Page 62 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Oof!”
I landed with a hard thud on an unwelcoming floor, and the breath whooshed out of my lungs with a short, hoarse, unintelligible cry of surprise.
Even more surprising than my harsh, abrupt landing was the lack of fog when I opened my eyes.
Raising my head to check my surroundings, my eyebrows shot skywards at finding the air clear—although it was dark and flecked with transparent clouds of dust, stirred by my inelegant arrival.
I was inside the palace again, and everything was broken.
Where I sat, the room had been destroyed, its remnants spanning around me like the interior of a crater in the earth. It was as if the hand of the divine had reached down from the sky and scooped everything out—floors, ceilings, walls, and doorways from the ground to the rooftop. Furniture and paintings and broken mirrors lay discarded in uneven pieces around me, coated in dust and cobwebs.
About a floor above me, there was a gaping hole in the wall. It was positioned where a new landing should have been on the remnants of a decomposing staircase. The fog reappeared, plugging the gap as if a doorway had taken physical form out of the clouds lingering outside.
I fell from there.
Some of the mist wafted within the boundary of the damage, a faint whisper of vapour shaped like exceptionally long, wandering fingers gripping onto the roughened stonework collapsing in that part of the palace.
As a deep feeling of dread settled in my belly, my eyes skated across the edges of the decrepit wing, searching for another way out. The entire section was corroded, all entry and exit points sealed off as far as my widened eyes could see.
Columns and pillars had collapsed on each other, criss-crossing over the chasm between walls as the cavernous space cascaded up in ruin towards the heavens. The bone-white stonework was holding each empty floor at bay—a skeleton serving to prevent further disintegration against gravity. I couldn’t even tell if there was a ceiling left at the very top or simply another makeshift reparation born of fog.
Nothing was secured.
At any moment, part of the structure could come tumbling down, even where I sat stranded in the middle of the floor with chunks and slabs of stone littered around me. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought perhaps I was in a constructionzone, but Lucais wasn’t renovating. The entire area was so fragile that it had been cordoned off and condemned.
And guarded.
“The fog is an enchantment,” I realised out loud. I was right, but it had never felt so wrong. “That’swhy the palace doesn’t have one. It’s in the fog!”
“You’re not supposed to be down here.”
Clamping my hand over my mouth to suppress a scream, I spun around, flipping my position so I was sitting on my knees. “Lucais,” I gasped.
He emerged from the shadows and dust like a creature of nightmares.
Lucais’s blond hair shone nearly white in the grey light, his skin radiating an ethereal glow that put holy artefacts to shame, and the look on his face was one of pure, uninspired devastation. Hands in his pockets, he didn’t smile at me—not even with his eyes. I bit back the desire to cringe.
“Are you happy now?”
Carefully, I climbed to my feet, transferring the thick layer of dirt and powder from my hands to the fabric of my pants. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
He gestured to the damaged space around us as he moved closer, his presence alone enough to cause an atmospheric shift. Debris clattered to the ground somewhere in the hollowed-out chamber, and a fierce shudder gripped the skin between my shoulder blades. I tried to steel myself against it, but it was no use; it rippled through me while Lucais stalked over. I caught the slight narrowing of his gaze as he watched.
“You wouldn’t leave well enough alone,” he said, and his voice was full of tightly bound restraint. “You wouldn’t take my word for it.” His steps echoed with dangerous purpose as he approached me. “Now that you have found physical proof that Iam not infallible, are you happy? Does this make you feel better about your decision?”
My eyebrows dove to meet each other above the bridge of my nose. “Why would I be happy?” I asked, a little breathless. I didn’t truly understand what was going on. “Andwhatdecision?”
Lucais stopped in front of me and slid his hands from his pockets. Reaching out, he brushed his thumb across my cheekbone from my earlobe to my nose, studying my skin as if it were marred with soot. It probably was, but that didn’t explain the chemical reaction his touch left upon my tingling skin in its wake.
“The decision not to be with me,” Lucais answered at last, placing his other hand on the small of my back. He gave me a gentle push, guiding me over fallen debris towards the outskirts of the room.
“That’s not a decision,” I scoffed, twisting my neck to peer up at him. “If there’s only one option, do you still call that a choice?”
The question was rhetorical, so the only response he gave me was a small sigh and another gentle nudge to skirt the tangle of curtain strings lying across the floor. I followed his instructions and felt a sliver of relief settle on my shoulders once we were no longer in the middle of the impending crash site.
“We went over this already,” I complained, shrugging off his lingering touch like a coat that was suddenly making me feel too hot. I was irritated that he was the one who pulled back—twice—yet he acted as though the ball was in my court. Pinning him to the spot with my eyes, I searched his face for answers, daring him to prove me wrong with more than a few pretty throwaway words. “You don’t want to be with me any more than I want to be with you.”
“No,” the High King agreed quietly. He folded his arms over his chest, golden eyes flaring as he stared me down with the power of a thousand suns. “But I also don’t go snooping around your bedroom looking for things to absolve me of the guilt of that.”
