Page 94 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Nevertheless, I still felt like I might die from overexposure as nausea gurgled in my stomach, and everything that was wrong in the world filled me to bursting point.
Flashes of light danced across my vision through the other side of the maze, searing the veil like a hot poker dragging its tip down a curtain. Sparks ricocheted for miles—an explosion that could have been an atomic bomb as easily as it could have been Lucais.
It was powerful enough to rival Batre’s scream, ferociously tearing down the sound barrier until bits and pieces of the battlecame flooding through to my ears, but I couldn’t see or hear Morgoya. The only sounds were of the caenim—grunts, growls, and woeful moans, like an orgy of death and destruction—as they continued to whoosh past me and wage an attack on my closest friends.
Feeling dizzy and confused, I started to think about the storm again. It had either gone quiet, or the dark cloud covering me was so thick that it prevented any signs of it from peeking through. It was too hard for me to tell whether the flashes of light and vibrations on the ground beneath my feet were the storm or the High King lashing out at the universe from the Ruins, but if I had to place a bet with my life as the collateral, I’d be betting it on Lucais.
I wondered what he was doing and what he was thinking, but our mental connection had been jammed by the veil between us. It was still there, and I could pick it up like a receiver in my mental hand, but there was no dial tone because all of the phone lines were down. I called him, but I knew he couldn’t hear me. I knew it because he didn’t answer, and yet I could still feel him like a hand around my wrist—like he was also holding the receiver in his mind even though silence was the only connection stretching through the line.
Using that feeling to spur myself on, I wrestled with the shadows, pushing forwards only to spring back like I was fighting with an elastic band. When I managed to get one of my arms free, it was only ever for a nanosecond before the shadows swallowed me up again.
Everything ached.
Cramps seized my muscles and invisible cuts decorated my skin like tattoos that couldn’t be seen—only felt.
Frustration shot out of my mouth in a noise that started as a yell but quickly escalated into another howl that dragged itself out of my throat like a morning star.
What do you want? What do you want from me?
My mental cry was full of anguish, and the shadows in the Court of Darkness rejoiced. Like a key unlocking a door, the answers to my questions came flooding in so hard and fast that I thought my head might explode. They rammed into me, one after the other, relentlessly battering me until I lost the strength to hold my own head up, and I had to rely on the presence of my copycat shadow to do it for me.
Tears streaming down my face, I hung limply in the air, the darkness cradling me like a martyr while it drained the last ounces of self-possession from my bones. Even then, my body struggled with the transition, rejecting the caress of darkness the same way I’d recoil from a burning hot oven tray.
My reflexes were on overdrive, desperately trying to shake me free from the hideous touches slicing into my back, tickling my spine with knife-sharp claws, and pulling at my fingernails and hair. I had no control over it—
Try harder try harder try harder try harder try harder try harder—
My throat was shredded raw by my screams as I flailed, kicking my feet and turning my head so hard I thought my neck might break.
Break break break break break break break—
Something hot and wet dripped out of my nose, pooling on the plump curve of my upper lip before tracing the outline of my mouth and spilling down my chin. At first, I thought it was from tears, but then I tasted the wicked metallic tang infiltrating my mouth as the other nostril began to bleed, too.
Let me go,I begged.Please, let me go.
Flashes of blood, weaponry, and warfare filled my mind. Each vision came at me like a monster out of my closet, lunging as soon as I opened the door, or a bullet train I couldn’t dodge.Every time I flinched away, the shadows spun me around, and another horror rushed out of the maze to take its place.
My head lolled back, the force of each pull and tug enough to dislodge it from the rest of my body. In truth, I wasn’t sure why it hadn’t. Unless—
See.
Images that had to have been from the Gift War tore me to shreds.
Visions of burning buildings, decimated cities and towns, empty playgrounds with merry-go-rounds covered in scorch marks that had melted half of the structures into the ground, black stillwater inside houses with their roofs ripped clean away, and fields of bodies in shining armour coated with blood and gore.
As I peered closer with my mind’s eye, my blood turned ice-cold in my veins because—
Men. Women. Children. Bloodied, bruised, and broken bodies. Piles of them clad in bloodstained clothes covered the fields around the decaying Forest. Smoke burned, billowing up from a space hidden deep inside, followed by the gradual collapse of trees as they lost their fight and crashed onto the floor.
Wet with blood and coated in dirt, the pieces of the lifeless faeries who had bled out onto the ground lay between the burial piles—hearts, lungs, intestines. Dead crows lay scattered between the corpses, lured in by the rotting organs of the fallen before something had killed them, too. Some were mid-feast on a soldier’s open wound. One had its beak stuck inside a rib cage, their smooth, feathered neck lax and their wings splayed out to the sides.
Visions of a great stone wall replaced the field, bodies slung over the battlement as if the men and women had been on watch when it struck them. Weapons were stacked neatlyagainst walls, and there wasn’t a single trace of blood or gore to be found. Those people hadn’t seen it coming.
A town at the base of a volcano, melted by the lava that had been stopped by something only halfway through burning up the last remnants of its victims clothing and shoes before it cooled and set.
A lake with faeries face-down, floating in the water—
“STOP IT!” I screeched. “Stopit!Stopit!Stopit!”
