Page 90 of What Lies Within Masks & Shadows

Garrik chuckled, undressing entirely, before he pulled a glass vial from the bedside table. He sunk into his cot, uncorked the vial, and drew it to his nose.

The scent enveloped his senses.

Inhaling deep as a calming rush filtered through his nerves.

And before he laid back, he returned it to the table as he refused a memory threatening to form.

‘That’s it, son. It’s over. It’s all over.’

No,Garrik thought.It is not.Warring off the male’s voice, he focused on the smooth blankets of his cot.

It was warm from the sun blaring against the canvas, and his fur-covered pillows welcomed his spinning head. The pain of his back was not sufficient enough to suffer the unbearable touch against his abdomen, he could never do that, so he laid on the half-healed lashes and placed one arm beneath his head.

Closing his hollow eyes, Garrik surrendered to the merciless oblivion. Allowing the screaming darkness of a torturous nightmare to capture him and imprison him inside.

In an incredible surge of tendrils, Garrik, forged of darkness, parted the swarm of swirling ash and whorling smoke before materializing in his High Fae form.

“Why haven’t I seen the High Prince training?” Alora tracked the movement of shadows far off to her right, inside the arena.

His overt displays of power were of little surprise at this point; she’d been at camp for two weeks now. The High Princeseemed to manifest himself inside his powers more often than not—and simply dawn from darkness without warning.

Dawn, she played with the word in her mind. Another new piece of the High Prince being stored away.

Only this time, he ushered someone behind him; an elder High Fae male with long, tattered, gray hair and a scarlet robe.

Thankfully, Garrik didn’t seem to notice her careful evaluation when he dropped to his knee beside a wounded faerie. The young male wolf shifter was bleeding from a head wound sustained in a sparring session. Not with the High Prince, though. Garrik was never seen conducting in sport. In fact, she rarely witnessed him carrying a blade in camp at all. And when he did, she thought it looked more like a prop than a weapon.

In the short moments that followed, Garrik banded his arm around the faerie’s waist and threw the male’s arm around his shoulders, avoiding the claws that were slowly retracting. The movement was effortless. Lifting him before staggered footsteps trailed to the wooden wall to meet with the elder male who made quick work of bandaging the head wound.

Alora remembered how only a week ago, two others had their arms banded around Garrik’s waist, settling him into a chair while he struggled to remain conscious. And now watching him move as if nothing had happened … as if he hadn’t been lashed and humiliated at all.

Silver eyes flashed in her direction.

Her head whipped away. Denying completely her stare, she lifted her hands in front of her, focusing on a large chunk of iron within a pile of various stones just as she practiced countless times that week.

“Focus now. Lift only the iron, nothing else.” Eldacar’s gaze met hers from over his round-rimmed glasses. A pencil scribbled a note in the book he held before using it to point at her belt. “Try to replicate the shape of your dagger, without fire this time. Seeit in your mind.” In the air, he traced with his pencil, outlining the dagger at her side and marveling at the ordinary shape for effect. “The shape, the edge. The way the leather curves around the handle.”

Eldacar had stared at the dagger for days before he made the suggestion. Something about it had sparked his interest, but he could never quite identify why.

Alora had asked about his curiosity, then, when he blushed and fumbled with his pencil and notepad, he simply said, “Please forgive me. I believed I had seen something similar in a book, perhaps ages past. I regret I couldn’t locate which text.” Those brown eyes pleaded for forgiveness above stumbling lips as if he’d struck her a damning blow. He had turned away, distraught, and shuffled to the sanctuary of his tent mere seconds after, but his curious spark remained.

Alora dropped her palm to the hilt of the dagger, narrowing on the chunk of glistening iron among the stones on the table.

Practice had been the same in most of her training thus far. Her task, like each day that week, was to lift the iron without her fire igniting from her palms—or the object itself—leaving the stones where they lay. Then mold the metal into something other than its original form, though the strain of every muscle and thought made that part near impossible.

If she couldn’t mold it into anything more than a rounded glob, bursting with flames, all week, how did he expect her to create a dagger like her own?

Regardless, the stones on the wooden table began vibrating as if the ground beneath them quaked. Some slid to the dirt as her fingers curled, trembling into fiery fists. Wrinkling her forehead, Alora squinted her eyes, teaming with focused determination to be able to do this—just once.

The table too began to shake, and as before, the iron chunk drifted upward in a white, flaming ball. As if it had been heatedover fire, its form began to ripple. Liquefied metal was a prize, and hers to win.

It’s working!Sort of. She gritted harder.Come on…

With little surprise, the metal exploded into hundreds of molten shards, and everyone in the arena dropped from the incoming impact.

Garrik whipped his head in their direction in time to throw out his palm and conjure an invisible wall. The shrapnel pelted into it without passing through and simply fell at the impalpable base.

A wicked fury emerged from Alora’s throat as she pushed herself back up. “I’m better with just my fire, Eldacar.” She squeezed her hand until an ember formed.

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