I walked from the building and thought I was going to explode with rage.

I wrestled with myself like I cannot remember having to.

I was shaking with an anger I simply could not seem to control.

I flashed through the doorways and to the old castle ruins in an instant, into a pretty soft brightness that made me angrier still. I suppressed the desire to start tearing the ruins apart and in the end, stared at the sun until I thought I was going blind.

The intense pain gave me the edge I needed to regain control and slowly, I was able to move into the layers of cool and clarity that allowed me to breathe once more with regularity, to unlock my knotted muscles and to gain some form of shape to my thoughts and my being.

I have never wanted to kill anyone as badly as I wanted to kill her this day.

It would be so beautiful. So simple.

I would put my hands on her head, leverage her jaw ah so gently and with the softest of crunches beneath my fingertips, beneath my palms, a gentle reverberation that would travel up my forearms, I would break her neck and there would be an end to it.

She was quite right.

I could take any woman in the land, a pretty one, a titled one, and she too could bear my children. I did not need her anymore. I knew what she knew and with experience would know more than she did now. There was nothing she could teach me anymore.

I would let her live long enough to give birth to my son and then I would put an end to her and all my suffering on her behalf, directly caused by her, by her and all that she was to me.

The decision made me feel lighter, easier in an instance. I closed my eyes, burning still and dried, blind, and restored them to functioning. Breathing deeply and freely once more, I added a further decision.

I would stay away from her until the time came.

It was a foolish notion to have wanted her by my side at the coronation. It was as though I had wanted her to find a way to escape me – why, I don’t know, perhaps in some way, some hidden part of me thought of it as amusing to wage another war with her, a hide-and-seek perhaps across the levels, the domains and the kingdoms.

I considered the notion and it was true. Such an outcome could have provided some challenge, some excitement, an entertainment of sorts after all these centuries of nothing and nowhere.

But there were challenges and there was foolishness.

This woman brought out the worst in me in every way. She had driven me to the very brink of insanity not once but a dozen times or more and I was no longer willing to continue on in this way.

She had said that Sepheal had forgotten to teach me two lessons – that of magic, and that of love.

I would seriously say that I had learned them both and had been given the third, that one of insanity, for free.

I opened my eyes and the land lay clearly and sharply defined before me.

All of it was mine.

With her no longer in my thoughts, all there was would be mine.

All of it, unconditionally, eternally.

I slowly turned on the spot and surveyed all that lay around me, feeling a perfection and a calm at last again that had eluded me for centuries, even when I returned to an ordinary state of functioning.

I smiled to myself.

Then it occurred to me to pay a little visit to my young friend.

I would speak with Chay Catena.