Page 240 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“The heart,” I gasped.

It wasn’t hard to find it. We were both drawn to it, and the fabric of magic itself seemed to pull towards it, like finding a tear in a piece of clothing. We dug through the glass until we found it.

The Lejara glowed red, as if surrounded by odd, heatless flames. One glance, and I knew that something about it had changed irreparably. The magic that surrounded it was now chaotic and volatile.

Because the heart had been shattered into many, many pieces.

CHAPTERNINETY-SIX

AEFE

Icouldn’t do anything but run. My mind was somewhere a million miles away, and my body was just running—running through the halls of Ela’Dar, down endless stairs to the ground floor. I stumbled through the city, my eyes burning and blurry, reducing the world to indistinct shapes of ruin.

Nobody so much as glanced my way. Just another broken soul, they would think, in a kingdom now full of ghosts.

I kept running until my legs burned too badly, and then I walked as far as they could carry me. I didn’t know where I was going. When the cool embrace of the Pales’ shadows enveloped me, I was dimly surprised.

I climbed through the ruined Pales, scaling stories upon stories of black stone while tears rolled down my cheeks. It was sunset, the searing light setting fire to black stone in jagged gashes. The lights that were built into the stone still burned, however softly, and when the sun disappeared beneath the horizon, they simmered to life like a sky full of stars. I climbed through the corpse of my home until I got to the throne room. I pressed my palm to the violet stain on the floor.

Orscheid had died here. Her life had spilled here. And I thought, perhaps, I might have been able to feel some part of her here.

I need you, my sister. I need you.

But there was nothing of my sweet, kind sister here. There was only the mark of a life ripped violently from this world, too soon, like so many were.

Like Caduan would be.

I wept there for a long, long time, curled up on the cold floor.

Eventually I rose. I had no more tears. Everything inside of me had gone numb. I walked a familiar path through the halls of the Pales, avoiding chasms in the floors and piles of shattered stone, until I reached a little door to a little room.

I opened it.

The familiarity was like a dagger wrenched through my chest. And yet, this room didn’t even feel like it was mine. It had belonged to some other girl named Aefe, centuries ago, before she knew exactly how much she would lose.

A crack ran across the center of the room, but otherwise, everything else was untouched—all the way down to the moth-eaten bedsheets piled, forever unmade, on the bed. Mechanically, I got into the bed and wrapped those rotting blankets around my shoulders. They did little against the chill.

In another life, a lost Fey princess felt safe here.

I pressed my palm to the wall, just as that girl did every night. She took such comfort in the Pales, in the knowledge that she was connected to a thousand others in a home carved from the same piece of rock. She would press her skin to this wall and feel all of their souls here with her.

But tonight the walls did not feel like a connection to a thousand other souls. They just felt like stone.

* * *

I did not knowhow long I remained there. I watched the sunlight paint jagged streaks over the wall through the cracks in the Pale, moving across the rock in a rhythmic pattern day after day. There was water here—the systems built into the Pales to funnel rainwater into aqueducts and pipes were still intact, so the faucet in my room still worked. I had little food other than what was already stuffed in my pockets, but I didn’t mind. I was not hungry. When my abdomen ached, I ate a couple of nuts. When my tongue was so dry it hurt, I drank a sip of water.

Then I returned to the bed.

Eventually, I heard my name ringing out through the hallways. No—not my name,aname, just one that I was known by before. It was silly of me to think I could ever claim that name again.

The voice was so distant at first that I thought it might be Caduan, a thought that sent a shock of pain through me—pain, and then dread, because I could not bear to see him.

But no, it wasn’t Caduan. I listened to the shouts grow closer and did not answer, not even when they were in my room, and grew suddenly silent.

“Aefe?”

Fear in his voice when I did not move.

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