Page 210 of Of Nine So Bold

Your realm is dying.Its deep voice was suddenly much closer, as if the creature was right beside my ear.We cannot cross that which no longer exists.

The shaking around me grew worse. Screams came from the darkness. It sounded like the smaller gateway demons.

It sounded like my men.

Desperately, I strained to reach them in the darkness. But everything was fracturing, and I couldn’t find a single place to hold on to as I tumbled faster and faster toward cracks that were dragging everything into?—

Light flared ahead of me and something shoved me from behind. I hurtled through the blur of light like I’d been pushed from a cliff.

Gravity caught me. Reversed. Slammed me down onto my back atop something rough and scratchy.

Air rushed from my chest, and I gasped. Overhead, the gateway hung in the air, split through by a fissure so much more horrifying than the gateway itself.

Pureemptiness. A space my eyes couldn’t make sense of, becausenothingwas there. Not even air. Not the sky beyond it.

Just nothingness that had never heard of such a thing as darkness or light.

The empty realms.

Holy gods, what had my stepmother done?

In an instant, the tear in reality started to eat into the gateway. A shudder went through the spell.

Like a great force was ripping it safely away from my world, the gateway opening vanished, leaving only blue sky.

And the fissure, which was spreading wider with every passing second.

Scrambling to my feet, I backed away from the gash in the sky and looked around frantically.

I wasn’t where I should have been. This wasn’t the apothecary district of Lumilia. Instead, I stood all alone in the northern garden of my castle. The hardy winter plants were withered and dying in their beds. The castle wall was ahead of me, obscuring any view of the city or the countryside. Meanwhile, the air to the west felt strange. Tingly like what I’d felt among the witches of the Jeweled Coven, which hopefully meant that they’d made it here.

But as for my men…

My heart in my throat, I stretched out in my mind, searching.

Relief hit me a moment later. Somewhere deep in the earth beneath my feet, Ozias was moving fast, heading toward the castle. A vague sense of presence told me Niko was there too. The rest were behind me, but not close.

I turned.

And froze.

The castle that had been my childhood home looked like something out of a fever-fueled nightmare. The walls were crawling with black fungus-like vines. Gray, gnarled branches stabbed out from between the stones of the walls, like the poisonous apple trees were growing from within the walls themselves. Dried and blackened leaves encrusted with yellowed pustules of rot hung half-dead from their ends.

My heart ached. I’d been away for so long, and this felt like returning only to find everything I loved had been destroyed.

Oralmost.

I pushed down the pain as best I could. There had to be a way to stop this. Reverse it.Something.

We just needed to find it.

And each other.

I started toward where I could feel Ozias.

A door banged against the wall on the far side of the garden. Hulking figures with green skin and tusks strode through theopening. Their eyes glowed, and when they saw me, they growled like hungry predators.

Oh gods.

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