T ime passed in a blur. I curled up in the dark in the corner of Caduan’s bed. He lay beside me, his hand on my waist, and neither of us said
anything at all. I did not realize we had fallen asleep until I was being jerked awake again.
“My King! My King!”
Luia sounded frantic. And yet, my consciousness returned so, so slowly. I questioned at first whether this was real, or a dream—everything seemed too soft and too sharp at once, my skin covered in goosebumps, the air acrid.
I forced my eyes open to see Luia on the bed, crouched over Caduan, shaking him.
My panic was sharp enough to cut through the unnatural haze in my mind. I jerked upright. Caduan’s head lolled back, limp even as Luia practically picked him up by his collar.
I did the only thing I could think to do. I slapped him across the face as hard as I could.
Luia, shocked, dropped him. He fell in a heap to the pillow. For several harrowing seconds, he still did not move.
“Caduan?” My voice shook. It came out softer than I expected, or maybe it just sounded that way, because my ears were ringing—why were my ears ringing? Why did everything feel so strange?
And then, at last, he opened his eyes. Awareness came to him slowly. And then, moments after it, came panic. His hand shot to his chest, clutching it.
Luia let out a shaky breath of relief. “Thank the gods. My King— Caduan, it’s—”
“What happened?” The words were ragged. His breathing was uneven. He pushed himself upright in an ungraceful lurch, hand still at his chest. “I
— Something has—”
“Meajqa,” Luia choked out. She was near tears. “That drunk fool, he tried to do it alone— the prisoner—”
A terrible wave of dread crashed over me.
Before Luia could finish, Caduan staggered from the bed. “Stay here,” he commanded, but I was already standing too—only to find myself nearly tipping over, as if the whole world had been tilted sideways on its axis.
Luia caught my arm, her brow knotted. “What is wrong with you?
Caduan—!”
She tried to stop Caduan, too, but he was already throwing open the door, half-running, half-stumbling down the hall. I followed him, catching up quickly enough to catch his arm and stabilize him—I felt dizzy and off- kilter, but at least I had my strength, while Caduan looked like his body was actively failing him. We swept through the halls, and I couldn’t even think to ask where we were going, until Caduan fell to his knees.
Nura’s cell was open. Meajqa, limp and bloody, was crumpled in a heap just within the door, surrounded by guards attempting to revive him.
The cell was empty.
A cold fear fell over me. Caduan stared at it in horror.
Upstairs, I heard someone scream, a single shout that soon became a cacophony.
Caduan stood and started limping down the hall. “Wait—”
He ignored me. We ran up the stairs, to the front entrance, the one that opened up closer to the city. The palace was in chaos, soldiers and guards and servants running in all directions.
He threw open the door and half-fell down the steps.
Below us, the city of Ela’Dar burned. People, from here little more than ants, ran frenzied through the streets. Screams rose from the city walls.
Everything went numb.
I heard shouts behind me and turned. A group of guards backed against the wall, eyes round, facing off against this…
This…
Was it a person? A Fey? They wore the uniform of Ela’Dar’s military. They had pointed ears and black hair. But their movements… no, their movements were wrong, just as their proportions were, every part of their body a little ill-fitted to the others. When it turned to us, its eyes were a million miles deep, black holes that took me through the center of the earth when I looked at them.
Wrong wrong wrong wrong, every primal instinct within me screamed. Then I realized: this thing was a corpse.
And Ela’Dar was overrun with them.
 |
ELA’DAR HAD BURIED SO, so many dead these last six months. Now those dead flooded the city. Caduan barely allowed himself time to take it in before racing into the madness. His terror seemed to have brought him a wave of frenzied energy, because now he just ran, ignoring all else as he focused on his destination.
The destruction was all-consuming.
Death was everywhere. Fey civilians were being torn apart by their own lost loved ones. Homes collapsed. Walls of stone crumbled as if they were paper. Around us, soldiers poured from the barracks, panicked and ill- prepared. Distantly, Luia’s commands drowned beneath the sound of screams of horror or pain.
Caduan did not stop, and so, neither did I. We flew to the edge of the palace grounds. A creature lunged at us, leaving burning marks in my skin with a mere brush of its fingertips. It grabbed Caduan, but I wildly stabbed it until its face—could one even call it a face?—was a disfigured mess seeping black. It released him and slumped to the ground long enough for us to slip its grasp. Out of the corner of my eye I saw it rise again seconds later, but by then, we were gone.
A circular stone building came into view through the trees.
I recognized this place. I had come here that night so many months ago, awakened by the strange force that seemed to shift in the air—the night I had found Caduan slumped against the wall, surrounded by the shades he had created, and we had walked back together in the night.
There were no shades here now. Not anymore.
Instead there was merely an open door and an empty room. The table at its center, a round slab of iron, was empty. The light that had once burned through the patterns in the floor had now dimmed. The glow in its center was gone.
Caduan collapsed over the table. For a moment, he just leaned there, breath heaving.
“I don’t understand,” I managed. “What is—”
And it was only then that I noticed his body. The monster had torn his shirt to shreds, leaving half his chest and most of his abdomen exposed— revealing streaks of darkness, overtaking his flesh like roots.
“I’m so sorry, Aefe.”
He looked up at me, and the pure devastation on his face was so much more terrifying than anything we had just witnessed. More terrifying than looking into the eyes of living death itself.
“I’m so sorry.”
