Page 40 of Cursed Shadows 3

And he cares little about ever knowing me.

I think if he ever saves my life, it will be for Daxeel. Not for me.

And even then, I don’t bet on it.

The rest of the Breeze passes in silence.

I rock with the sway of the seat, and no one comes out into the gardens. Time ticks onwards into the First Wind, dust and leaves on the ground rustling, disturbed.

But I rock, back and forth, back and forth.

And I have nothing to do but think.

My head is leaned back against the post, and I stare up at the slivers of darkness I can make out through the gaps in the wisteria.

The Cursed Shadows.

An ill-suited name.

They are not true shadows, not cursed either, so I don’t quite know where the term originated. What it really is, ismore.

More darkness.

That’s why it feels so thick in the air now, like I’m going to suffocate in it the longer that the spiral pushes up into the skies at Comlar. That constant fuelling of the darkness, it just adds more and more, until what? Until finally the glowjars are dimmed entirely, until the flames in the lanterns on the streets are snuffed out? Until no matter the light, there is only darkness?

I don’t know why the dokkalves would want the Cursed Shadows, want to blind their own world. Sure, they can see in the dark as clearly as I can in the light, but it’s impractical enough that I suspect this is about war.

Daxeel channels the Cursed Shadows now, but if he gets to Mother’s ear and survives it all, it will pass into the iilra. It makes sense for that to be their way, because the iilra can stretch a power over an entire sisterhood across Dorcha, but Daxeel is just one male. He dies, so do the shadows. But the iilra? There are always more out there.

There are always more to come.

A battlefield that suffers the border between light and dark? Bring iilra. They can sweep the lands in excess darkness, steal away the sunlight, and the victory will be for the dokkalves, the light ones will be blinded.

Still, it doesn’t sit with me the way it should.

I’m missing something.

It should make seamless sense, but it doesn’t.

Daxeel, like all other dark males, is a warrior at his core. Trained and accomplished. It is their culture, their law to be raised as fighters, then to serve a decade in war. But his career choice of an extractor, of a torturer, is not meant for battlefields. So will he change his career? Will he decide on a warrior role, just to keep battlefield advantage for his people?

No. No, there is more to it than I am seeing.

The aftermath of the Sacrament is uncertain, and my half-witted theories aren’t quite fitting together. But I have the awful feeling that everyone is in on a joke, except me—

And I am the punchline.

I check in on Aleana again that phase, maybe just to kill time, maybe to observe her failing health. When I find her, she sits at a vanity table and uses a damp cloth to wipe away black bloodstains from her mouth.

Her bare legs are what hook my attention. Smeared in stains of black, like smudged ink, it looks as though her sickness is eating her from the inside out.

I say nothing about it, and instead we enjoy dinner together in her bedchamber before she retires for the Quiet.

Alone, I return to my bedchamber.

I don’t see Daxeel.

7

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