Royal Wolf Box Set by Haley Weir

Chapter Seventeen

The royal family held a ceremony to honor Samar’s life. There was finally a moment to breathe and a time of peace, and Samar deserved to be honored in the most reverent of ways. Not only had she saved their kingdom with her sacrifice, but she ended the legacy of Kitsune. Now, with no other Kitsune alive that they knew of, there would be no further generations. The beautiful and elegant species of the fox shifter was gone.

The ceremony was breathtaking. Cassandra and Holly had helped the servants to set up the area themselves. They chose the courtyard since Samar loved to look up at the open sky there so much. They strung twinkling white lights into the branches of the trees and lit candles to line the stone paths. On the grass, they had sky lanterns weighed with white stones that would be released all at once into the night sky. There was no body to bury or burn in remembrance. There was only her tail.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Cassandra asked Aeron as he pulled Samar’s talisman tail out from its place near his bare chest beneath his shirt.

“Yes,” he answered with certainty. “I neither need nor want this power anymore. Samar’s magical tail served the purpose that she intended it to and helped us to win the war. Now, it is just a cruel reminder of what has been taken from me.”

“I wasn’t talking about the magical power,” she said. “I was talking about it being the only thing that you have left of Samar.”

“It’s not the only thing,” he said as he touched his finger to his temple. “I have memories.”

Aeron tossed Samar’s beautiful tail into the bonfire that was crackling in the middle of the courtyard. Immediately, it made the flames dance and churn into several different colors at once. One final gift of magic from Samar.

After the ceremony, Aeron was nothing aside from tired. He had no more feelings to feel or thoughts to think. He had only the overwhelming sense of mental and physical exhaustion. He climbed into his bed, which normally would have felt empty without either Cassandra or Samar there with him, and he closed his eyes as soon as his head touched the pillow.

Aeron rarely dreamt. And even when he did, he never remembered his dreams. But tonight, when he fell into sleep, Samar came to visit him in his dreams. He desperately hoped that he would remember this dream when he woke in the morning.

“You’re here,” he said to her.

It all felt so real that he could have sworn he was awake, and that Samar was still alive. She stood before him as clear as day and smiled.

“Yes,” she said gently. “I’m here, Aeron. I will always be by your side.”

She looked over him, and then her smile turned into the shape of a pout.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

He had missed her so much that even in his dream, he had to reach out and hold her.

“You are not wearing my tail,” she said.

“I did,” he confirmed quickly. “I wore it, and it helped us to win the war, just as you told Cassandra that it would.”

“But why are you not wearing it now?” she asked.

“The danger has passed, and the fight is over,” he said as he looked at her sadly. “I just couldn’t keep it after that. It belonged to you, and it should belong to you even after death. I sent it to you in the flames. Are you upset?”

“No,” she said, but her face still seemed troubled. “But I need to warn you that you are in danger. I wish you would have kept my tail close to you until all of the danger had passed.”

“What other danger could there be?” Aeron asked her. “There are no more enemies to contend with.”

“There are,” she said. “Some are just more visible than others.”

For a moment, it looked as if she was getting ready to leave, and Aeron didn’t want the dream to end yet.

“Samar, don’t leave, please,” he begged her.

“I haven’t left you,” she said. “I am by your side even now. There are many lives beyond this one.”

“So then that means that I will see you again someday after my time here is through,” Aeron said with a relieved sense of happiness.

Samar looked at him and he wished that he could hold her in his dreams and feel her touch once more. He didn’t know when he would see her in his dreams again, and he didn’t want to let her go just yet. But their time together during his sleep was coming to an end, and the ambiguous statement that she gave him before she left did nothing to help settle him.

“You will be reunited with your love that has been fated for you all along when you get to the next life,” she said as she looked fondly upon him. “But it will not be me.”

“Wait, what?” he said.

But it was too late now, and as he said the words, he felt his eyelids start to peel open. He pressed them together tightly to keep from waking up, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get himself to fall back into the dreamscape with Samar.

Suddenly, his eyes opened, and he woke up in confusion as he sat up in his bed. He knew that it had been more than just a dream. He never dreamt, and he had remembered each moment of it this time. But what the dream meant, and what Samar was trying to tell him, remained much of a mystery. She warned him of danger, and then gave him promise of a fated love. Aeron didn’t have a clue what either of those were supposed to mean or who was supposed to be the source. The danger had been eliminated, and as far as fated love was concerned, Cassandra was with Rubius, and Samar was dead. In his mind, Aeron wasn’t sure that either of the things that Samar had told him about would really happen. He got up and walked out to the kitchen to get some water. When he got there, he found that Cassandra was already sitting at the table with a cup of hot tea.

“You can’t sleep either?” he asked her as he walked in and sat down beside her.

“I was restless,” she said.

Aeron noticed that Cassandra looked a bit shaken as well.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re trembling.”

He looked down at his hands and saw that she was right. His hands were shaking, and his palms were sweaty.

“I had a dream,” he said.

“You never dream,” she teased.

“True.”

“What was your dream about?”

Aeron told her all about Samar visiting him in his sleep. He told her about her warning and the things that she had said, and Cassandra sipped her tea quietly while she listened.

“I think that it all means something,” he said. “Samar seemed very clear and very certain. But I just don’t know exactly what she meant by it all. Do you think that she’s in the next life right now, trying to reach us one last time to help?”

Cassandra didn’t answer him, but the look that she gave him from over the side of her teacup was one of a familiar knowing. /

“You know,” he said with a slight curve of a smile at his lips. “I miss our middle of the night chats.”

She laughed and set her teacup down on the tabletop. “You mean you liked it when we had all those sleepless nights and were exhausted the next morning?” she teased.

“Yes,” he answered truthfully. “I loved it.”

For a moment, things felt awkward between them. The kind of awkward that made Cassandra bite her bottom lip, and that made Aeron shift positions in his seat.

“I thought you were going into the forest tonight with Rubius,” he said.

“Yes, I was going to. But then I just felt for some reason like sleeping in the castle tonight.”

“That’s unusual for you,” he teased her back. “You hate being inside four walls.”

“True,” she chuckled. “But sometimes I find that these four walls aren’t quite so bad.”

They talked casually for a few more minutes, and then both got up to go back to the bedroom to sleep. They laid beside each other and Aeron offered Cassandra his shoulder, which he had not done for some time out of fear that she would think he was overstepping their agreement. But this time, she gently laid her head down on his chest and closed her eyes to fall asleep.