Page 40 of Cursed Shadows 1

A litalf catches my attention. I stand utterly still against the heat swelling all around me, but my gaze snaps to the assault course, where he propels himself from rope to rope. Makes it look so easy. I would fall—and I would die the moment I hit the ground. He would probably land on his feet.

He doesn’t fall, though. He lands perfectly on the high-rise platform with such precision and agility that I doubt his special skills involve hand-to-hand combat. He’s more of a spy in the making.

The dark fae that takes the course after him, he moves faster, rope to rope, but there’s something too feral in the way he grabs them, and I doubt vines or branches out there in the world would support such a grip with so much weight.

I find it all so useless.

That’s the thing about the Sacrament, it’s thewhy. Something I don’t quite understand myself.

Once every century—and not all the time does it actually happen at all—the quake splits the Mountain of Slumber in two. The mountain pulls apart, and up from the ground where no fae has ever gone down into and returned, the Mother Stone ascends from those depths, and it rises higher than the peaks.

That alone is enough to make me run in the other fucking direction.

Mother is…thegod. She is the mother of our gods, the ones we worship most of all. She is the creator of everything at its origin. Both light and dark fae, light and dark gods, day and night, sun and moon, birth and death.

Mother is… Mother.

I would stay clear of all that myself. These warriors out there on the battle blocks are insane if you ask me.

Maybe it’s the lore that has these vicious killers marching into the heart of it all. The lore that, down in the depths from between the split mountain halves, the gods slumber, and that when the quake comes and Mother Stone rises, she’s merely stirring in her sleep deep below the earth.

It’s only at that moment she hears the prayers of the fae. The voices closest to her are the loudest—and she will grant a wish.

Just one wish to only one fae.

Then she’ll fall back into her slumber for another century… or more.

Sometimes the mountain doesn’t split. Sometimes hundreds of years can go by without so much as a rumble or an avalanche.

Not this time.

The early tremors have already started. Together, some of our scribes with the iilra (a creepy sisterhood of robed, magical and sinister dark females I don’t like to be around at all) keep a monastery near Mountain of Slumber, and it’s their sole duty to monitor and report.

So maybe, as I watch a particularly large litalf beat a slender dokkalf into the mat, fists just raining down on his bloody and pale body, Isort ofunderstand the reason for all of this…

Each time the Mother Stone rises, the dark fae go to her. They want that wish—they fight hard for it, eternally. And each time, more litalves join the efforts to stop the dokkalves from getting anywhere near it.

We call it honour, valour, glory.

Really, it all started—and still is at the core of it all—about stopping the dark ones from reaching Mother’s ear. It just takes one of them, one from an ancient bloodline that belongsto the first of faekind, for a wish to be heard… and a wish to be granted.

Whatever their wish would be, I don’t know. Obviously it isn’t anything our kind are going to risk. It takes the removal of our Sun for everything to die, fall away, and then the dark ones have no restrictions.

Or they can wish away all litalves and humans, and just be all that’s left in any realm or any land.

Guess it seems more civilised this way, doesn’t it?

We come together on neutral lands, are housed together, eat together, and even train together.

Unity.

It’s a farce, one to make all of this seem like we have the same goal. Because when the litalves succeed—like they do every Sacrament when they take out the dokkalf from the ancient bloodline—we can still maintain some sort of balance between our kinds.

I watch them fight down there.

Vicious, both light and dark. Those dupe daggers cut through the air, slicing at throats—only for there to be no wounds at all, because those dupe daggers and swords and blades, they’re enchanted to draw only a few beads of blood but not actually injure. It’s an illusion, like our unity.

But in the Sacrament, there will be no dupes. And a lot more than some beads of blood will be spilled.

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