Page 105 of Destroyer

Lord D’Luc and his dozen Children were there waiting. Pristine in white, they looked like a hoard of dark-eyed, staring angels. Archie and Gwyneth clattered down the stairs after Ru. Professors Obralle and Cadwick were sick and bedridden, along with the rest of their colleagues.

After Lord D’Luc’s arrival, the spreading illness had been the talk of the Tower, according to Archie and Gwyneth. But Ru couldn’t be distracted by such things. Not now, not when she needed to focus.

A thick silence hung over the dungeon.

Ru pushed her hair behind her ears and sighed, placing her hands on the table. She stared at the artifact, her frustration with it so heavy and so implacable that she felt like a great wall of ice had grown up inside her, repelling everything in its path — passion, joy, laughter.

Why won’t it listen to me, she thought viciously.

Just as she had done every day since Fen’s departure, over and over, she tried to bring the golden light forth, to make the artifact react in the way it had done with Fen. It was the only course of action she could think to take, the only thing that wouldn’t end in the certain destruction of herself, her friends, and the Tower.

Because no matter how many times she failed in this demonstration, every time she refused to do another, D’Luc forced her hand. He demanded, coerced, and argued. Every time she came to his office, shaking with exhaustion and rage, he demanded that she continue. And each time she tried to reason with him, his words became needles, his every word laced with threat.

And while he never threatened her outright, she read between the lines of his smooth words.

“If you don’t do this, I hate to think…”

“If you can’t comply, the regent shall be notified, and your place at the Tower… the risk…”

Ru woke often in the night in cold sweats, in the wake of a recurring nightmare that her friends had been emptied of their emotions, soulless and dead-eyed, just like the Children.

Lord D’Luc would not let her rest until either she broke, or the artifact did. So Ru continued to do the only thing she could think of, to desperately reach for that feeling of connection, the warmth, the flowing golden light from before… and instead always found herself in a freezing, empty darkness.

The pain was worse each time, as if the artifact retreated day by day, further from her grasp. She could feel it, stillknewit was there, called for it, cried out in silence, but it gave her nothing in return.

Her eyes were squeezed shut, hands flat on the table, head beginning to pound with an oncoming migraine. She waited for the telltale warmth of blood on her upper lip.

Fen had abandoned her.

The artifact had abandoned her.

She pushed and pushed, reached and reached, until she came to a final impasse. All was dark and empty.

She was alone now in the black with the headless body of a nameless King's Guard. She was alone with his sightless eyes; alone with a dripping sword. She was alone with Lady Maryn’s terror. She was screaming, crying for someone to come and take her, to bring her somewhere safe, to take these things out of her head.

I hate you.The words came from so deep within that she wasn’t aware she’d thought them at first.

Fen, Lord D’Luc, the artifact… none were exempt from her ire.

I hate you.The wordsburned, blasting across the invisible thread between her and the artifact.

I hate you.Then there were screams, someone calling her name from far away, and she fell into a moonlit night licked with flames, white against the black sky.

CHAPTER37

Ru woke in the dark, drenched with sweat.

For a moment she thought she was still in a dream, falling forever into a sky of ink and flame, of paper-white trees on a vast horizon. And then she heard Gwyneth’s soft breathing. Her friend was curled up on the settee, which she’d moved next to the bed. Soft blue moonlight caressed her peaceful face as she slept.

An overwhelming tenderness came over Ru. Gwyneth hadn’t abandoned her. She had always been there, even when Ru was so unwilling to see beyond the artifact, beyond herself.

She lay back in her pillows, the image of a dream clinging to her waking eyes. She couldn’t flush it away; it clung to her, persistent. Her nightclothes sticking to her sweaty skin, she slid out of bed as quietly as she could manage, padding to the chest of drawers where a water jug and a cup sat waiting.

As she lifted the jug, the swirling blackness rose in her mind again, broken only by a moon and stars and flames… and a thought appeared in her mind so suddenly it was like a crackle of white-hot lightning across a dark sky.

The dream, the dark night, and those flames… she had thought they were trees, white against a night sky, so small she couldn’t have made them out properly. The illustration from the book she’d taken from the library and promptly forgotten about.

Ru found the book exactly where she’d left it, in a pile on the floor next to her desk. She flipped through it in the moonlight until she found the depiction she remembered. There it was as if ripped from her mind — a black night dotted with stars and an overly large moon. And far below, what she had thought were white trees, were really flames, licking upward toward the vast sky.

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