Elemental Heir | ✔️

Chapter 63

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(Dristan's POV)

I was a brewing cauldron of swirling emotions and thoughts. The most potent ingredient among the stew was concern, followed by amazement, pride, even a dash of fear.

But mostly concern.

I sat at the head of the council table, leaned back in my chair, one ankle resting atop the opposite knee. I leaned an elbow on the arm of the chair, resting my jaw against my fist. The room was silent, like the unsettling stillness of a forest before the eye of a storm.

Seated around the table were Brenya, Torryn, Andromeda, Marrok, Sylvie, and Aella. We had been here for nearly an hour now, waiting for Warrick's return... He'd gone to the belly of the Aviary to deal Ronan his lashings.

No one spoke.

All eyes were on me. All except for Brenya, who stared at the table in front of her, her chin held high, her expression blank. I kept my face masked with calm indifference as I sat at the head of the table. I camouflaged the scent of my emotions with a wall of impenetrable steel so that the others would not detect how disturbed I truly was.

Though I could still smell their own shock, their own fear, their own confusion...

I'd even masked my emotions and thoughts from Brenya. I did not want her to feel how worried I was for her. I did not want her to sense my fear of her unstable mental status. I did not want to cause her any more emotional weight than she was already bearing. It wasn't that I saw her as weak, or thought that she couldn't withstand knowing how I was feeling in this moment... She was strong, so, so strong...

But she was also so incredibly delicate. I had never known anyone who felt emotion as strongly as she did. I'd never known anyone so empathetic toward the emotions of others, never met anyone who felt guilt or remorse as strongly as she did.

Too much emotion was not good for her. I knew her well enough to know that to be truer than any truth. She was an emotional vacuum, and when the spaces inside of her became too full, too jam packed with the mass of them... She detonated. And sometimes, it caused her to hurt the people she cared for most.

Like when she'd been overcome with grief and anger in the forest, when her father had been killed and she'd killed Marrok and Sylvie's father in retaliation. Or when her determination to retrieve the fire rune had caused Warrick to burn his wing. Or when her love for me, her determination to get me out of a marriage I never wanted, caused her to bind herself to Ronan.

All of these violent explosions of her magnified emotions had resulted in her own suffering. And each time, I had to watch as she suffered that immense, all consuming, paralyzing guilt in the aftermath that followed.

And now... What she'd done to Ronan... Crushing the bones in his legs to dust... What Warrick was doing to him right now, this moment, far below us in the dungeons because she had ordered it to be done... This was the worst of all of it.