Page 126 of A Deception of Courts

Destroying the gate was temporary – more could be built. But without the keys, a gate was nothing but stone.

“I hope you are right.” I faced the labradorite before me.Altar’s bones.

“I give the stone the Icethorn key, and you shatter it?”

“Precisely,” Rafaela confirmed.

“If only Aldrick had been alive long enough to see this,” I said, reaching out and pressing my palms into the sharp edge of the stone’s surface. I felt it sing beneath me. The stone trembled to life beneath my touch. It drew me in with such force, I knew that trying to remove my hands would result in a battle. “It would have been one of life’s greatest pleasures to see as he watched all his years of hard work crumble before him.”

It was an odd feeling, the blood seeping out of my wounds to creep toward the stone, defying the laws of nature. Ice crept over my fingers the more I pushed it out of me and into this vessel. It crackled across the dark stone slowly, spreading and devouring. I opened the power deep within me and pushed it harder, expelling the pressure into the stone. There was no need to spill blood, it helped with the extraction, but I could’ve done it without it. As Aldrick had said, the key could have been given willingly. He just chose otherwise.

It wasn’t my innate power that flooded out of me, but the wild storm that dwelled deep inside. The presence of cold, which filled me the moment I’d accepted the Icethorn power all those weeks ago, awoke.

I closed my eyes as the sensation overwhelmed me. The stone flickered its unseen tongue, tasting the Icethorn key. Then, its teeth peeled back and sunk inside it, latching on like a leech. I cried out. The sudden pain was overwhelming, all-consuming.

I tried to call out for help, but my body refused me.

“Do not stop, not until it has it all!” Rafaela shouted, but her voice seemed quiet.

At what cost?

My mind pleaded for me to pull away, but I feared the stone had me shackled. It pulled and pulled, sucking the power out of me. I felt the marrow in my bones shiver, my veins knot and blood hiss.

I squinted through the wild winds that tore around me. Rafaela fought against it, hammer poised and ready. Her braids whipped like snakes around her skull.

As the stone drew the Icethorn key out, I witnessed a new horror. A vortex of dark smoke turned the middle of the gate into a sea of shadow. All but one stone was alive, fuelling the gate, opening it.

Deep inside me, I felt the gate crack. Like a door being forced, but not completely, just enough for someone to peer through the crack on the other side.

“I’m… opening the gate!” I shouted, my throat raw and bloodied. “Rafaela, what have you done?”

“You are not, I vow it.”

Erix and Duncan were swaddled in the shadow, trying to reach me. My scream had made them forget orders. Duncan, now free from Erix’s hold, ran into the centre, my name sliced across his lips. Behind him, Erix flapped his wings and became airborne. He looked down at the reaching waves of shadow that tried to pull him back down.

Duncan couldn’t have escaped it. His powerful arms cut through the walls of shadow and mist that slowed him down, trying to fight his way toward me.

The darkness rose up to his waist, then his chest, then to his chin.

Deep in my bones, as the stone continued to drink the Icethorn power from me, I sensed it crack open like a door on hinges that desired oil. I tried to pull back from the stone, but it was too late.

One moment Duncan was there, the next, he was gone, slipping beneath the wave of shadow and not coming back out of it.

And I knew, without question or thought, where he’d gone.

The gate had claimed Duncan. It had pulled him from the small slip my power had encouraged open. Without Elinor’s key, it wouldn’t have been enough to free Duwar. But his presence leaked out into this realm and captured what he desired.

I locked eyes with Erix, who flew out of reach of the shadows. For a moment, the world went quiet. I saw into Erix’s wide eyes and read his intention.

Erix didn’t hesitate. His silver eyes dropped from mine, and then he was gone, diving into the swell of shadow beneath him.

Like Duncan, I felt Erix’s soul leave this realm and slip into the one that waited through the crack in the gate.

The key’s presence was fading within me. I felt it, the final will of the power clinging onto me. I reached out my will and held onto it, entering a competition with the labradorite stone. I refused to give it up. If it took the key completely, Rafaela would destroy it.

Duncan and Erix would be lost.

Forever.

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