Page 6 of A War of Crowns

The witch held him fast, her left hand digging long fingernails into his skin through the thin fabric of his tunic. Her right gripped the dark blade that now pierced his heart, hilt-deep.

There should have been pain. There should have been a fresh, burning agony searing his nerves. But there wasn’t.

Instead, there was a deep and resounding cold rippling through his chest. It sank ever deeper, like so many clawspeeling through flesh and bone to pierce at something far more profound. Something that went far beyond mere blood and sinew.

His soul.

“You’ve been very bad,” the witch whispered to him, her breath ghosting against his ear with those four words.

Nausea gripped Hedley’s stomach at the sensation.

Though still he struggled against her hold, it was ultimately in vain. Whatever strength he had left had oozed right out of him the moment Alyx took flight.

Now it was long gone, carried away upon the usuru’s shimmering wings as she made for the shores of Elmoria, far across the Straight.

“Must you always play with them, Skatia?” the Arathian man snarled to the witch as the world around Hedley continued to fade into a frigid haze.

Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision as the woman holding him whispered directly against his ear in a further brush of lips to skin, “Don’t mind him, darling. He’s only jealous…”

Jealous?Why would anyone be jealous of this?

A tear streaked down Hedley’s cheek. Confusion and fear mingled into one beast within his heart as the jewel on the hilt of the witch’s dark blade suddenly shone with a prismatic light from within.

He could spy wisps of something swirling inside that gemstone, as if those vivid hues were being pulled from somewhere deep within himself to fill the jewel’s dark confines.

“Don’t worry, dear one…” the witch cooed.

Pinned in place, he watched on.

None of it made any sense. His ma’s stories had never mentioned anything like this—nothing at all about cold, dark blades and gemstones that thrummed with an eerie luminescence.

As the world faded further from him, Hedley stole one final glance out into the night. It had been several moments since Alyx’s silhouette had disappeared from view.

She was gone. She made it.

…But I won’t.

“Lord save me,” Hedley gasped through swiftly numbing lips when that realization fully struck home. He didn’t want to die. He wasn’t ready to die.

Not now. Not like this.

Anything but this.

At the sound of his whispered prayer, the witch could only laugh.

“Your Lord has no power here, boy,” she hissed against his ear once her amusement subsided. Scorn dripped from each syllable. “This isArath. Only the magic of Our Lady Below reigns upon these sands. And She hungers.”

Hedley gasped again, his back arching when the witch dug her dagger all the more deeply into his heart as though in punctuation to her words.

“Mysai…belongs to Elmoria…” he protested, trembling with the effort of uttering even those few words.

The darkness was roiling in quickly now. The cold borne from the witch’s blade had taken root deep in his chest. His heartbeatslowed. His breath weakened. Each draw of air into his lungs was a trial of its own.

“Nothing in Arath belongs to Elmoria,” the Arathian man snarled from somewhere behind him and to his right. “Your people tried to claim these lands and failed. We pushed you out.” Atchsounded. “And then we grew fat. We grew lazy,” the man continued with obvious distaste. “Your people may have held Mysai these two hundred years, boy, but that ends tonight.”

That aching cold had crawled its way into his extremities now. He tried to flex his fingers, but he could no longer feel them.

Not like this, Hedley pleaded again, this time inside the murky haze of his own mind.Please, not like this.

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