Chapter 5.

Just a ray of light.

Shadowfax is the home of the stone warriors, a place where hardly a ray of light dared to enter, a dark and silent realm where ruins and echoes remained in eternal torment.

Redlith kept her gaze fixed with her wings spread on the gargoyle, who, perhaps by some twist of fate, had marked them as a couple, but between them there was nothing that could feel peaceful; on the contrary, one could witness an internal storm that loomed to break out at any moment…

Then the harpy, with her eyes blazing with fury, took a step back, trying to keep her distance. She knew Mateus wouldn't leave her alone, but she refused to accept what he represented in her life, in her destiny, asking him: ¿Why do you want to keep me in this place? 

But the gargoyle, with its imposing figure and stone eyes, didn't flinch. Her deep voice echoed off the walls and ruins of the place: Because you are my destined partner, whether you like it or not, the goddess makes no mistakes, and you cannot escape fate…

Those words sounded so bitter that they made laughter feel poisonous. The goddess, ¿could that even make sense? It's a goodbye that she had never accepted or bowed to this fate that chained her to him…

¿Do you think I'm going to accept this without a fight? Sarcasm and irony were present in his voice. Her wings began to move nervously as if ready to attack, but there was something different about him. 

His almost expressionless, stony face betrayed a slight frustration mixed with distant pain. No matter how hard he tried to tell her: this isn't a curse, it's who we are, who we've always been. But the harpy's rage burned in her chest, and she brought her fist down on the gargoyle's stone face…

They hadn't even known each other for a couple of hours, and their lives were already filled with conflict; There was an undeniable connection everywhere, something about him attracted her, but she didn't want to admit it because, unlike other species, harpies thrive on freedom. 

If before meeting their destined mate, they already had someone invading their thoughts, tearing him away was like burning her skin. A harpy's obsession was completely sick. She would follow him to the ends of the earth as long as it all seemed like destiny. 

But Legolas, King Triton, had broken off their relationship, and with it, the disaster in the Forest of Lost Tears had also occurred. All because he had found his destined mate in the Princess of the Fae...

This was something a harpy couldn't accept, much less after spending years feeling that that space was hers; It also meant that the relationship between the mermaids and harpies would be broken: it left them homeless, with no place to return to…

The Forest of Lost Tears was the closest she could get to one of the entrances to the Merfolk Kingdom through the lake, but that damned goddess who has paired everyone off since before her creation had already screwed up her life with this joke: a gargoyle, a being thought extinct, a guardian almost no one remembered, of whom only legends and myths as old as time itself remained. ¿How could she simply accept that now he would be the one who would have control over her and her people?