Page 93 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The more I struggled, the more disturbed the shadows became, the more it hurt, the louder I shrieked, and the deeper into their grasp I fell.
I held my breath to starve my lungs of the fuel they needed to scream, and met the High King’s shell-shocked gaze with my own.
A gale raged around me, whipping at my clothes, but the shadows were static. Pain built and built with the momentum ofboulders rolling down a hill inside my chest, but I bit down on it, clamping my teeth together to foil the screams.
With one look, I could see the panic in the High King’s eyes as he assessed the situation—that he couldn’t tell where my body ended and the shadows began as the Court of Darkness devoured me.
Lucais lifted a hand, his golden eyes blazing with power, and shot a steady stream of searching light towards the shadows. But the darkness anticipated his move and yanked me backwards, forcing me deeper into the abyss. Sparks flew as the shadows rose up to form a shield, blocking his light from reaching me. The High King’s power hit the darkness like molten lava crashing down the side of a volcano during an eruption, and the shadows only pulled me tighter into their ranks.
A veil of black and white fell between us, ripping colour from my vision. Straining my eyes before they could adjust, I searched for any of the High Fae standing along the cusp of the Ruins. Relief crashed into me when I found them again, but it was a momentary glimpse through a murky film—and only long enough to see the end.
I smelled them coming.
The shadows tightened their grip on me, pinching another shout of pain out of my mouth that quickly snowballed into a cry of warning as an enormous caenim flew past me from the clouds of darkness at my back.
The beast lunged out of the gaping hole the shadows had made to hold me as their prisoner of the dark, and it went straight for the High King of Faerie.
twenty-nine
Get It Off Me
An entire horde of caenim flew out of the abyss behind me.
My inner child had been right to fear the wall of shadows because it held a terrifying, hidden reality inside. The Court of Darkness was possessed by a true maze—shadows that carved a labyrinth of walkways throughout the land, reducing the light to almost nothing and disorienting anyone trapped inside it.
A sob tore through my chest as I watched the caenim disappearing through the veil of shadow along the border of Blythe’s Court. Tumbling out of the darkness like nightmares coming to life, they landed on the unforgiving red dirt of the Ruins with their teeth, tongues, and claws poised to slash my friends to ribbons—my friends, who were still reeling from watching me being pulled inside the dark maze by the smoky clouds.
It was like an old movie playing on a screen bigger than my mortal eyes could conceive—a black-and-white silent film with special effects that were difficult to follow through the grainy quality of the imagery.
There were hundreds of caenim. Maybe thousands.
The shadows were teeming with them. Each time a new beast leapt past me, the magic on the other side of the darkness splintered, tugged in new directions until all I could see was a white-hot fireworks display of power shooting out across the Ruins.
Another caenim leapt out of the shadows, and Batre screamed. Loud enough to shatter the sound barrier between us. Loud enough to bring everything back to full speed. Loud enough to distort the darkness for a moment that lasted only as long as was required for me to see the caenim with its ghoulish, iron-tipped claws around Morgoya’s throat.
The darkness rallied and swarmed between us once more.
No!
I shrieked with enough power to rip my head free from the confines of the shadow’s body mould, violently thrashing from side to side as I put everything inside me into yanking my arms and legs out of its grip.
The figments of darkness hadn’t felt like anything too familiar when they initially touched me, but the longer I stayed inside their cocoon, the more reminiscent of the portal they felt. I was being plied with tacky and dirty magic until I couldn’t take it anymore, stuffed full of it like a roasted chicken.
It was everywhere—a violation of my mind, body, and soul. My heart was beating violently as if the effort would bring me any closer to Morgoya and Lucais, but my mind was being ripped in half, the continued assault of the darkness serving to distract me from what was occurring in the Ruins. Though I tried to hold onto that devastating connection, it soon slipped from my grasp, the clamour of battle following suit, and then I was alone with the sound of my lungs straining once more.
The dark had teeth and knew how to bite.
With every snap of a shadow against my flesh, I was overcome with a sensation of wrongness flooding my veins. It was underneath my skin and fingernails, between the curls whipping around my face, coating the raised hairs on my arms and the back of my neck, inside every last one of my pores, filling the wrinkles of my skin and fingerprints, and between my toes. The filthy, unnatural darkness was the moisture on my eyes, the breath in my lungs, the clenching and unclenching of my heart, and the poisoned fluid it was pumping through me.
It was me, and I was it, and there was no escape.
There never had been, and there never would be.
Reunited or split apart—
The pitch of my scream, rising through the chaos like a ribbon stolen by a hurricane, hit such a new height that I didn’t recognise it anymore. The shrill, keening sound shot out of me like the wailing noise from a stovetop kettle as I threw my head back, escalating with every slice of darkness into my skin, leaving a trail of scalding tingles down the column of my throat.
Wretched and cross, I tried to fight it off because desperately—so, so desperately—I wanted to win. But it was futile, and part of me knew that. Hadalwaysknown that. I couldn’t ward off the darkness when all I had to offer up in its place was more darkness.
