Chapter 601: A Love Fated To End [Bonus - ]

Chapter 601: A Love Fated To End [Bonus Chapter]

Before either Tariq or Safira could find their voices to reply, Menes’s right hand moved.

SWOOSH!

It wasn’t a strike like Tariq expected... instead it was a gentle, sweeping wave of warm golden sand that rose from the floorboards like a living blanket.

The sand swept around Tariq and Safira, lifting them both effortlessly off their feet.

Tariq’s lances dissolved into harmless dust, and before they could even let out a gasp of protest, the tide of sand carried them through the lounge archway, sliding them smoothly down the private corridor and directly into the primary royal suite.

CLANG-CLICK!

The heavy titanium suite door slammed shut behind them as the magnetic deadbolts engaged with a definitive motorized hiss.

Back in the empty lounge, Menes Al-Mansur stood alone.

He listened to the muffled confused voices of his son on the other side of the bulkhead with a bitter fragile smile resting on his lips.

"Enjoy it while you can, my son," Menes whispered into the quiet air, his voice barely louder than the hum of the jet engines. "Hold her tight and savor every breath."

He turned back to the glass table, reaching for the crystal bottle of aged sparkling vintage.

His bronze hand was trembling so violently that the neck of the bottle clinked against the rim of his glass with a rhythmic tink-tink-tink.

He filled the flute to the brim, raised it toward the endless desert outside, and swallowed the alcohol in a single burning gulp.

"Because we are all about to die."

...

THUD!

Tariq landed on the thick plush velvet carpet of the master suite with his boots skidding across the floor as the golden sand dissolved into fine harmless powder around his ankles.

Beside him, Safira stumbled, letting out a soft surprised gasp before Tariq caught her around the waist with his bandaged forearm, pulling her flush against his chest.

"Hey..." Tariq breathed, his pulse racing as he looked back at the locked titanium door. "Are you alright?"

Safira rested her palms against his chest, her dark eyes still wide with utter disbelieving shock.

"Tariq..." she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "Did your father just... did he really say that? A grandfather? Since when does the Pharaoh-President care about grandchildren? He looked... he looked almost happy."

Tariq’s face flushed bright crimson with the heat spreading from his neck to the tips of his ears.

"I don’t know," Tariq muttered, rubbing the back of his neck with an awkward self-conscious chuckle. "He’s never spoken to me like that in my entire life. Usually, if I raise a sand lance in his presence, he breaks three of my ribs and leaves me in the training yard to reflect on filial piety..."

Safira looked at him with her lips curving into a slow breathtaking smile that chased away the lingering shadows of the arena.

"You threatened to burn the throne room down for me," she whispered, her fingers trailing up the lapel of his linen tunic. "You risked everything. Why? Any other prince in your position would have accepted the decree... A concubine’s bed is still warm, Tariq. You could have taken three noble wives from the southern clans and secured your borders..."

Tariq reached out, his bandaged fingers gently cupping the side of her face.

Despite the rough spirit-silk wrapping, his touch was impossibly tender.

He leaned down, pressing his lips softly against the center of her forehead, breathing in the familiar intoxicating scent of lotus blossoms and warm desert air that clung to her hair.

"I told you four years ago, Safira," Tariq murmured against her skin. "I’m going to change the cycle... The Al-Mansur dynasty has ruled this desert for centuries by treating women like currency and our children like disposable soldiers. My brothers... Malikar and Khensu... they lived and died as tools of the state."

A brief dark shadow flickered across his eyes, his voice dropping into a solemn tone.

"I grieve for them. Truly, I do... They were my flesh and blood. But if their deaths are what it took to shatter that cycle, if their absence is what finally forces the crown onto my head without a civil war, then I won’t waste this chance... I won’t rule from a cold loveless palace... We rule the Sun Court together... Side by side... As equals!"

Safira’s breath hitched with tears welling in her dark eyes.

She buried her face against his stomach, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist, clinging to him as if terrified he’d dissolve into the desert air.

"When Seraphina’s fire hit me..." Safira sobbed softly, her voice muffled against his clothes, "...when my flesh turned to glass and I felt the cracks spreading through my chest, do you know what my biggest regret was, Tariq?"

"What, my love?"

"I never got to be a mother," she whispered, looking up at him with her lower lip trembling with raw vulnerability. "I’ve held lances since I was seven years old. I’ve killed crawlers in the Sovereign Realm and I’ve bled for the state but I hate it... I hate the fighting... All I ever wanted, all I dreamed about when we were hiding in the southern gardens at midnight, was holding your child. A son who looks like you and a daughter with your eyes."

Tariq’s heart hammered against his ribs with fierce overwhelming tenderness.

He looked down at her beautiful tear-stained face with the memory of her near-death washing over him, replaced instantly by an urgent burning hunger to reaffirm that she was here, that she was warm, that she was alive.

"Then why are we waiting?" Tariq whispered, his voice thick with sudden husky heat.

Safira blinked, her cheeks blooming with a deep radiant blush that reached the roots of her hair.

"R-Really? Right now? We’re still thirty thousand feet in the air—"

Tariq didn’t let her finish the sentence as he leaned down, capturing her lips in a deep fierce desperate kiss that stole the air clean from her lungs.

"Mmh~"

SMACK!

Safira let out a soft muffled sound against his mouth with her arms instantly winding around his neck, pulling him down with an urgency that matched his own.

Her fingers tangled into his thick dark curls, her body pressing against his with a feverish heat that made the heavy fabric between them feel like an unbearable wall.

Tariq’s bandaged hands moved with hunger, sliding under the hem of her silk tunic, feeling the smooth flawless skin of her waist.

With a swift fluid motion, he pulled the garment over her head, letting it flutter to the floor, followed instantly by his own linen shirt.

Their bodies met immediately and they were hot.

’I always tell Saf this but she’s really hot...’

Tariq scooped her into his arms, carrying her the two steps to the enormous silk-draped bed at the center of the suite.

They tumbled onto the mattress together in a tangle of limbs as Tariq shifting his weight smoothly until he was hovering over her with his knees pinning her thighs as he looked down at her beneath the amber lamplight.

Safira was breathless with her chest heaving and her dark eyes molten with surrender.

"Come on~"

Tariq dipped his head, trailing his lips down the sharp elegant curve of her jawline, moving to the soft sensitive hollow beneath her ear.

"Mmh~" Safira moaned softly, her head tilting back into the pillows and her spine arching upward as a violent shiver rippled down her skin.

Tariq parted his lips, pressing a slow deliberate kiss into the crook of her neck with his teeth gently grazing the tender flesh before drawing it into a deep bruising suction, marking her skin with an unmistakable dark-crimson bloom of possession.

"Hgnh~!" Safira gasped with her nails digging into the muscles of his bare back as her breath began coming in ragged shallow pants. "Tariq... please..."

Tariq lifted his head slightly, his amber eyes dark with pure concentrated adoration, preparing to lower himself further and to taste every inch of the woman who had returned from the grave for him...

FLICKER!

Tariq’s gaze instinctively drifted toward the panoramic viewport set into the suite’s outer wall as he froze.

Thirty thousand feet in the air, against the brilliant blinding azure of the desert sky, there was a blot of pure lightless black.

It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t an aircraft either.

’Weird...’

It was like a massive tear in the sky, barely a mile off the starboard wing of their escort formation.

It looked like a swirling vortex of pitch-black sand, twisting against the sunlight like an ink stain spreading across clean water.

Safira felt him hesitate as she reached up with both hands, cupping his face, her lips parting with a playful teasing pout.

"Tariq... don’t look away," she whispered, her voice dripping with sweet intoxicating longing as she drew his head back down toward her chest. "Look at me. Only at me..."

Tariq looked down into her beautiful dark eyes, smiling softly, letting the strange anomaly in the sky slip from his mind.

"Always."

He leaned down, their lips meeting in another deep passionate embrace.

...It only took one moment after that. That was all it took... A single microscopic fraction of a heartbeat.

SHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRK!

There was no sound of an impact as one second, Tariq was hovering over his lover on the soft silk mattress of the royal suite and the next second, the entire world simply ceased to exist.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The hurricane-force slipstream of the upper atmosphere hit Tariq’s bare skin with the violence of a freight train.

The ceiling, the bed, the titanium bulkheads, the luxury furnishings, the entire forward fuselage of the Aethel-Sun had been instantly vaporized into thin air.

’H–huh?’

Tariq tumbled through the freezing, violent thirty-thousand-foot void, completely naked with his eyes burning as the thin sub-zero air whipped through his hair.

"WHAT—"

A strangled horrified shriek ripped from his throat as he twisted his body, fighting against the terminal velocity drag...

All around him in the open sky, butchery was unfolding.

CRACK-CRUNCH-SHATTER!

Massive, colossal rivers of jet-black sand, thousands of tons of coarse lightless mineral screaming through the stratosphere like ancient ravenous serpents, were violently coiling around the eight escort cruisers.

The star-iron hulls of the warships didn’t dent or buckle under physical weight.

The moment the black sand touched the polished metal, an unnatural horrific chemical corruption spread across the plates...

The white titanium instantly turned into brittle lightless black glass!

BOOM! SHATTER!

A cruiser carrying sixty royal guards shattered into millions of microscopic black glass fragments in mid-air with the soldiers inside tumbling into the open sky!

Tariq watched in paralyzed, waking horror as a lieutenant, a seasoned Third Stage warrior, was swallowed by a swirling tendril of black sand.

The man didn’t bleed and he didn’t burn either.

As the black grains coated his armor and skin, his flesh, his eyes, his screaming mouth, and his core violently calcified, turning into a solid statue of jet-black glass.

SNAP!

The glass statue tumbled into the slipstream, caught by a stray shockwave, and instantly pulverized into fine drifting black powder.

"SAFIRA!" Tariq screamed, his voice tearing raw against the roaring wind as his terror reached a hysterical fever pitch! "SAFIRA! WHERE ARE YOU?!"

He whipped his head around, wildly pumping his core as he was desperate to manifest his sand-glider to arrest his fall...

And then he saw her.

Ten yards below him, falling through the azure sky, was Safira.

Her bare olive skin was completely exposed to the freezing winds with her hair whipping violently around her face.

SPLAT-SHRRRRK!

A thick undulating tendril of black sand, barbed like an ancient harpoon and dripping with an aura of total soul-erasure, had shot directly through the center of her chest, impaling her clean through her sternum.

"Gah—!"

Thick dark crimson blood erupted from Safira’s mouth, spraying into the freezing wind.

Her hands frantically clawed at the black sand spike piercing her ribs, but her fingers found no purchase since the grains were living churning needles that bit straight through her palms.

"T-Tariq..." she choked out, blood pouring over her lips, her voice a broken rasp that was barely audible over the roaring slipstream. "Tariq... help... it hurts..."

CRACKLE!

Before Tariq’s dilated horror-stricken pupils, the horrific calcification began...

From the wound in her chest, the corruption spread as her olive skin violently hardened, turning into an oily lightless black glass.

The smooth curves of her hips, her thighs, her neck, the very skin he had kissed bare seconds ago, were freezing into solid brittle crystal...

"NO! NO! NO!" Tariq shrieked, an animalistic wail tearing from the depths of his soul.

He threw both arms forward, ignoring the agonizing burn in his fractured hands, desperate to ignite his blood-quartz to bridge the gap.

"HOLD ON! SAFIRA! I’M COMING! I’M—"

THWIP-THWIP-THWIP-THWIP!

Four massive razor-sharp tendrils of black sand erupted from the void behind him.

SHRUNK-CRUNCH!

They tore through his physical body with merciless precision as one tendril punched straight through his right shoulder, severing the clavicle while a second impaled his left hip, shattering the pelvis and a third drilled through his lower abdomen, pinning his spine.

"AGHHH!" Tariq choked, his vision instantly exploding into stars of agony as blood flooded his trachea.

And the fourth tendril...

SQUEEZE!

It coiled tightly around his chest, driving inward between his ribs, wrapping its coarse freezing black grains directly around his primary mana core!

Tariq’s body went completely rigid.

’N-nooo...’

He looked down through the blood dripping into his eyes with his gaze locking onto Safira’s face one final time.

She was screaming.

Even with her chest turned to black glass, her head was still flesh and her dark eyes wide with pure terror as she watched the black tendrils tear through the man she loved.

"TARIQ! NO! PLEASE! GODS, NO—"

CRACK-CRUNCH!

The tendril inside Tariq’s chest tightened into an fist as his core... his spiritual organ that made him a Lord, shattered like a hollow eggshell.

The light in Tariq Al-Mansur’s amber eyes instantly died, snuffed out like a candle submerged in cold water.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Safira shrieked, a sound so broken and so filled with soul-shattering agony that it seemed to tear through the sky itself!

CRUNCH!

The tendril in her chest didn’t give her another second to mourn... It constricted, crushing her fractured heart and her mana core simultaneously.

SHATTER!

In the blink of an eye, the black glass consumed both of them completely.