Page 234 of Mother of Death and Dawn

A cold fear fell over me. Caduan stared at it in horror.

Upstairs, I heard someone scream, a single shout that soon became a cacophony.

Caduan stood and started limping down the hall.

“Wait—”

He ignored me. We ran up the stairs, to the front entrance, the one that opened up closer to the city. The palace was in chaos, soldiers and guards and servants running in all directions.

He threw open the door and half-fell down the steps.

Below us, the city of Ela’Dar burned. People, from here little more than ants, ran frenzied through the streets. Screams rose from the city walls.

Everything went numb.

I heard shouts behind me and turned. A group of guards backed against the wall, eyes round, facing off against this…

This…

Was it a person? A Fey? They wore the uniform of Ela’Dar’s military. They had pointed ears and black hair. But their movements… no, their movements were wrong, just as their proportions were, every part of their body a little ill-fitted to the others. When it turned to us, its eyes were a million miles deep, black holes that took me through the center of the earth when I looked at them.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong,every primal instinct within me screamed.

Then I realized: this thing was acorpse.

And Ela’Dar was overrun with them.

* * *

Ela’Dar had buried so,so many dead these last six months. Now those dead flooded the city. Caduan barely allowed himself time to take it in before racing into the madness. His terror seemed to have brought him a wave of frenzied energy, because now he just ran, ignoring all else as he focused on his destination.

The destruction was all-consuming.

Death was everywhere. Fey civilians were being torn apart by their own lost loved ones. Homes collapsed. Walls of stone crumbled as if they were paper. Around us, soldiers poured from the barracks, panicked and ill-prepared. Distantly, Luia’s commands drowned beneath the sound of screams of horror or pain.

Caduan did not stop, and so, neither did I. We flew to the edge of the palace grounds. A creature lunged at us, leaving burning marks in my skin with a mere brush of its fingertips. It grabbed Caduan, but I wildly stabbed it until its face—could one even call it a face?—was a disfigured mess seeping black. It released him and slumped to the ground long enough for us to slip its grasp. Out of the corner of my eye I saw it rise again seconds later, but by then, we were gone.

A circular stone building came into view through the trees.

I recognized this place. I had come here that night so many months ago, awakened by the strange force that seemed to shift in the air—the night I had found Caduan slumped against the wall, surrounded by the shades he had created, and we had walked back together in the night.

There were no shades here now. Not anymore.

Instead there was merely an open door and an empty room. The table at its center, a round slab of iron, was empty. The light that had once burned through the patterns in the floor had now dimmed. The glow in its center was gone.

Caduan collapsed over the table. For a moment, he just leaned there, breath heaving.

“I don’t understand,” I managed. “What is—”

And it was only then that I noticed his body. The monster had torn his shirt to shreds, leaving half his chest and most of his abdomen exposed—revealing streaks of darkness, overtaking his flesh like roots.

“I’m so sorry, Aefe.”

He looked up at me, and the pure devastation on his face was so much more terrifying than anything we had just witnessed. More terrifying than looking into the eyes of living death itself.

“I’m so sorry.”

CHAPTERNINETY-THREE

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