud of him. Not afraid of him as she always was near to the end. "You must only accept it."

His tears subsided and he gently unfurled himself from her arms and gazed at her.

"I have...accepted. In my mind and in my soul I have accepted." He shook his head, despairing. "But I am unchanged." Help me.

"You have not, my child," she said.

He felt a flare of impatience rise up in him then. "Then tell me how! For moons I have wrestled with this. Sought the change within myself, willed it with everything I possess, opened my mind and heart to what I must become but I have found nothing. If I am to lead this realm into war or peace then you must tell me how I am to do it."

She blinked, slow and soft. Said again, "Then you have not accepted it."

This was useless. Why send this spectre of his mother here to lead him when she knew as much as he. Nothing. When she spoke in riddles and ill-defined statements. Those he could manage on his own.

His brain felt sharper suddenly, less overcome and clouded. He sat back and stared at the figure before him. "What are you?" He studied her. "For you are not really here. Before me. Do I see a ghost or something else? Perhaps you are not here to aid me at all."

She smiled, sadness touched the sides of her mouth. She said: "Did not you ask the Goddess for aid? I am here because you were heard."

Theodan blinked. "The Goddess sent you to me?"

"Who else?" She reached out to brush a strand of his hair from his face, touch reverent almost. He closed his eyes to it, trying to reject the warmth it filled him with for it was not real, could not be. The yielding once more of his thoughts. He shook himself out of it. He had to focus. On the reason he had come here. On what he needed to do now. He straightened up once more and looked down at the figure of his mother.

"You said that my greatest trials are ahead of me. Shall I win this war? If I take my men to Calate, take the war to their king, will I be victorious?" He knew not what this being sat before him was, but if the Goddess had sent her, then perhaps that meant she knew what would come to pass.

She smiled, sad. "You do not wish to wage war on the realm of the female you long for..."

At the words, longing unfurled within him, tightening his chest and stealing his breath. The rage followed, that dark impenetrable rage that filled him whenever he thought of Valdr of Calate. His mind was a torment of indecision and uncertainty. Of rage and longing.

"I made a promise..." he managed. "That I would do all in my power to avoid this war." He choked on these last words. "But by the Gods, I want to destroy him. I want to tear him apart and feast upon the darkness within."

"Then what stops you?"

He blinked at her, uncertain words on the tip of his tongue.

"You are afraid," she said, knowingly.

Theodan growled. "I am afraid of no human, king or otherwise."

"You are afraid of how she may look at you if you become this thing. Afraid that she may never look upon you the same again if you bring war to her realm." Her voice was soft, patient. It was the truth of it.

"She cares for her people," Theodan said quietly. "She does not want her people to suffer in war with Leoth."

"And what of her brother, the king? Does she care for him?"

He snapped his eyes to her, claws extending at the very mention of him. "He is her tormentor. I have seen the things he has done to her, felt them, tasted them." His lip curled.

"Yet she returned to him."

"Because I gave her no choice!" he growled. "I returned her to him like a gift and I shall not forgive myself for it."

"And she gave you none. For she told you nothing of her brother's transgressions against her."

"Why would she speak of such a thing to me?" He asked, incredulous. Fara had never offered him anything of her confidence, he had forced all truths from her tongue by brute force. Shoved others at her though they were not true, and Fara had not refuted them. He'd accused her beloved prince of being her persecutor and she had not denied it.

His mother said nothing, but there was something in her gaze he did not like. Something that snuffed out the light he had seen in her eyes before. An irrefutable darkness. It brought a strangeness to her face. Something other. Had it been there before? Had he been too overwhelmed to see it? He took a step closer, tilted his head to study the figure of his mother with new eyes.

"Say what you imply," Theodan requested, watching her carefully. Something sinister crept into her gaze then, like a snake with its prey caught in its sight.

"Only that she returned to him when it was clear she had your heart in her hands. Only that the ruler of every realm of Ethis has fallen when the Princess of Calate has turned her gaze upon it." He let her go on when the gleam in her eye became so utterly malevolent.

He stalked towards her and wrapped his hand round the narrow throat of the figure pretending to be his mother. "You are no messenger of the goddess, that much is evident to me now."

Her eyes went round with panic. "I seek only to aid you, Inasa. To show you what you cannot see, what you will not see." She brought her hand up and touched his cheek, palm flat against it. Her fingers climbed until the longest pressed against his temple and then she brought up the other to mirror the touch on the other side. White exploded inside his mind, the blast sharp and hot, and then he saw.

It was an image he had seen before, Fara standing in front of a crone-like figure who held out a delicate strip of jewelled metal to her which was inlaid with yellow stones. She whispered something that sounded like a curse. Fara moving slowly through the bright shimmering ballroom towards a painted Galyn of Azura. The flailing limbs of a dancer tumbling her into his path. her words soft and spoken beneath her tongue as he lifted her from the floor: Hear me, Goddess, hear me this night, bring me his love, let his passion burn bright. The curse took hold of the Crown Prince in his eyes first, he saw it shimmer and then fade, before it moved over his whole body.

Theodan staggered back, vision and legs unsteady. He shook his head. "No, no it was not...Fara loved him...I am certain of it." He'd seen the pain in her eyes when he had taken his sword to the prince's throat. Had felt the heartache bleed from her whenever his name was spoken. Guilt, perhaps? Something insidious spoke within him. A voice he did not recognise.

"It does not change how she came to possess such a love. A stolen love; the theft planned meticulously."

"Galyn of Azura loved her." Theodan stated. How could he not. How could anyone who looked upon Fara of Calate not come to love her. He'd heard Arielle speak of that love before Torrik, of how deeply her beloved son had loved her. How...gods, the consort. Nyssa of Therolis. the one he'd faced again on the beach, who'd held a knife to his throat as he'd lay unarmed. Had Galyn still been devoted to before going to Calate? he could still recall how she'd clawed and fought to tear Fara apart for stealing that love from her. Could it be...? "No, I do not believe it."

"You do not want to believe it. Do not want to believe that perhaps the princess of Calate has used you just as she used Galyn of Azura." He bared his teeth at her, at this female who was a demon in his mother's skin. "Just as she uses another male even now."

At this he stalked back to her. "What are you talking about? You come here to poison my thoughts against she who gives light to my soul? For what purpose? What do you want from me?"

"I have told you," she said patiently, as though speaking to a child. "I am here to aid you."

"And I no longer believe you." But he could not help the weakness that moved his tongue. "What male do you speak of? You said she uses another even now —of whom do you speak?"

That same malevolent glimmer. "A male to whom she was once betrothed. Who loves her still. He has promised her an army of ships if she abandons her brother. They plan to sail to Azura as husband and wife."

He felt the ground shake and tilt beneath him, his bones trembling violently as he fought to stay upright. His claws shot out and his teeth grew in readiness. Violence thrummed inside him, pushing and pulling at the skin, making it feel taught over his hot bones. "You lie..."

She smiled at him. It was awash with sadness. Nay, not sadness. Pity. "You could not have truly thought she loved you? That she longed for you as you longed for her?" Humiliation burned his cheeks. Had he thought it? It sounded absurd here under the moon. But he was certain there had been something tender in her eyes the day he'd told her goodbye. There had been desire too, here in this very place where this spectre stood now. "Her particular power is in how she can so easily turn males to her whim. She does it again even now. Do you know for certain that she did not plan it all with her brother?"

He flew across the grove and tackled the form of his mother to the ground, snarling close to her face as he drew his hand back, claws poised to slash across her pale throat. "Show your true form—I demand it."

This time the spectre did not pretend to look afraid, this time she watched him with a cold calculating gaze. Then her lips lifted in a faint amused smile.

"My true form is lost amongst the stars, child, I am only ever what I am desired to be. What I am needed to be."

"I do not need you at all, demon."

She clucked softly, chidingly. "Oh, but you do...for you are so lost. So frightened of your own power. Afraid to seize it and become what you must."

He brought the black tips of his claws to the underside of her jaw and pushed, black blood pearling against the white. "Why are you here?"

"Because you asked," she smiled, serpentine. How cold she had turned now, this figure who had fooled him with soft words and tender touches. "You begged for aid and I am the only one who answered. It seems you should offer me gratitude, not animosity."

"You are chaos and evil, and all of the darkness in this world," he spat.

At this she transformed, and the image of his mother peeled away to reveal Fara beneath him. Her lips were parted and her breaths quick. His first instinct was to lower his claws and bury his face in her neck. But he knew it was not her, not her writhing beneath him, not her pushing her hips up against him, not her running his hands over him.

Above him there was a sudden crack of thunder and then the heavens opened, the scent of grass and rain suffusing the air around him. She shoved her hands between them and found his member, stroking its outline atop the leather, coaxing him to semi-hardness. Longing fought against the awful wrongness. Gods how he had longed for her, every moon since he'd first set eyes on her, every moon since he'd sent her away from him.

He clung to it then, that need and desire, let it fuel him, let it consume him. His mind did not feel his own, only his body felt familiar to him and he recognised the lust that charged through it now. Unstoppable.

He was fully hard as he pushed up the skirts which were quickly becoming soaked. Fingers pulled at the laces of his leathers and yanked them open, a cool smooth hand wrapping around his cock. He growled at the contact, relief and want s strong within him it stole his breath.

"Show me your true form," he said again as he dragged his fang down the column of Fara's throat, using it to tear open the collar of her gown. The violence he felt inside him was too strong, and he could not countenance the damage he would do to Fara's body in the act that was now upon them.

"There is no other form you desire more than this one..." She spread open her thighs and forcefully pulled him towards her. The rain came in sheets of grey soaking the floor of the grove and calling to mind the dreams he'd had of taking Fara like this. He felt stretched thin, close to tearing, and when the second thunderclap boomed around the grove and he was thrown backwards, he was certain he had splintered apart entirely.

He lifted his head to see another figure stood at the top of the temple steps, corporeal but only just, draped in a crackling light as though made from lightning itself. Another female, dark haired and small-boned, with silver eyes like his own. This was the form of the Goddess. He did not know how or why he was so certain, but he was.

"How dare you show yourself here?" The goddess seethed. "Have you not wrought enough damage upon this mortal realm?"

Theodan watched, stricken with guilt and horror by what he had almost done. The female in Fara's form stood and wiped the rain from her face and glared, breaths laboured and the image shimmering as though it took effort to hold onto it.

"Oh, not nearly enough," the form of Fara smiled before glancing at Theodan. "So close warrior, so very close." She gave him a slow seductive smile. 'We would have enjoyed each other, I think." And with that she melted in to the rain, a soft hiss and then she was gone. Theodan stared after the vapour a moment before flicking his eyes to the small female in the doorway of the temple. She sagged, as though holding herself upright took much more strength than she possessed. He wanted to aid her but his feet were frozen to the ground. Instead he shoved himself back into his leathers and eyed the figure cautiously.

When she turned her gaze on him, he felt it press down on him. "You are Theodan of Teredia."

He could not open his mouth to attempt a reply had he wanted to, but it was not posed as a question in any case.

"That was Emaris of the Anphia." The Goddess told him. Anphia. The name sounded familiar. It was old. He'd seen it written not heard it spoken. In the tomes of the Library beneath the court of the moon. Phia...likened to a curse or a blessing. An...before. Forsworn.

"She was foresworn?" He grappled with the notion, blinking at the space she occupied only moments before.

"The most ancient of them all. The most powerful of them all. The most wicked of them all." She looked upon Theodan with a careful eye...a judgemental eye. "You are weaker than was promised. As it is oft the case with males. You cannot even fight your basest desires, how are you expected to fight an army of anointed females." She sounded deeply unimpressed.

He swallowed back the rebuttal. It was true. He'd been moments away from committing the most carnal of sins with a foresworn because she bore Fara's form. Wait...an army of anointed females. She descended the steps of the temple, looking stronger than she had a moment ago. The ground was a swamp beneath them but she seemed to float atop it, soundless and smooth as she made her way towards him.

"Now, Theodan of Teredia, are you ready to accept your gift."

It was on the tip of his tongue to scream that he already had accepted it, that he had accepted it over and over and over again and he remained unchanged. Instead, he said only:

"Yes."

"Emaris of the Anphia was correct. You you are afraid." The goddess said. "Fear leaches from you in waves." This time he did not want to deny it. Could not deny it. "You are afraid of what you may become, of the power within you. For you were warned of it since you were a child and it scares you more than anything. Is that not true, Theodan of Teredia?"

"Yes." His mouth moved of it's own accord. Yet it was the truth. As though pulled from the very depths of his soul. Some unravelling deep inside himself.

The goddess smiled. "But now you know... that if you are to save these realms from the chaos and evil within it, then you must acknowledge and accept what you are. For the gift given is incomplete without the acceptance of that truth. You understand this now?"

Again, the word loosed from his tongue. "Yes."

"And what are you Theodan of Teredia?"

Her mouth moved along with his when he spoke.

"I am destruction."

His knees buckled beneath him and the scream rose up from the very ground and tore through his entire body before unleashing from his throat.

"We are destroyed..." he heard even beyond the screaming.