Page 92 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Lucais waved both hands like he could clear the clouds of confusion away. “Look. I am sorry we don’t have anything more concrete to go on yet, but you didn’t see the way the shadows on the Map reacted to her presence. They’ve been clouding Blythe’s Court for so many years, resistant to even my light, and yet one touch from Aura’s hand made them scatter into the aether. Unless she put them there herself and then forgot about them, what other explanation could there be?”
Everyone stared into the void lingering between us.
“Because I’m human?” I suggested dubiously. It was all I had to offer to the conversation. I switched my gaze to Wrenlock’s calm, handsome face. “Because when you reject magic, magic starts to reject you, right?”
The tall, dark man smiled at me, but it didn’t reach those beautiful brown eyes.
With his entire hand, Lucais gestured regally to the shadows still wafting around my feet. “Then explain that,” he said with a sigh.
I grunted, annoyed, and let my head fall back. When I opened my eyes, the storm was still swirling above us, reminding me of our original purpose in coming to the Ruins and the Court of Darkness. Lucais must have been on the same train of thought because he instructed us to bench the topic for another day in a less creepy location, and then led the group onwards.
A cold chill seeped through to the bone as the shadows danced around my feet.
I couldn’t feel the shadow behind me, but I could see darkness collecting at my back in my peripheral vision.
I considered asking Lucais or Morgoya to send it packing with a blast of their light magic, but the closer we got to the lapsus, the less the shadows bothered me.
They didn’t feel foreboding or dangerous anymore. I had a weird sense of the slate being wiped clean with back and forth strokes that matched the pace of my footsteps as our group drew closer to the storm.
Lightning flashed above us, and rumbles of thunder broke out into a brawl on top of our heads, steadily increasing in volume. Nobody said anything, and I wasn’t quite sure what else to look for aside from signs of environmental disruptions, so it took me by surprise when a thread of the shadows in the Court reached out to greet me like a hand.
The sound of my sharp intake of breath was swallowed by a boom of thunder.
The shadow hand poked me with a long, jagged finger. It wasn’t like the mindless dark swirling around my feet; it presented itself to me with purpose and intent at eye level. I froze, my muscles tensing and joints locking into place as I waited for a sensation to follow. A tickle or a searing pain. Something.
I felt nothing, and it poked me again.
What the fuck.
A shiver zigzagged down my body as a second hand reached out to join. And then a third. And a fourth.
This is getting ridiculous.
“Hello,” I hissed, skirting the outstretched hands to continue following my friends. “Now, go away.”
The damn things were undeterred. Shrugging off their attempts to prod me with shadowy fingers and dodging as new upper limbs formed out of the darkness ultimately gained me nothing—they wouldn’t let me through.
They encircled me, backing me up against the border of the Court of Darkness.
It was at that moment I realised how dangerous something could be even when it couldn’t be tangibly felt.
I tried to swipe the hands away. My flesh and bones fell straight through the wrists made from shadows, but they took a moment to reform.
Wildly, I started swinging at them, flapping my arms around in disjointed movements as I attempted to bat away the hands that extended towards me long enough to slip out of their reach.
It was like mopping up a spill in the ocean.
I made a noise in the back of my throat, and saw Lucais turn back for me right before the unholy mother of all shadow hands rose up from the dark maze like a wave, rolling straight towards my face. Without thinking, I jumped backwards—
And fell straight into the darkness at my back.
A guttural scream ripped from my lungs as the shadows sank their teeth into me.
In a torrent of wind, I was ripped in half and stitched back together in the dark.
Wrenlock had been right. It fit me perfectly.
Every curve along my body and every strand of my hair was swiftly and seamlessly engulfed in darkness, but it was like falling into a pool of jelly. I couldn’t swim away. I couldn’t run and hide.
