Page 94 of Crown of Wrath

We tumble out from a shadow under a snow-capped cedar tree. The unmistakable scent of its branches is a stark contrast to the scentless world we’d just left. The mid-afternoon sun is so bright that it stings my eyes, and I have to blink the light blindness away.

“Do you know what that was?” Echo asks nearly hysterically.

“No idea. I assume you do, though?” I am really getting tired of not knowing anything.

She crawls on hands and knees across the snow until she’s kneeling in front of me. “That’sthe Darkness.” She says it like it’s so obvious.

“Well, that’s what it said. It might lie, but…”

Echo rolls her eyes like a child talking to an idiot. “No, Maeve. It’s the Darkness that your Mother talked to so she could find all the hidden things. It’s how she foundA History of Magic and Dragons. It’s how she came up with the plan to create Valinar. Maeve, that creature is older than the dragons. It’s… It’s older than gods or anything on Nyth. There’s a distinct possibility that it’s even older than Nyth.”

I run my hand through my hair, knocking off some of the snow that clings to it. “So we should have accepted its deal?”

“I have no idea. Brenna didn’t talk to me about any agreements. She just said that it was dangerous. More dangerous than anything you could find in Nyth or Valinar. Even more dangerous than Calyr, because Calyr was a being that could be defeated. The Darkness couldn’t.”

I blink. “How could anything kill Calyr? He’s a dragon.”

“And dragons left Nyth because they were afraid of dying. The dragons left because something was hunting them. We think of them as impossibly strong, but they’re not. They’re stronger than High Fae, but there are things out there that are far, far worse than them. And The Darkness is one of them.”

She says that last sentence like it’s an undeniable truth. “We need to talk to my mother,” I say as I stand up. An hour ago, I felt like I knew exactly where I stood in the world. I felt like I had finally become someone who could make decisions without being blindsided by something I couldn’t have ever considered before.

Now, here I am, trying to understand a creature I’ve never heard of who could have killed dragons. There’s always another secret, and all of them seem to find the worst possible time to reveal themselves.

Before I’ve had a chance to brush the cedar needles off my pants, somethingveryheavy hits the ground behind me with a loud WOOMPH. Then another and another and another in quick succession. I barely have time to notice Echo’s eyes open wide before I whirl around, a shadow spear appearing in my hand on instinct.

Once again, I’m confronted by something I’d never expected to see, but at least I know what this is. A drakeling. Well, four drakelings, but my eyes don’t move from the largest of the four. One with blindingly silver scales whose eyes shimmer with a myriad of colors. It’s enormous. The size of a bull, it truly stands like a miniature dragon.

Long horns branch off from the glowing silver scales in twisting and splitting branches all over its body. Each one ends in a sharp spine that could impale a person. It snorts and a puff of smoke rises from its nostrils.

I hear Echo skittering backward behind me, but I don’t move. My instincts had insisted that I retreat from The Darkness, but this isn’t the same. I know how impossible it would be to hurt a drakeling, and there’s nothing I could do to stop these four if they decided to attack me.

I walk forward toward the silver one, ignoring the three behind it. Without a hesitation, I reach out and run my fingers over its forehead, my nails scratching the hard scales that have gotten far larger than I remember.

“Zephyra,” I whisper.

Maeve. My name echoes in my mind, and I smile down at the drakeling who knew exactly who I was when she landed.

“What are you doing here? And who are your friends?” I finally look at the other three. One is a deep russet brown that shimmers with a red tint. Its horns sprout from all over its body like sharp porcupine spines, covering it and making it appear even larger than it is. The next is a dark emerald green, and its scales shine like gemstones without a single horn adorning its body. It seems to preen where the others look at least slightly ferocious.

The last one is black. From the tip of its snout to the end of its tail, it’s as black as pitch without a bit of shine to it.

The last drakelings.The words are soft, but they leave nothing to the imagination. Could these four truly be the last four alive anywhere in Nyth?

“There aren’t any others?” I ask with just as much incredulity as I’m feeling. My eyes move from one to the next, taking them each in.

Zephyra shakes her massive head.All the rest have returned to the void. We are the last. Each of us found something to feed on when the rest of the drakelings starved. We survived until Maeve Arden became the Queen of Stone, and now magic is returning to the world. But then it began to fade again.

I give Zephyra a frown. “What do you mean,it began to fade?”

Echo shifts, looking a little less afraid as I talk to the drakelings so comfortably. She musters up a bit more courage and takes a few steps closer to Zephyra and her friends.The magic in the air is less than it was. It did not all go away, but it… it has become hard to fill ourselves. This is why we found each other and went searching for Maeve Arden. You are the reason the magic came back to the land, and when it faded, we knew you must have some part of it as well.

Zephyra gets a very un-dragonlike look on her face as she cocks her head.But there is nothing wrong with Maeve Arden.She moves her enormous snout toward me, and she sniffsloudly, those massive teeth only inches from my body.Maeve Arden is still the Queen of Stone. Why did the magic fade?

“I don’t know,” I say softly.

“It’s because you’ve been in Valinar,” Echo responds immediately. “You can’t be the Conduit for the Throne of Earth while you’re not in Nyth.”

Zephyra swivels her snakelike head to peer at Echo, and she takes the two steps toward the girl. Echo steps backward, fear filling her face, and she trips over a rotten cedar branch.

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