Page 29 of Elven Crown

A quick twitch of Rowan’s leg punctured the stillness. His hand jerked next, then an entire leg, then all his limbs at once.

Still stiff and glowing with that inner blue light, his flesh remained streaked with dark mercurial silver creeping across his physical form like vines around in an abandoned temple. Rowan’s body bucked on the floor, convulsing and jerking in every direction.

Then the glowing blue light of the potion gave way beneath a thicker, brighter, more dangerous gray-silver strobing around him. First in one limb, then the other. Jumping from side to side.Winking once at the hollow of his throat and again at the center of his chest before sparks erupted above his kneecap and from his ear.

In seconds, the same silvery-gray light of Rebecca’s Bloodshadow magic, the final touch to this potion of The Striving, fluttered up and down Rowan’s form while his legs flopped and kicked at the floor. His hands slapped against the wood without control, and his head whipped from side to side, completely at the mercy of his own experiences.

Rebecca was about to be sick.

This final trial’s potion was only supposed to confront initiates with the deepest, darkest parts of themselves. For someone like Rebecca, who already had an intimate relationship with all those parts of herself, it had been a piece of cake.

It would have been just as easy for Rowan, too, if she hadn’t added a little extra punch to go with it. If she hadn’t added pieces of herself to his trial using her own intimate knowledge of his weaknesses to confront him alongside everything he knew and hated about himself.

Rowan wasn’t just squaring off against Rowan Blackmoon in his own mind right now.

No, whatever plane to which the potion had transported him, he now stood against himself as his own worst enemyandRebecca Bloodshadow.

His friend. His greatest ally. His most dangerous opponent.

Rebecca could hardly breathe at the sight of him seizing on the floor beneath the potion’s grip. This was only supposed to have been a message sent to him alone, something extra only Rowan would understand. He would have understood it, too—the meaning behind everything she’d crafted of her magic and slipped into that flask.

That he was butting into her business and she wouldn’t stand for it.

Clearly, she’d miscalculated, and now it was all wrong.

She wanted to believe in him, to have faith in his strength, to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it looked too much like she’d made some horrible, irreversible mistake. She’d misjudged the amount of her own magic she’d turned into a poison for him.

Had she added too much to this final stage, or not enough? Had he changed so much in the last several centuries, weakened this badly, that what he otherwise might have withstood in the past was now too much and she was killing him?

The echo of Rowan’s limbs bucking and twitching and slapping against the gym’s hardwood floor were the only sounds now. They continued in one long, endless, unbearable symphony of struggle and disaster, and there was nothing anyone could do.

No one could help him. No one could intervene, even a sworn healer like Zida.

This was The Striving. Rowan was on his own.

Rebecca nearly jumped out of her seat when a deafening crack ripped through the gym, as if an ancient tree had split apart down the middle, though it all came from Rowan’s bucking body within the casting circle.

The nauseating sound echoed again and again through the gym, lasting far longer than it had a right to last. Then the darkening silver streaks flashed together one final time and disappeared.

Rowan stopped moving and lay there in the casting circle, limbs spread haphazardly where they’d landed, his head rolled to one side. Completely motionless.

Lifeless, even.

From where Rebecca sat, that was exactly what it looked like.

No one said a thing. No one moved. Everyone waited, watching, hovering on the edge of anticipation, because surely there was more.

Surely, this couldn’t be it.

Only when she finally released the breath she’d been holding did Rebecca realize she was already trembling. She forced herself to inhale slowly and deeply, soshewouldn’t keel over too, right here on the dais. Then she glanced up at the clock above the doors.

Only three minutes till midnight. Three goddamn minutes, and nothing else had happened.

Rowan lay there on the floor, maybe dying, maybe already dead. She had no idea. But she had to do something.

There weren’t any options.

Part of her wanted to leap out of her chair and off the dais and go to him. To heal him right there in front of everyone. To break all the rules of The Striving and all the rules she’d set for herself and followed to the letter since the day she’d decided to be someone else. Something else.

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