Page 111 of Of Fate So Dark

Cold alarm shot through me at the look on his face. “What is it?”

“Gwyneira.”

Without another word, Ozias dropped the horse’s reins and took off running.

29

MELISANDRE

With my last scrap of awareness, I fled. I retreated with every fiber that remained of my being, fleeing as hard and fast as I could from that nightmare and seeking something, anything to offer me refuge and stability against Alaric’s lies.

That I was nothing.

That I was gone.

That my every goal, my great plans, were over.

He didn’t care to chase me any longer. The darkness was all that was left. But still I raced onward, burrowing deeper and deeper to get away from what couldn’t be real.

And just as I had throughout my whole life, I found it burning like a dark star at the core of the universe. Hate.

Pure.

Beautiful.

Hate.

It blazed within me, down below all the cruelty and disrespect. It glowed like an absence of light so profound, no star in the sky could compare. Because of its brilliance, because of its cold and hard embrace, I’d found the Voidborn and become a vampire. I’d overthrown the Jeweled Coven and claimed Eira’s throne. I’d even returned to my father’s pathetic little village and personally ended every one of my tormentors’ lives.

Monster, they’d screamed. Please, they’d begged.

Oh, how I relished those sounds.

Down beneath the magic and the fangs, this was my true power. This was why Alaric still could not erase or control me. Not because I was broken or because I couldn’t handle his presence.

Because I was a more profound expression of this beauty than he would ever be.

Deep below the suffocating pressure of Alaric’s power in my mind, I wrapped myself around that cold, black star and let it fill me, flood me, until I drew every ounce of it in. I was the darkness. This darkness.

And I’d never hated anyone in my life as much as I hated him.

Like flashes of light through thick fog, fleeting images of the world returned. Rough walls. Torches. A tunnel of crudely chiseled stone where the shadows moved in unnatural ways.

We were in the deepest, oldest parts of the castle. The place my vampires stayed. Even now, I caught glimpses of them in their human forms.

Alaric stood before them all, his arms—my arms—extended, palms down. The magic within me rushed to his call just as it had in the forest with Stelaruna. My power surged down into the earth, racing past the dirt and rock toward the nexus far below it all.

But though he drew upon my magic, he didn’t possess the full extent of what I was. He didn’t control the truth that lived at the core of my soul. Of my own will, I rode that blast of magic toward the nexus below Lumilia. I could not feel my body. I was only distantly aware of the castle groaning and quaking in its terror. But I didn’t care.

I was the pure dark star that would take this nexus for myself, and Alaric would not stop me.

A ripple passed through the darkness—Alaric’s surprise. “You’re still here?” He sounded amused. “What a stubborn little creature you are.”

I paid him no mind. In the forest, his hold on me had weakened when he destroyed the nexus. It’d only been for a moment, just a flash.

Even if he had control of my body, even if some things I’d experienced had been a lie, that moment could still be his undoing.

The brilliant glow of the nexus spread through the darkness ahead, a bright core where numerous ley lines all met and crossed. A thousand frail threads spread from each ley line, reaching out into the world, but if they were like thin roots holding reality together, then the nexus was the seed from which the supports grew.

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