Page 47 of Crown of Wrath

For Maeve, there’s nothing I can’t endure.

She needs me now more than ever before, and so I swim through the exhaustion. I swim until I feel the pulsing of another island. Just like the first, it’s a spot of life in the darkness, and I move toward it. I drag myself onto another sandy beach—so similar to the first—but when I pull myself out of the void, it’s not a world of twilight like the first. Instead, it’s an island filled with trees. A forest.

The scent of rain is in the air, but there’s a brightness that I hadn’t expected. A cloudless sky lets the sun’s rays heat the air as if we were in the middle of summer. Unlike Maeve’s original landscape, there are no shadows. Just massive trees full of green leaves under a summer sun.

“Maeve?” I call out.

I feel an answer, but it’s not words. It’s… different. A wind blows, making the black sand shift along the beach. Why isn’t she answering? Then I see the shadows, or rather, the lack of them. The sun is shining through the trees, yet it’s just as bright underneath the foliage as it is in the open.

It’s like the trees aren’t real.

I step toward them and run my finger along the bark as I’ve seen Maeve do so many times. It’s not bark that I touch. It’s stone.

They’re all made of stone, and that’s why they aren’t moving. The branches don’t sway in the breeze. The leaves don’t shift as I walk by. I reach up and touch one of the hanging branches andtrace it as I’d trace Maeve’s skin, my black nails scraping against it with a sharp rasping sound.

I move to the leaves, shining bright green in a world without shadows. When my nail touches the leaf, it falls from its place on the branch and crashes to the ground, shattering like a gemstone.

After the shocking sound, I recognize just how silent this place is. That crashing leaf shouldn’t be reverberating in my mind. Other sounds should have filled the silence afterward. The wind. Moving branches. Animals. Insects. There are so many sounds that fill the space of the world, and in my experience, only the Nothing and the void are truly silent.

Even in the mental landscape, the mind creates these sounds to make the world seem more real. Mine is filled with wind and flames and the sound of sand moving over glass. This should… It should have something.

“Maeve,” I say again. “Talk to me, please.”

My mind whirs as I try to understand the metaphor of this place. It’s cold and stone. This is the Queen of Earth’s domain. Or something similar. But why aren’t there animals? Why aren’t there sounds?

And why won’t Maeve respond?

If she wanted me out of her mind, she’d push me out, but I can barely feel her here.

Then I realize why she’s not responding. She doesn’t want Cole here. Shadows rise around me, blocking out the sun, and I say, “Maeve Arden, do not ignore me.” I run my nails over a tree branch just as I would have touched her cheek, and a shiver rocks the world.

“You have a responsibility to the physical world, Maeve Arden. You are the Conduit. The world needs the last High Fae of the House of Earth.” My shadows extend, and instead of becoming people, they become the rest of the world that she cared about.

A gryphon made of inky darkness rises from the ground and gives a shake. “Who will protect the gryphons, Maeve Arden? Your connection to the Throne of Earth is what is going to allow the gryphons to lay eggs. What about the drakelings?” Zephyra rises out of the shadows at my feet and extends her wings. “Her brood mates died because there was no one to bring the magic of the dragons back into the world. But you can do that. You can be the person who gives magic back to the world.”

More creatures, not just the magic ones, find their place in this silent world. Deer and turkeys and eagles and hawks. “You’re going to save the animals, both magical and non-magical. Will you hide here long enough to fade into the void? Will you run from the world that desperately needs you simply because you hurt?”

An earthquake rumbles under me, and leaves from the stone trees begin to drop. Branches follow, and I have to put up a hard shield of shadow to protect myself from the falling debris. A thousand crashes around me fill the previously silent world with a cacophony of sound.

The branches and leaves hit my shadows and shatter as I hide from them. Then the sound stops, and everything is silent again. I let the shadows dissipate, and in front of me stands Maeve. Not the black sand version from the last island, and not the flesh and blood version I expect. Instead, this one is made of a black and white stone. Sharp angles as though she were roughly carved from marble. Just like the trees.

“I am not hiding, Shade,” she whispers. “I have never hidden from anything. Not from predators. Not from Immortals. Not from you.”

“Then why aren’t you leaving this place?” I demand.

She caresses the drakeling’s shadowed face, and the shape blurs for a moment. She hesitates before looking back up at me. “Because it doesn’t matter if I leave this place or not. I won’t beable to save any of them. To do that, I’d have to beat Gethin and the House of Steel, and that’s not going to happen. Soon enough, Darian and Lee will die. Maybe in battle. Maybe to the Nothing. Then it will just be me and Cole, and we’ll fight. And we’ll lose. And the drakelings and gryphons and basilisks and deer and turkey and hawks will all still die. I’m not hiding. There’s nothing I can do. I’m not strong enough to protect them all. Why should I force the last people I care about to die in an impossible fight?”

She smiles at me. “But you could stay here, Shade. It’s nice having someone to talk to. It gets so quiet.”

My shadows move toward the stone effigy of the woman I love and climb her body. “You’ll die, too, if you stay here.”

My shadows crisscross her body, but there’s no reaction. Even when I lightly squeeze her with them. She’s not here. She’s everywhere in this mental landscape. There’s no way to play her body against her as I have in the past.

“Would that really be so bad? Every person who’s gotten close to me has died, Shade. Would the world truly be better off if I lived?”

“Yes.” I turn around and walk away from her.Saving Maeve is the only thing that matters. Even if she hates me in the end.“Maybe everyone you ever know will die, but until you do, fighting is the only acceptable option. You can save the world. It may not be your fault that it’s broken, but it is your responsibility to fix it because you’re the only person left alive that can.”

I turn toward her effigy again, and this time, I don’t look up at the sky. I focus on the effigy as if it were really Maeve. “If you die, the Painted Crown will pass to Gethin, and I promise he will hunt your friends down and murder them, along with everyone you’ve ever known. The only way that anyone you care about survives is if you stop hiding behind your fear and pain and pull the pieces of your soul together. It’s the only way. Anything elseis letting your cowardice kill everything that matters to you even more than the Nothing has.”

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