Page 133 of Cursed Shadows 4

His boots smack down on the rocks that line the crevices. The jagged surfaces stab into him, but as though he feels nothing at all, nothing more than the sheer cold of the panic spreading inside of him, his run is uninterrupted.

His hands unfurl.

Fists come naturally in a sprint, but he lets his fingers relax—feels the licking of the Cursed Shadows over his palms, spreading out like inky ribbons falling from his hands.

The whip lashes out and out. Dare desperately throws each strike at Nari, too far up in her fall, but too close to the impact that will not just kill her, butexplodeher.

Dare must know, as Rune does, as Samick, as anyone who watches Nari fall, as the litalves do, the ones who simply stand and stare, waiting for their victory to come, both Caius and Nari to die…

They all must know that no whip coiled around her wrist or her ankle will stop her hitting the frozen earth so hard that her limbs and head and blood and insides will ricochet into oblivion, and they will all be covered in what’s left of her.

The shadows unravel.

Daxeel’s pace is punishing, thunderous boot-strikes on the river of rocks, and he focuses, forces every ounce of shadow in him, calls on his authority to the darkness within him, and crams it all into one single palm.

He doesn’t look at Caius, tangled with the falling litalf, gutting and butchering each other.

He doesn’t save him, because Caius doesn’t need to be saved. He has declared his death. Declared it for Dorcha.

Daxeel only has focus for her, eyes for her.

And he lunges off the rocks, his stare locked onto the slick blood smearing her armour, the leathers glistening, the chestnut hair lashing wildly around her face.

He throws out his hand—and a hollow shout tears out of him as he rips the Cursed Shadows from his body.

The pain is instant. It’s hot, as though blood spills from his every pore, it is dizzying and he squints through the blur of his sight to keep his stare locked onto Nari, and it shreds him as though his skin,his flesh, is being peeled from his body.

But it is the Cursed Shadows. A part of him, embedding further and further into his body, his soul, by the phase.

And he tears it from himself, he channels it into a rope of eternal shadows, and he flings it out for Nari.

But the pain does more than blind him.

The shadows coil around her ankle… and it all goes dark.

NARCISSA

††††††

The air rushes up to my back.

Arms and legs splayed, I don’t fight the whirl of frost around me. I am limp against the whooshing winds, my lashes are weighted over my eyes, and with the little sight that I have, I stare up at the mountainside I was dragged from.

Bodies barrel around me.

Above, Caius falls much the same as I do. But unlike me, he has no acceptance of the fate he faces. Blade bitten between his teeth, he hacks at the whirling, tumbling litalf. Caius keeps a grip on his ankle, locking him close, and he hacks an axe into his gut over and over and over—

I do not mourn for the litalf, the one who has killed me.

I do not cringe from his crimson blood that spatters me like a wet dusting of rubies.

I simply fall and gaze up at the fae who will join me in death.

The litalf hasn’t accepted his fallen fate as I do. He whirls through the plummet, as though he fights it, and he lashes out at Caius with his blades and spilling guts.

They fight more than each other, but their fates, too.

I don’t fight.

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