Page 16 of A Queen Of Broken Realms
The light brightens beneath me. The creature. I look up. I reach. I kick. I wave the silver arrow, but it only stirs the oil of decaying human souls.
Just like diving into deep water, Ashen’s voice says from memory.You hold your breath. There’s a pressure in your head. Then you open your eyes and you are in another world.
Something slams into my back with a force that empties my lungs of air.
At first, there’s no pain. And then burning, raging fire. I try to strike at the source with the silver arrow, but it’s knocked from my hand. I watch it spin and sink into the black depths.
Crimson stains billow in the water around me. Something is stuck into my back like claws, as though a giant eagle is fishing me out of the sea, carrying me off in its talons.
Except I’m not going to the surface.
I’m going down.
And then a voice. The monster of the deep. Its thoughts are the last that I hear in my mind.
Leucosia of Anthemoessa,it says.It is time to meet your fate.
CHAPTER6
ASHEN
“Do you feel her?” I ask as I look down at the witch. Her ebony gaze scans the sea. She is still and silent for a long moment.
“No.”
“She was here. I know it. She leapt into the water.”
The witch takes a step closer to the cliff edge. She looks down at the glistening black waves. “If you’re right, you know what she was up against. You swam in it too. What’s it like?”
I don’t want to tell her. I don’t think I even have words adequate enough to describe the horror of those waters. It is anguish and sorrow in depth unfathomable. It is hell. “Worse than you can imagine.”
“You felt her in it?”
“Yes. She was in distress.”
“And then what?”
“Panic. Terror. And then nothing. I have not felt her since.”
Not even once. Not for a moment. Not a whisper of Lu in the mark that binds us. It’s as though she disappeared from the Shadow Realm altogether. And I felt nothing from her when I went to the Living Realm to retrieve the witch who now stands beside me.
Nothing.
“She cannot be dead, or I would be dead too,” I say, trying to convince myself as much as the witch. “Perhaps if I die, she will be sent back with me to the Resurrection Chamber.”
“Can you be sure? If she’s trapped somewhere that you can’t feel her, you could damn her there. What if she suffers there? Lingers there? Is that a risk you’re willing to take?”
No. It’s not.
I make no reply. I just let out a long breath and scan the sea that keeps its secrets, refusing to give up a trace of my wife, no matter how much I stare or curse or beg it for even a scrap of solace.
My wife. My Lu. The one most precious star in all my darkness, winked out as though she was never more than an illusion.
“Her necklace. It connects you, does it not?” I ask, trying to keep the desperation from my voice.
“Yes. She can summon me with it, if we’re in the same realm,” Ediye says, though her voice is too low and quiet for hope to live there.
“Can you find it without being called?”
