Page 18 of Heart of the Shadow King

“Come out!” she calls to the stone man under her hand. The reverberations intensify. This whole realm shakes, the sky above tilting wildly. The voices of the singers grow to an all-encompassing roar, and the crystals hum in many high-pitched frequencies, a dangerous harmony. In the center of all stands Faraine, my beloved, sending those vibrations deep into the stone. Hairline cracks begin to appear, not just on one stone, but on all of them, spreading swiftly through the crowd. She leans in, her phantom face serene save for the faintest puckering at her brow. The cracks spread, faster and faster.

Then they shatter.

It’s difficult to describe what happens next. Man’s perception cannot comprehend this realm of spirit. I seem to see black rock breaking into a billion particles of dust. Each particle glints and shines, an individual work of art, and I see them, every one of them, all at once.

For a moment both glorious and terrible, I feel the troldefolk of Hoknath surrounding me. Their heads are thrown back as though breathing out great lungsful of air. Green air which bursts from their lips in a tempest exhale. Poison whirls around me, around Faraine, a maelstrom of foul-smelling malice, hiding her from my sight. “Faraine!” I try to call, desperate.

The spirits hit me. One after another, passing through me, just as the dead of Mythanar had done. But unlike those dead, they do not wait to be encouraged. They are desperate for relief and rush upon me like a hail of arrows. The impact should rip my very essence to shreds, but somehow, somewhere, Faraine holds me. Her grip on my hands channels the pulse of theVulug Ugdth,keeping me together. So the dead pass through me, a whole city’s worth of spirits.

Only one spirit lingers, waiting to approach me after all the others have gone. She takes on a visible shape, and though I am stunned to my core by what I have just experienced, I nonetheless recognize her. The last time I’d seen her, she lay spread upon the ground, her body torn apart. The unwilling sacrifice whose life was violently taken for theva-jorceremony.

She sways a little as she approaches. Her eyes are hollow, and her body appears as it was in the last moments of her life—cut open, entrails tumbling from her torso and trailing after her. She stops before me, her face still lovely despite the horrors she’s endured, and tips her head to one side.

They believed it would save them,she whispers.The poison was too much.

I reach out, take her hand in mine. “What they did to you was sacrilege. No belief justifies such an act.”

She shakes her head, delicate lashes falling to shield her empty eyes.Perhaps if I had been braver. Stronger.

“No.” I draw her to me, wrap my arms around her, holding her tight. “You were everything you should be.”

After a moment she relaxes in my arms. When she draws back at last, her eyes have cleared, and the phantomlike image of her body has mended. No more gaping wounds where sacrificial knives tore her flesh apart.You will save the Under Realm?she asks.You will make my death matter?

“I will save them all.”

The young woman nods. Then she too passes through me. I feel her life in my chest, surrounding my heart, and gone.

I let out a shuddering gasp, drop to my knees. Part of me wants to let my own spirit go now. It would be easy; I can almost feel the way, a simple shrugging loose of these song-threads that hold me. What a relief it would be to give up this burden, this kingship.

But Faraine’s voice is in my ear: “They are at peace now, my love.”

I shake my head. So many were lost. I’d not protected them. I was their king, and I’d failed them.

Her hands cup my face, gentle but firm. “They are at peace,” she repeats. “You have done what you must.” She forces my head up, forces me to look at her. “Now come back to me, Vor.”

Suddenly I’m in my own body once more, bowed beneath the Stone of Death which I still hold above my head. It feels as though it will shatter my arms. I suck in an agonized gasp of air, tilt my head back, gazing up.

Faraine is there. In the water, standing before me. Her hands clasp the crystal, and her body shakes with the force of its resonance. She gazes down into my face, her eyes shining twin orbs of sapphire blue.

She blinks.

When her lashes lift, her eyes roll back in her head.

“Faraine!” I cry, surging to my feet even as she falls into the water of the sacred pool.

9

FARAINE

I fall through a cloud of heat which reeks of poison.

The relentless force at the pit of the world pulls me down to it. Down and down and further down. Tumbling, careening through emptiness. I feel the skin-flaying closeness of rock walls on either side, but cannot grasp them, cannot break my fall. There is an inevitability to this plummet. A doom that cannot be forestalled.

And below me . . .

Down where the heat is most intense and the pressure enough to crush bones . . .

A great red eye opens.

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