Page 102 of Shadebound
But Alessandro had never been accused of doing the smart thing.
For one heartbeat, everything was still. Then he shifted his weight. A brutal wave of heat and pressure crashed into my chest like a battering ram.
I flew backward.
My spine hit stone. The ceiling spun. The walls blurred and I didn’t even get a sound out before the magic ripped through me like a storm front. My body crumpled to the floor. Everything blinked white.
The last thing I saw was Alessandro’s face—expressionless. Cold.
Then darkness swallowed me whole.
Field Journal — Entry #290 - Classified
Shadebound do not work well in pairs. We do not enjoy the company of the shadows that are not ours.
Not when we like to consume it. Devour it.
But we cannot taste another’s inner monster without consequence...
I often wonder what will happen to the girl when I feast on her darkness.
I wonder if it will kill her again.
Chapter Thirty One, Names
The portal split open silently, with all the grace of a festering wound.
I stepped through without ceremony.
The first thing that struck me was the smell. Not blood, or herbs—those would’ve been mercies. This was something older. Wet stone left to ferment beneath moss. Copper hiding under tongue.
Mors had always been like that. A place full of ghosts even before anyone had died.
Behind me, Mortavia closed its jaws. The silver light died with it. I stood alone on the gravel path, boots crunching against frost-tipped stones, eyes sweeping the grounds like I expectedsomething to leap out of the shadows and bite. Nothing did. But the place was watching. I could feel it like a blade between my ribs.
And worse—so could my shadows.
They slid out from beneath my coat and collar like snakes from a disturbed nest, curling low to the earth, jittering against the seams of my trousers, brushing along the frozen weeds. They’d been calm in Mortavia recently. Quiet. Almost docile for a place made of nothing but decay and darkness. But here, on this cursed strip of land, they bristled like they remembered what had been done to us last time we came through.
My shadow wolf, Cipher, appeared like smoke from my fingertips. His nose met the cold ground, hackles rising as he inhaled the stench of a place we both despised.
A long exhale slipped past my lips as I waited for him to scout the area. I reached into my long black coat pocket and pulled out the old voice recorder one of my mothers had given to me before my arrest. I clicked it on with my pale inked fingers, and a red light blinked awake.
“Field journal entry number two-thousand-and-eleven,” I said, voice scratchy from lack of sleep. “Mors is a cesspit for monsters, and yet it is ruled by them. They still pretend to roam the halls for good reasons, not spite and malice.”
I walked forward as I spoke, letting the recorder capture the rhythm of my boots and the breath of the world around me. Cipher kept sniffing his way around the decaying land, more at ease than I was.
“My shadows are... agitated,” I continued. “They know this place. Or they remember it. And I suppose for a thing like me, there’s not much difference. Shadebound don’t forget what hurts them.”
I paused. The wind was rising, tugging gently at the edges of the trees in the distance, where the academy rose like black spines in the distance.
“I used to feel at home here,” I murmured into the recorder. “Among the decay. Among the bones. But this place has soured even more in my absence. I can taste it in the air.”
I clicked the recorder off. It didn’t need to hear what I really wanted to say. That this place had once felt like sanctuary—and now it felt like bait.
I tucked the recorder back into my trouser pocket, fingers brushing the stitching I’d mended by hand last week after a shadow monster had tried to take a bite out of me during patrol. It was still the most polite interaction I’d had all month.
The morning hadn’t broken yet. The sky was an anaemic shade of violet, the colour of a bruise that never healed, stretched thin over the iron-black silhouette of the academy spires. Light crept reluctantly along the gravel path in front of me, enough to show the bloody scarring in the stone where something—someone—had been dragged recently. Down towards the beach where my least favourite professor still taught his mind rapes designed as lessons.
