What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(61)

“Estrella, I promise; you will know when it’s a sex thing,” he said, patting his stomach again. “This is the oldest story I know.” I shifted forward, turning to put my back to him as I lowered myself down. The side of my face pressed against his shirt, drawing in a deep breath of the distinct scent I’d come to associate with Caelum.

He always smelled like wintergreen, like fresh snow falling in the meadow at night. Like drawing an essence sharp and cold into your lungs and letting it burn you from the inside.

He draped his cloak around me, enveloping me in warmth. I didn’t have it in me to protest that he’d be cold, knowing from experience that it was as futile as trying not to breathe him in.

He raised a hand, running it through the waves of my hair gently as he hummed softly. “In the beginning, there was nothing.” He paused as the strands of my hair fell through his fingers. His voice dropped lower, murmuring the words of his story as he continued on with a lyrical cadence. There was no doubt in my mind the story he wove was one he knew well, one that he’d been told repeatedly throughout his life, perhaps by the father who’d taught him all about things we weren’t meant to know.

“The world was an empty void, a place without light or substance or shadows. The world was nothing but Khaos, but he eventually grew tired of being alone and he used the darkness surrounding him to create Ilta. He fell in love with the Primordial of Night, and with the way she shimmered in the shadows she created. They came together and eventually created a son, Edrus, the Primordial of Darkness. Ilta and Edrus grew close, closer than she felt with Khaos, and she jilted her previous lover in favor of her son,” he said.

“She what?” I asked, outrage rising in my gut. This was a sex thing.

“There were only three beings in all of the world, Estrella. Is it so surprising that familial boundaries as we know them today didn’t exist when they were creating, well, everything?” he asked, tapping his finger against my nose pointedly. “Together, Ilta and Edrus had two children, and on and on creation went until there were seven generations of Primordials and the world as we know it came to be. They created the dirt beneath our feet and the mountains that rise into the sky, the sea at the edges of the Kingdom and everything around us. From those Primordials came the last generation of Gods, the ones humans once worshiped, until they learned the truth.”

“The primordials birthed the Fae race?” I asked, yawning as I tried to force my eyes to stay open. “Is that what the Fae believe?”

“It is. They believe in The Father and The Mother in their own way, but they do not worship them the same as the human race. The Fae believe The Father and The Mother are waiting to take you to the afterlife after your thirteenth life cycle comes to a close, but they’re not ruled by the weight of their choices during their time in this world.”

“What happened to the original Primordials? Why would they allow their children to be worshiped as Gods if they were the ones who actually created the world?” I asked, shifting my head on his lap. I lay on my back, staring up at him as he curled himself over me and trailed gentle fingertips down my cheek.

“Curious thing,” he said. “You’re supposed to be falling asleep.”

“When you said you’d tell me a story, I didn’t think you meant something from the forbidden texts! I thought you meant a bedtime story. How am I supposed to sleep when you’re talking about the creation of the world?”

“I’ll keep that in mind for the future. I could tell you a sex story instead? Perhaps one of the ones I’ve read about the union of Peri and Marat and the celebrations of their son? We already have the visual aid from earlier, and I’m certain we could—”

He grunted when I lifted and dropped my head into his stomach, turning away from him to face the fire. I couldn’t bring myself to take my head off him, not with the warmth of his body heating my near-frozen ear.

“I take it back. You’re more cruel than curious. A curious thing would want to reenact those moments and discover just why they were so pleasurable.”

“Would you shut up or just tell me where the Primordials went already?” I asked, groaning past my annoyance with his antics.

“They disappeared, Little One. Nobody knows where they went or what happened to them. Only that they abandoned this world and those in it. The children of the Primordials, what we know of as the Old Gods, took over. They put themselves at the top of the hierarchy and lived a life of decadence and sin,” he said, continuing on as I snuggled into him against my better judgment.

He spoke of gilded cities, of the lands they’d had fashioned in their own honor, and the temples where they were worshiped. I fell asleep to the image of temples of stone in my head, my eyes drifting closed as slumber finally claimed me.





20





I snuggled deeper into the warmth wrapped around me, rubbing my face against bare skin where the laces of his shirt had parted in sleep. A deep groan startled me just enough that my eyes flew open in shock, holding myself perfectly still as I tried to unravel what had happened.

I’d fallen asleep with my head on Caelum’s lap, so why was it his chest I snuggled into? I glanced down at our bodies, wincing when I found my dress hiked up to reveal my bare calf where my leg draped over his waist. My body was half on top of him, sprawled across his as if I could suck the heat from his bones and into mine. With the embers of the fire at my back, his body warmth at my front, and his cloak draped over myself, the cold of the early winter outside was a thing of the past.