Page 36 of Renegade Kingdom
The freed Endless had gathered too. They hung toward the stern, keeping to the edges of the deck but present all the same. Some had never met Rhidian. Some had fought against him while under Arik’s control. But they were here, paying their respects to the man who had helped to free them. Beside them,the soldiers who had trained at Rhidian’s camp stood with their heads bowed, their grief raw and visible.
Rhidian’s crew stood in a line near the platform, their faces carved from stone. Waiting.
They were waiting for me.
I stepped forward, and every eye on the ship turned to follow.
“Most of you knew Rhidian as a captain,” I began, my voice carrying across the silent deck. “As a leader. A fighter. A man who stood against impossible odds because he couldn’t stomach the alternative.” I paused, letting the words settle. “But I knew him before all of that. I knew him as a boy who once nearly went skinny dipping at a royal festival because a girl he barely knew dared him to.”
A few surprised sounds from the crew. One of them might have been a laugh.
“He grew up to be so much more than any of us could have predicted. The boy I knew became a man who changed the course of this realm. He sacrificed everything to save people he’d never met because he knew it was the right thing to do. There was never any calculation in it, never any weighing of costs and benefits. He saw people suffering and he did something about it. It was that simple for him. It was always that simple.”
My gaze swept across the deck. The freed Endless. The soldiers. The crew who had followed Rhidian into hell and back.
“Rhidian set aside the idea of courts and division and laid everything on the line for those who needed him. He didn’t care about bloodlines or borders or which court you were born into. He cared aboutpeople.” I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. “When this is all over, and itwillbe over, he is the one we should all look back on as the saviour of this realm. He started it all. He stood strong when no one else would.” My voice hardened with a conviction I felt all the way to my bones. “And now we’re going to finish what he started.”
Silence held the ship for a long, reverent moment. Then one of Rhidian’s crew pressed a fist to his chest and bowed his head. Another followed. Then another. Like a wave rolling through the crowd, the gesture spread until every person on that deck stood with their fists against their hearts in tribute.
I nodded at the crew, and they moved forward to lift the platform.
That’s when my magic tore out of me.
I didn’t call it. Didn’t summon it or shape it or try to direct it in any way. It simply erupted from my chest in a wave of golden light, racing toward Rhidian’s body like a river finding the sea.
I gasped, but before I could even try to rein it in, I felt the others joining.
Dean’s magic came first. Cold and sharp, the crystalline beauty of winter frost. Then Tank’s, warm and verdant, the smell of new growth after rain. Maddox’s blazed to life next, the fierce heat of summer sun. And Ryder’s, crackling and electric, the wild energy of a storm about to break.
All of it twisted together with my own. Braiding, weaving, twining into something greater than any of us could create alone. The combined magic washed over Rhidian’s body, coating the white cloth in a gleaming layer of gold that pulsed with life.
I stared at my trembling hands and felt something tug at my awareness.
When I concentrated, I found it. Not just my mates’ magic joining mine, but something else. Something smaller, fainter. Like a hundred tiny threads of light, each one barely visible on its own but together forming something real and undeniable.
Magic was flowing from the people on the ship.
From the freed Endless, from the crew, from the soldiers. Thin, fragile streams of power that shouldn’t have existed. Not in people who’d been drained and enslaved and stripped ofeverything they were. And yet there it was. Faint but present. Not everything had been stolen from them.
I didn’t think any of them could feel it themselves. The trickle was so small, so faint that it would be almost unnoticeable. But it was there, reaching toward Rhidian’s body, joining the golden shell that was forming around him.
My eyes found Dean’s across the deck. He was frowning, his gaze focused on something specific. Not the general flow of magic from the crowd, but a single stream. One that was noticeably stronger than the others, brighter, more defined.
It was coming from below deck.
I knew without even touching it that it was Damon’s.
Something twisted in my chest at the realisation. Even chained in the dark, even fighting a monster for control of his own mind, Damon was here. Paying tribute in the only way he could.
The golden magic hardened around Rhidian’s body, crystallizing into a shell that caught the grey light and scattered it across the deck in fractured rainbows. The whispers started immediately. Fragments drifting through the crowd like leaves on water.
“The old ways...”
“Like in the stories...”
“Is this real?”
Everyone was staring at me. All of them, with something in their eyes that went beyond respect or gratitude. Something that looked almost like reverence.
