Page 25 of Mother of Death and Dawn

The messenger led us to Caduan’s private wing of the castle. The double doors were closed. Some awareness lingering beneath my fragile mortal senses shuddered as we approached—something that nagged at fragments of old memories.

I hesitated, and Caduan noticed. He paused, his hand on the door.

“I can have someone return you to your room,” he said.

I wasn’t sure why this felt like an insult. “I do not want to return to my room.”

“You do not want to see what is in here, either.”

I knew that he was likely right. Whatever I felt emanating from within reminded me far too much of the nightmares that plagued me at night. And yet… it called to me, too.

“I will stay,” I said.

I thought Caduan might argue with me. But instead he gave me a long stare that I could not decipher and said nothing more before opening the door.

I had never seen this room before. It was circular, with many windows and few decorations. The floor was white marble. The combination of the waning sunlight spilling through the window and the gleaming bright tile made the pools of violet blood seem to glow.

There was so much blood.

All of it dripped from a single table at the center of the room. Upon it lay a Fey man, a once-white sheet pulled up to his neck. Luia, Vythian, two healers, and a soldier surrounded him. A nauseating wave rolled over me, as if something in the air itself was rotten.

Caduan’s face was grim. He approached the table and pulled back the sheet. Luia let out a shocked curse.

A massive, savage gash ran from the man’s navel all the way up to the base of his throat. Someone had stitched the wound, but the blood still pooled and dripped from it. Black and purple mottled the flesh around it. Dark veins spread beneath the Fey’s skin, reaching out over the golden skin of his chest and abdomen, almost to his shoulders.

The man was weeping. When the sheet moved over him, he let out a wordless cry, body lurching. The healers held him down.

I couldn’t move.

The strange sensation I felt in the air grew thicker. My stomach threatened to empty. My ears filled with a high-pitched scream, though I recognized what I was hearing was not a “sound”—it was not coming from the disfigured man’s twisted lips, but somewhere deeper.

“How did he make the journey back alive?” Caduan muttered.

“We made sure that he lived,” the soldier said. She was covered in violet, her face pale. “You needed to see firsthand what the humans are doing, my King. What they are doing to those of us they capture.”

“He was recovered from Ara?”

“By the shades. Yes. He was a soldier assigned to send a message to our Threllian allies in the south. Shortly after his assignment, he disappeared.”

“He went too close to Ara’s Threllian outposts,” Luia said.

“We did not think we’d recover him, but…” The soldier’s eyes fell to the man on the table, and words seemed to escape her.

Luia’s lip curled with hatred. “That Aran bitch is a vile beast. Who knows how long she had kept him alive like this? All for her twisted experiments.”

Caduan leaned over the figure, solemn.

“He won’t live.”

A new voice came from behind us.

I turned and went still.

For a moment I was looking at another person, one that I knew long ago. A man with golden hair who I hated so much it burned me alive. The man who had betrayed me.

The past and the present collided, until I realized…

No—no, it wasn’t him.

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