I found myself staring at the things growing out of her back. “Wings,” I muttered, remembering the large winged men I had seen on my first visit to Ledenaether.
“Just as you are people of light and life—there are people of darkness and death,” she said. “Neither can exist in the opposite world. I bargained for a life here without the Darkness inside me, a life that ended the day I tried to escape. Now, it’s claiming me.”
“What can I do?” I squeezed her hand, watching her pupils dilate and expand, the colour of her irises trying to merge with her pupils.
“The prophecy,” she said urgently. “The words that started all of this. You need to know.”
Her nails dug into my arm, her eyes shivering, that colour trying to merge again.
“Tell me,” I tried to soothe her, but my head was beginning to pound, and when I looked over at Calder, there was blood dripping from his nose.
He quickly wiped it away, but my urgency increased. Ein closed her eyes for a moment, arching her back as though it pained her. Her words were slow, her voice breaking.
“Darkness has always followed light,
But the two have never met.
They are separated by shadow,
The hanging bridge in their duet.
Until the creatures of night rise,
Crossing the world without colour,
A face of dark and a face of light,
Turning to confront each other.
Good and evil, eternally bound,
Will lose the world of the bright,
Until one of each is crowned,
On the immortal throne of night.”
She released my arm, her eyes opening. The colours had merged, and her gaze now glowed slightly. She screamed, thrashing violently, tearing apart the tree with the violent battering of her wings. Calder dragged me back. My head swam dizzily, my vision becoming shaky.
“You.” Ein growled, extracting herself from the tree and crawling toward me. She rose to her feet, her wings beating out around her. “Stay,” she ordered, her smile flashing, brilliant white. “The Eilfur would like you to stay.”
Eilfur.
“What do you mean?” I asked as Calder dragged me away.
“We need to get out of here,” he ordered.
I stumbled, both in shock and weakness. Ein wasn’t exactly chasing us, but I didn’t like the way she was just standing there, watching us leave. We started running again, our legs weakening with every step. We collapsed as soon as we stepped back into the midworld. I rolled to my back, my heart flopping sickeningly in my chest.
“Eilfur. It means eternal,” I repeated Frey’s translation, straining for breath.
“Must be what they call the king of Ledenaether,” Calder grunted, his hands notched on his knees, his shoulders shaking slightly.
“Eilfur was the name signed to all the birth and death records for the King of Fyrio.”
“You’ve been busy.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.
“It was weird. The men of the family were all called Vidrol, and they never had any daughters. The mothers always had the same names as well.”
I fumbled for my timepiece, holding it up before my face and counting back through the hours.
“We still have time.” I switched my gaze over to his, a tight smile pushing at the edges of my mouth. “They said I couldn’t save you and get back in three days.”
“There’s nothing I would like to do more, than prove those bastards wrong.” He stood and picked me up, securing his arms around me. “Do your thing.”
I clawed my hands into the air, ripping them through the invisible fabric around us.
“Lotte.”
We fell from the midworld to the foreworld, standing in the same place at the base of the Wailing Crag—though the grey in the air had made way for a suffocating darkness. I hunched over as Calder set me down, retching as the sky exploded into a web of lightning and deafening thunder. It seemed to be furious at our sudden appearance, at the fact that I had travelled through the Vilwood and still stood there, prize in hand. The nausea crippled me, pain fissuring through me in time with the lightning. I screamed as Calder grabbed me, trying to figure out what was wrong.
“Hide,” I begged him, as I reached inside my chest, coaxing the shadows from their hiding place. “It’s happening again.”
The Darkness was launching an assault on my mind, threatening to tear me apart from the inside out. I watched as Calder inched back only three steps. Of course he wasn’t going to leave.
I closed my eyes, begging for the control I so desperately needed. I released my shadow inside my own body, spending every inch of my concentration on not allowing it to leave the confines of my skin. The Darkness inside me swelled, doubling its attack, and I rolled in the dirt, a groan vibrating through me. My shadows were burning it out of me, but it was an agonising process, and I feared I would explode into cinders at any moment.
“You almost have it,” a voice whispered, strong and deep, right above my face.
He was touching me, even though he shouldn’t have been. His fingers were rough against my cheeks, his hands dwarfing my head.
“Stay with me, Ven.”
I released the last of my energy, flinging it out as it burned through the rest of the Darkness swelling beneath my skin. My eyes flew open as I lay there, as empty as I had ever been. Calder loomed over me, and the sky loomed over him, colour leaking back into the horizon, the sun creeping through the trees to warm my face.
“You did it,” he whispered, his lips brushing the corner of my mouth in a silent acknowledgement of that fragile, unbreakable thing between us.
We had bled for the world again, and it had accepted our sacrifice, whether we belonged to each other or not.
We were enough.
It was enough.
For now.
To be continued…
A Dream of Embers, book three, is available for pre-order now!
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to the beautiful readers who appreciate that the struggle to see the light is always so much sweeter if you begin in the darkness.
This series is such a slow burn, and so grim at times, but I promise …
The sweet end will be worth it.
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