Page 132 of To Scale the Emerald Mountain
What remains sprinkles to the ground on a hiss, nothing but smoldering, green ash giving off a faint whiff of jasmine and cloves.
My eyes widen as Alec pants in my ear, still crushing me against himself.
“Yes.” His whispered word drips with awe.
His impassioned breaths bring me back to reality. I throw my head back, intending to hit his face but barely clip his jaw.
He breaks his hold, and I turn to aim my spear at him. I pause my attack when I find him deflated, shoulders slouched, his sword hanging limply at his side.
“Tell me what it will take to bring you back to me,” Alec pleads.
“I’m not the girl you apparently cherished so dearly before.”
“You are. Nothing can ever take away who you are.” Alec’s face softens as he takes a step towards me.
“Don’t.” I back a step away; he follows.
“I have cried more tears in the last months than I have collectively in my whole, long life. Each one makes me emptier than the last, knowing that you will not comfort me through them. Knowing that you will not allow me to comfort you through yours.” Alec steps forward again. “How do you think I feel? How do you thinkit is for me, knowing that—other than you—the person I love most in this world is the one to have caused your pain?”
My hands shake and breaths shred through my ribs as he continues to walk towards me.
“His actions have ensured that I can never be whole. For even though he is still breathing, he is dead to me.” Alec’s barely an inch from my spear when he stops, throwing his sword at my feet, the sound of his surrender clenching my heart. “My life is meaningless without you. You are everything.”
Scorching tears streak down my face as the weight of guilt and shame that I have been so desperately trying to drown finally succeeds in drowning me.
My vision warps to a lush forest.
A cruel face with eyes so like the ones just piercing me shine lifelessly in the summer sun. The hateful face rubs the tip of his nose against mine as he whispers with a lover’s caress,You aren’t worth knowing.
The scene shifts to the same face looking at me with affection as he holds me against a door and kisses me like my breath is his lifeline.
I scream as I lunge forward and bury the spear of my staff deep within Locane’s heart, plunging past bone and pushing to break through the skin of his back.
The twisted face of Locane fades away to show its loving counterpart before me, holding my weapon with both bloody hands as he pulls it out of his chest.
Because it wasn’t Locane who I stabbed—it was Alec.
It’s Alec who gasps as he dislodges the staff and drops it on the ground with an ear shattering clang.
Shuddering breaths heave in my lungs, trying to make sense of my reality and hoping that this is another instance of being unable to trust my mind.
As a trickle of blood escapes the corner of Alec’s mouth, and he falls forward to his knees, hands over his mutilated heart, I know that this is real.
A mangled cry wrenches from me as I run forward to catch him.
I place my hands over Alec’s, quickly coating them with his slick, hot blood.
He gasps and reaches up a sticky red hand to cup my cheek.
His labored breaths rattle through me, shaking my teeth.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I cry hysterically, stroking his face.
The tiny light flickering in my chest I have tried so desperately to ignore begins to fade—too quickly.
“No. No, no, no.”
Alec looks me in the eye as he weakly wipes a tear from my cheek with trembling fingers before his arm falls limp to the ground, a death rattle flowing from his lips. His light within me gutters and extinguishes completely as an anguished scream rends from my lungs.
