Azalea

By Colton Guy Nelson

"Azalea" is the final installment of the Wyvren Trilogy. Ren and Karine have finally defeated their greatest foes, only for them to be separated by the cruel undoings of a loose end they never suspected. Ren will do everything in her power to bring Karine back to her, even if it means tearing the fabric of reality apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Colton Guy Nelson
• Release date: Dec 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798869086044

Book preview

cover-image, Azalea

For the girl who chose love above herself.

Table of Contents

August

Analog

Ashura

Ardency

Accentor

Affinity

Annul

Absolve

Abyss

Aurelius

Aneira

Avenger

Ascent

Acceleration

Alpha

Abeyance

Azalea

Act VII

August

We won. The dark creator that forged me from the corpse of talent in the womb of his hatred was dead. The captor of Karine’s mortality was vanquished. The root of so much evil, the guiding hand of calamity against humanity, finally destroyed. And now I held his power; his Mantle. Even with my thoughts about me and my mind my own, my body felt like a blossoming orchard and my blood pumped through me like sunshine.

The unfamiliar churning of Spring’s power pumped through my newly formed flesh and blood heart. Even the burning pink ring around my green irises felt heavy against their home in my skull. I focused my vision forward to my new sister, seething in bronze radiance and prepared to start what would be the first of the feuds amongst the Seasons since their creation.

You’ve killed my favorite brother, you monster, she hissed with fistfuls of copper light. The only other Equinox; the only one to ever truly understand me. Her porcelain face was lined with the ruminating fires of her auburn ferocity as she began to burn forward with giant scorching steps. You will certainly not replace him. I’d sooner tear my family apart than accept your hate into our Year.

I felt the violet hues of Karine’s psychic words brush against my ears, are you strong enough to fight? We’ve taken down Spring and a handful of Months; we have what we need from this Timeline, should we retreat?

Something bizarre rose in my chest. The bitter tastes of hubris began to curl my lips as the blushing flowers in my eyes formed beautiful mists across my judgement. I responded, verbally and confidently, no. We stand and we fight. We have conquered their strongest and can keep up with the Seasons using Spring’s power. We can’t let up now.

And what exactly is leading you to believe you have defeated the strongest of my siblings? A sarcastic and vicious voice roared from the doorway beyond the floating bridge that lead to our aerial battlefield. We both turned to see the heavy black stone door ajar. There in the threshold of obsidian leaned the smug figure of a comrade we believed lost to us again before our fight. August.

August, what are you doing? Where did you go? Karine belted in joyous confusion. We thought… her voice trailed off as misunderstanding settled more deeply than wonder in her mind. We thought you were gone.

We frankly didn’t have time to be enamored by his introduction, regardless of how ominous it may have been. I felt the bellowing flames before I saw them, my nose catching the scent of charred hair as mine began to singe. I turned to find Autumn dramatically closer than she was before, arms above her head in a collected hammer fist dripping with resinous ochre light. I pushed Karine out of the way and reached into myself to try and ignite the familiar burning angel’s light, but instead something different took hold within me and guided my hands more than the other way around.

I saw my long dark hair lighten to the sandy auburn shade that belonged to my father, my arms moving on their own, now outstretched towards my fellow Equinox. My hands found hers as my stature grew to meet the level of her eyes, and in my grasp the intense heat of her rage quelled into a blossoming of vibrant orange peonies.

I heard my voice sound without my cognition, the words themselves drawing breath for me as I threatened Autumn, I will always be more than you, sister. And you will always be meant to be less. My swords appeared into existence with the brazen certainty of creation, without spell or effort. In their dazzling debut each blade found its way into each piece of Autumn; arms, legs, torso. As the final one split her face, I saw the faint pink glow of Spring’s magic pulse through each of them as if they had, too, become alive with his power.

The Season shifted from her corporeal form and back into the collection of sunset lights that manifested her to begin with. In a striking retreat, she bolted back into the clouds above like lightning in reverse. I felt my autonomy return to my fingertips again as my swords dematerialized. Even with Spring’s power in my body, I was not yet strong enough to conquer the flower I had become. I was still a Lotus, trying to thrive with Azalea roots.

That was as dramatic as I expected it to be, August chimed in, straightening from his leisurely position and beginning to take steps towards Karine and I. But don’t worry, she’ll be back with her remaining siblings. The stripes of stark white scars across his face from my efforts to free him from March’s patchwork spell were dancing across his face; the white pigment reacting to his magic and shimmering like light through water.

Neither of us knew what to say as the new strangely confident persona of August continued to speak without the hesitation I once knew him to have. Where have I been? I’ve been here. Waiting for the two of you to catch up. His steps were as playful as his tone as he made his way closer. "I knew that you would try to fight Spring again but I never thought that you would actually go so far as becoming what you hated so much. Impressive, Wyvren."

I cut my eyes to Karine, her stance as defensive as mine against his words. You’ve never called her that before, Karine cautiously responded, reaching to her throat and clutching her Clock Key. We’ve never treated her that way, even after she consumed the Orchid.

I stepped closer to Karine, you were in Midnight for hundreds of years trying to solve the predicament of making light move past a moment where Time didn’t exist. That’s when we met; you had no idea who I was.

August playfully turned his expression into something curious. Is that what I told you? I can barely remember what it is I decided to say when we first met. He finally stepped onto the platform and walked over to the husk that was once my body, now burned and devoid of color. He reached down into the chest cavity and lifted the lifeless stone that became Spring’s heart and cradled it in both hands.

August twirled the gray cube through his grip, facing us with more condescending information. Did it never occur to you that when both of you went between Timelines, I was the only one besides Spring to remember who you were? When you were? What you were doing and what you needed? He looked down to the lifeless cube in his hands. I regret knowing that it was my magic that killed you, Spring. I never thought your toy was able to learn enough to use our magics against us.

My heart felt so much; betrayal, surprise, disbelief, and for some reason, more than anything, excitement. I straightened my posture and lifted my head, looking down my nose at August with my augmented height. I should have realized that none of you could be trusted. You didn’t get separated from us when we came to this new Timeline, did you? You slipped out through the remaining bits of Liminal Space between here and there.

August rolled his eyes, Spring’s heir of superiority now an apparent influence on him. The only thing I was ever tasked with doing was watching you and Autumn closely. While she isn’t as strong as Spring, she is his natural antithesis; the opposite of his power. And you, he smiled with a tilted head of condolence, were always destined to break away from him and run to your ancient girlfriend. He sneered, shifting his glance to Karine.

Karine summoned her dual swords and began a a brisk advance. Without a word August gestured freely with his hands and dissipated the eerie blue light that emanated from her Clock Key, causing the swords to completely dissolve. A look of horror grayed her face as she immediately tried to muster its magic again, but it was too late. She looked at me, horrified and without her strongest power, and turned back to August empty handed.

The blue light of Karine’s Clock Key frolicked through the air between them, making its way to August’s still hand and mingled between his fingertips.

"I’ve never quite been able to use the magics that I nullify in stealing their hue, August pondered as his eyes gazed at the cerulean light dancing across his hand. But I can certainly keep you from using it. He turned his conniving gaze from Karine’s magic to me. I wonder if our friend will be able to come back to life again without this?"

I felt the tension of fear spring through my feet and propel me forward in pure instinct. We had come to far, and Karine’s mortality was the only thing the two of us could depend on. Karine always found me, I couldn’t afford to let us be separated now. The only veil that could be drawn between us was death, and without Spring’s blue light of Time in her possession, I didn’t know how to get her back.

August smiled, the ominous black color of the smooth floor beneath us shimmering up his body and consuming his figure. As soon as I arrived to him, his body spilled like a bottle of ink into the blackness of the floor, swimming through its pigment just like Isadora once did with her aquatic prowess. I never knew he had such an ability, certainly by his design.

My glance shifted to the floor, my eyes frantically shifting back and forth to at last find the dark blue light of Karine’s Clock Key in the grasp of August’s dissolved form swimming beneath us.

I raised my hands again, the burning heat of Spring igniting in my eyes. August, my voice echoed through the air and stone alike. Just as before, the words chose themselves as they found shape across my tongue, weaving a sentience I never thought I would say to anyone or anything. "Obey me."

The weight of the atmosphere around us became crushing as the very oxygen kneeled to my command. The platform bowed and cracked in reverence to my words, and at last from one of the glassy ravines beneath my breath slithered out the shadowed form of August, his face cringing in resistance as he outstretched his hands towards me.

As each second beneath my glance passed, another finger opened until his grasp released the shimmering promise of Karine’s immortality. I felt pride in my heart and certainty in my mind. With this power, even in the fledgling stages of understanding who I had become, I knew that I could change it all. I could undo the evils of my past. I could piece together a world that would never know the pain of my dark ancestry. I could finally free us.

And then it happened. As soon as I embraced the absolution of my strength and dignified my misplaced pride in the role I couldn’t yet begin to understand, the room shivered with a brisk coldness. With a gasp not from August or myself, I turned to watch Karine’s ocean blue eyes begin to frost over as her pale lips blued in a petite maelstrom around her.

I was speechless. My lips trembled as hers could not in their icy entrapment, and before I could find the strength to make my mind make sense of what I was seeing, from behind the wintery visage of my love stepped the Month that we spared just before the fight.

As December’s face revealed itself, her olive skin like her Winter mother’s and hair raven black against the gaunt shimmering crystalline skin of her face. Despite her apparent blow to my heart, there wasn’t the pride of victory on her face. Only the solemn resolve of a winter that she knew Karine wouldn’t survive ever again.

It doesn’t matter what you learn, what you gain, or what you do, August’s voice warmed with spite from behind me, still speaking from his spilled posture on the floor beneath me from beyond my view as I still tried to rationalize another truth than the one before me. You are, and always will be, the shadow of death. Nothing will ever survive you. And when this power is stripped from you by Seasons who know how to use this strength, you will be faced with a death that will know no peace, apart from her. August closed his hands around the now dimming blue light from Karine’s possession. Forever.

I don’t exactly remember what happened next. I remember turning to face August’s thrashing assessment only to find his body without a head, the colors of his face scattering like dust behind him as my gaze smeared his conniving brains into impossibilities through the air. My body didn’t lose sensation in my shock, but rather gained an ecstasy as my grief fueled a strange light within me. I wanted with all of my heart to give into the mourning of Karine’s frozen body, but instead all I could feel was overflowing power.

I turned from August, and in what felt like one step closed the distance between December and I. Just inches from Karine’s cold body I looked into the chilling Month’s eyes and saw something that rhymed with both acceptance and compassion within them. Before I could even ask her how, why- anything at all, she spilled onto the ground into a wistful bouquet of hyacinths and dandelions.

The platform shifted, seeming to lose its magic completely as I divorced it finally from any power the Tower had left after Isadora’s death, and as we began to hurdle through the air to the earth thousands of feet beneath us, I turned my eyes to Karine’s. They were empty, completely devoid of anything at all. My freshly auburn hair whipped around our faces, starkly contrasting the rigid stillness of even her dark locks completely still in our free fall.

Finally the tears began to burn and I felt streams of heat sting against my cheeks, each drop changing into tiger lily petals as they left my cheek and spun through the air. I touched Karine’s face, feeling the frost begin to cling to my own flesh as I began to bargain with the universe to give her back to me.

In the speeding winds that continued to tear around us, I looked up into the clouds above only to see the colors of the Seasons begin to streak through the clouds, all now privy to the fate of their brother and empire. I gritted my teeth and screamed, you can’t take everything from me! I finally have the power! I finally have the means to end all of this! Why won’t you let me be free?!

As soon as my words spun from my lips and stained the air above me, everything began to slow before my eyes. I looked down at Karine and as our descent ceased into a full stop, there was a faint trickle of blue light that danced from the empty Clock Key around her neck. I watched its path move around us, shimmering its way through the air and to the still grip of August’s dead hands.

Through his grip, the remaining dim cerulean light of Karine’s Time magic precipitated to the calling trail from the Clock Key. As soon as the two blue lights touched, the Might of what could happen erupted in a spiraling explosion of lights I had never seen before.

Had Might always been this vibrant? Without the Mantle of Spring enhancing my eyes, it was always just a buzzing hum of particles shaping possibilities. Now, Might spiraled around my sight in the complexities of galaxies, dazzling in stars of expression before me. Just as it happened before with our fight with Kieran, beyond all possibility’s and swirling eons of Karine’s death unfolding before me again and again, there was a single shimmering trail of stardust, twinkling in counterpoint, spiraling in the opposite direction of all the rest.

As soon as I perceived that solitary outcome, Time began to unfurl itself again, the moments of the present jerking themselves back into motion. I looked at Karine’s cold face, her last words forever trapped behind lips that would never move again, and clenched my weeping eyes in wonder of what they could have been. I turned from her, knowing that it would probably be the last time I would ever see her face as I knew it again, and reached towards the final moments her Clock Key showed me; the last will and testament of her immortal companion, trying to guide me one final time.

I love you, I whispered, still focused away from her in knowing that I wouldn’t be strong enough to leave if I turned back now. My fingers grasped the shimmering sands of Time in the galaxy before me and in an abrupt shift, instead of transporting to a new Timeline or seeing a new future, the platform changed trajectory and began to rise back into the sky.

In our ascent, I became a viewer of events from outside of them, perceiving Time from another vantage point rather than being bound to it. Still, in the vacancy of light around me, I remained in stasis with myself as I watched events I was also apart of begin to rewind.

I saw December and August after watching my cruel undoing of them, Karine’s breath returning to lungs no longer frozen, Autumn revitalizing in her rage, Spring resurrecting and tearing me apart by the very capillaries that once hung my fragile body together. All of it.

I watched in awe from a shadow in Space that before now I thought could never exist, truly a spectator through our conquest. Isadora’s battle with us played in reverse, Dorian and October reforming under my hateful destruction of them, the bloody pulp that Vanna became spiraling back into her shape as March guided her tortuous hands across my dying body before I was forced to pulverize her.

In that moment I clenched the faint strand of existence in my fist, slowing the rapid reversal until I was suspended truly in the moment of my awakening beneath the bewitched seamstress. I stepped through my shadowy corridor, each step remaining obscured from the moments before me, and found myself beside her, watching her glowing yellow eye stare down at me.

Vanna, my muffled voice whispered in the stasis of time. Vanna, can you hear me? We remained completely still, my voice hanging just past my lips without the presence of continuity to move it to her ears. I pulled the granule collection of Time in the opposite direction like a rope, slowing playing the scene as I remembered it, watching my past self and Vanna spring into life like an animatronic show.

Time was moving again, slowly but steadily as I allowed the glistening strand of that moment to fall through my fingertips. Vanna was convinced, condescending me with each stab of her enchanted needles. I watched as my former self pleaded with her under her duress, and then I spoke again.

Vanna, my voice moved, the silhouette of my words shadowed in the realm beyond hers in my pocket of reality. Vanna, can you hear me? I need you to hear me. Each word guided in a dark cloud towards her ears, gradually covering them in the same dimensional substance I was existing in. Vanna, it’s okay; I can save you. I can set you free from this if you just listen to me.

I suddenly realized the effect of my words on the trapped witch. I was Spring now, and in this moment, she was under the influence of my power. As I spoke to her, with each and every command, I was undoing the work of the Grace that compelled the yellow magics in her mind. As I extended my influence like a ghost from my impossible vantage point, I could reach in and save her.

I watched the trapped version of my past self try to get through to her, but the more I spoke the more I realized that even in this moment then, I was here before. My existence as Spring was already set in motion before I realized it.

I spoke again, Vanna, listen to me. This is Ren; not the one you’re with now, but the one that can save you from this. You don’t have to fight, you don’t have to suffer.

Why should I believe anything you said to me after you lied to me? After you manipulated me and the noble protectors of our humble way of life? She shifted her gaze from the Ren on the table and moved her attention to me, bridging the dark gap between us as she began to be pulled into my Space. I trusted you. I won’t be made a fool of again. I’ve lost too much.

I still wear your ribbon, I heard myself choke out from the slab I was strapped to beneath Vanna. In the same voice I echoed the words I said to her before once more, but this time from a realm where I could reach her.

"I care about you. Time doesn’t always work the way we want it to, but we came back for you Vanna. I came back for you. I shifted my visage with my new Seasonal power, donning the daffodil dress she gave me the first night we met; the very same one Karine would give me in the world before that. This dress, these moments, my time with you and the others; it is all precious to me. I’m sorry we were late. But we can fix it. We can change this story if we work together. Desperation superseded the agony on my face, knowing what my former self would do if I still couldn’t break the curse of my predecessor please."

Vanna stopped. Her gaze shifted from me in the ominous realm we were sharing and back to my bleeding body before her in reality. I have Spring’s power now. I can fix everything if you let me. I can’t force you to do anything, but together we can make a world where we can be happy. You, me, Karine, Irene, Evelynn; no one has to die. I reached a spectral hand towards her, the outline of my resolve grasping at her hand. Please, Vanna. Let’s get out of this alive.

Vanna’s face contorted from nostalgia to sadness as tears began to mingle in her eye. She looked down at my battered and constricted body, then her sword, unclenching her gripped spell hand and wiping her face with the inside of her elbow. Wyvren… Ren… What… I watched the yellow light fade from her eye as she seemed to enter a new lucid state.

Ren, Ren I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt anybody. I never wanted to her you, she trembled as the words left her, almost convulsing as the sudden rush of sentience returned to her. This was the final shadow of my former success. Where does it go wrong from here?

I watched as Ren and Vanna talked, consoling each other in their mutual freedom from Spring’s conniving grasp. The moments were catching up to how they played out before, relief and comfort filling the space between them. When did March step in? Could I stop him this time?

I could… let this all go, Vanna whimpered, Ren, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can barely remember anything. It’s like the last couple of years have just been a haze. It was almost time, but even with my new Spatial awareness and literally clutching the moments as they past, I couldn’t perceive the oncoming danger. Was it going to play out differently? Did I have to come here in the future and experience it for myself?

Vanna continued, I know where they’re keeping Karine, give me a minute to release the spell I have on your armor and we can go to her.  She took a satisfactory breath and looked down at me, okay, once you’re loose enough we can get… her voice trailed off and her eye glazed over with a ghastly yellow mist. Before I fully reacted, I felt the rush of familiar dread wash over my face and sink into my heart.

With a soft wafting of cinnamon and honeysuckles, I felt him appear behind me. The ethereal moments of Time trickling through my hand suddenly seized to a halt as I felt another hand reach around me from behind, closing gentle fingers around the only option I had to undo what had been done.

I never thought you would be able to actually pull it off, starlight, Spring’s enchantingly warm voice whispered hazily into my ear, his free hand parting my lightened hair over my shoulder as he closed in on me more intimately than he ever had before. To think that you actually found a way to defeat me. I must say, I’m impressed.

I tried to pull away from him, but as I stepped forward his tender hold over my closed hand clenched into a splintering grip, nearly squeezing the Timeline out of my hands. He moved his other hand around to my throat and jaw, fixing my gaze forward. Letting go of my hand he grabbed a piece of the swirling essence ahead of my hand, dragging it back into motion.

How are you here? I gasped in resistance, trying to remove myself from his ravenous clutches. "I killed you. I killed you. I have your power now. You can’t exist if I am Spring!" I