Page 16 of Shade of Ruin

“Lysara, be merciful,” I whisper, knowing what I’m going to find when I move the turkey. The goddess of beauty and death and kindness is the only god to pray to at a time like this. I lift the hen, knowing that there’s nothing wrong with her.

And I see exactly what I’d expected. Proof that the world is dying. The remains of six broken turkey eggs. White with tiny black spots. The shells are still there. And so are the poults. Broken things that look like they’d been burned. The tiny bits of feather are tinged with black. The bodies are twisted and gnarled.

An entire brood of chicks dead. Not because of a disease or a predator. No, they’re dead because the world is ending. Something happened before I was born that’s steadily getting worse.

I let out a sigh and turn around. At least I understand now, even if there’s nothing I can do to fix anything.

Chapter 9

The darkness has spoken to me again. There’s a solution, but the price is so high I’m not sure I’m willing to make that sacrifice. My Little Star…

~Queen Brenna, personal journals

The past few nightshave been different. While the food is cooking, Cole talks. Not about him and not about me. We’ve kept our lives out of the discussions, but we both know that if I’m to survive this new world I’m in, I need to learn about the Fae. I don’t know what it is about my desperate need for that information that spurred him to speak unbidden, but he no longer seems so annoyed at the mere idea of sound coming from my lips.

That’s why, when I step into the campfire light tonight, I’m surprised to see him standing stock still, his eyes on a distantarea beyond the trees. When I try to say something, he holds up his hand, silencing me.

What could it be that he’s listening to? The seconds tick by as I stare at him, every muscle in my body on high alert. My thumb presses against the glyph on my spear, and I feel the magic in the spear activate. It’s a feeling I’m growing more used to. As soon as I tried to feel it, it seemed obvious.

Then I hear it. An eerie silence that only happens when a storm is rolling in, but there’s not a cloud in the sky.

“The Nothing,” Cole hisses. He puts a hand out toward the fire, and it’s extinguished in a second. He rushes to his things and wraps them up. “I don’t know where it’s coming from,” he says. “But it’s here, and we need to get away from it.”

The Nothing? What is he talking about? Some new terrible beast that I couldn’t have imagined while I was living a human’s life? Or is it something else? Something more deadly? I don’t say anything, though. I’ve learned enough from him to recognize that it’s best to just trust the High Fae to know when danger is near. The moment thatColeis afraid is the moment that I should be petrified.

I grab up my bag and bedroll and sling them over my shoulder after shoving the night’s squirrels into them. Cole is already running, and I have to sprint to keep up. We get back onto the path and continue to head north.

Cole doesn’t seem to struggle to keep a breakneck pace, but after several minutes of continuous sprinting, I start to have difficulty keeping up. I’ve never run this far this fast in my life. My lungs burn from the exertion, but whatever is making him run has to be bad. I can’t imagine what would scare someone like Cole.

It takes everything in me to keep my legs moving second after second. I just keep my eyes on Cole’s back as we burn up the miles.

Then Cole stops so suddenly that I run into him. It’s like running into a brick wall, and he doesn’t so much as have to take a step to catch his balance. It takes everything in me not to fall to the ground when my momentum is thrown off that much.

I expect Cole to say something. Anything, really, to explain why he would just stop in the middle of the road. Then I see it.

I step out from behind him and understand what the Nothing is. The mists that swallowed up Riverside and so many other places in the world. In front of us, thick, rolling clouds crawl from behind the forest line. Tendrils of it creep along the ground. This is what terrified Cole. Not a creature. The mists that are slowly encompassing the world.

“We just go around it?” I ask, and he shakes his head.

“It’s a trick. The Nothing is trying to catch us. Why else would it have left that child alive?”

I look to where he’s pointing, and there, on the ground in front of us, is a boy no older than five. Walking around with a ball in his hand, he looks lost, but he’s completely unafraid. Only a few feet away from the mists, he could walk into them at any point.

My heart catches in my throat. For that briefest of moments, the world seems to slow down. I’ve never been this close to something so deadly. It’s like facing down a dragon. I can’t do anything to keep the Nothing from going where it wants and killing anything in its path. All I can do is run.

Everyone knows that the people who go into the mists never come out. At least not alive. The images I’ve heard described are disturbing beyond imagining, and the thought of that happening to a child when I could stop it isn’t something I can live with.

My legs move on their own, and I sprint toward the little boy. Even with how exhausted I am after our run, my feet move faster than I can remember. The boy looks up and starts laughing, falling backward onto his bottom. The ball slips out of hischubby little fingers and rolls closer to the mist, which just keeps edging closer to him.

“No, Maeve! Come back!” Cole’s voice calls out to me from where we were standing, but I ignore him. There’s no way I’m going to let this child be killed by the mists. He’s so close…

“Hey!” I shout to the boy, but instead of listening, he rolls onto his hands and knees and crawls toward the ball that sits only a foot away from the closest tendril of vapor. Terror fills me, but it only pushes me harder instead of making me freeze. There’s no way I’m going to let that little boy be lost to the mist when I can see him; when I can save him. I was given speed and strength and agility that a normal human could never imagine.

My Fae bloodline has made my life so much more difficult, but this is something good I can do with it. I can get to that child when a human couldn’t. It won’t take more than a few seconds to get there and get away from those deadly white mists.

I’m a hundred feet away from the boy when everything I’d thought I’d known becomes very wrong.

Until now, I’d thought of these mists as some kind of weather phenomenon. Something similar to morning fog. Except that it ate people. In my mind, it was like the Fae version of fog. Before I’d started running, it had been in the woods beside the road and in front of us, slowly crossing the road near the boy.

---