Page 95 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Uncontrollable sobs took over, and I was no longer able to plead with the shadows. Saliva dripped out of the corners of my mouth as I wailed, mixing with the blood that had started to dry on my chin, and a sickly-sweet burn gathered in my chest—the kind of feeling that convinced me I was about to die and be glad of it.
Because the visions weren’t of a battlefield from the Gift War. The world I had been shown wasn’t from the past. It was in the future—a war that hadn’t started yet.
Mercifully, the darkness pulled back the most confronting aspects of its mental beating, but only so it could show me the worst. The feeling overcame me first—the precursory sense of danger that hollowed out new depths to the pit in my stomach before fleeing to hide from whatever was coming next—
And then I saw it.
But it wasn’t the dark.
It killed off the darkness, too.
It killed off…everything.
Try harder try harder try harder—
“No! No, I won’t!” I shouted hysterically.
I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could, desperate to force spots and lines onto the backs of my eyelids. My soul-deep craving for a flicker of light and colour was overwhelming. I needed to see something—anything.
“I won’t! Get off me! Get off me!” I heaved in an enormously deep breath, preparing for spontaneous combustion if that’s what it would take to end the torment. “Get it off me!”
Something firm wrapped around my ankles like large, rough hands, but they lacked the warmth and softness of a human being or a faerie, and a scream coiled in my throat.
It ripped out of my chest when the placebo hands tightened their grip and pulled me, hard and fast, like I’d imagined the monsters beneath my bed would do if I let my foot dangle over the side as a child. It happened so quickly that it didn’t give me or the shadows in Blythe’s Court a fighting chance.
Cold air rushed down my throat completely out of order, leaving me gasping for breath when I fell out of the shadow prison and onto the solid ground with a thud.
Immediately, I rolled onto my side so I could heave everything up and out of my stomach.
Liquid flooded my throat, pouring out of my mouth, thin and watery like cordial but with a distinctly rotten and sickly taste.
I opened my eyes to find black water pooling on the red dirt, which was so dry and hard that it initially resisted the presence of moisture.
Pathetically, I wailed again, flipping onto my back so fast that my head slammed into a rock I didn’t see behind me.
My eyes slammed shut, and I saw stars murdering each other—
“Get off me!” I yelled. Through the roaring in my head, I could hear my voice becoming weaker and rougher as I wore my voice box down to gravel and dust. “Get it off me! Stop it! Let me go! Please, please, God, let me go…”
I felt hands on my face. Soft hands, small fingers. Warmth. “Aura.”
My body jerked away from the touch—a reflex reaction, defending itself. “It’s not me,” I cried, my voice shattering on the final word. “They don’t want me! It’s not me. It’s not me…”
“Aura!” A hand touched my eyelids, soft fingers tipped with something hard and pointy.
Morgoya.
My eyes cracked open, stinging and hindered by tears. Mouth watering and throat tight, I pressed a hand to my heart and tried to regulate something—my breathing, my heartbeat, my emotions. Anything.
“I…” The sound of my voice was beyond croaky. It was barely there, barely recognisable.
“Shh,” the blurry-faced High Lady crooned. I recoiled, highly suspicious. “It’s okay. You’re with us. You’re out.”
I noticed that she didn’t tell me I was safe.
thirty
Wrathful Sorrow
