Page 156 of Cursed Shadows 4

With a huff, I turn my cheek to him, my skin rashy and pebbled from the sheer chill so close to the summit. The air, I notice, is thinner up here.

Boots slam into the snow, crunching the frozen earth.

I push up onto my feet and, with all of us at the top of the overhang, gathered on the edge of the summit, I look ahead, across the misty clearing of snow, past the treelines that border us, all the way to the base of the Mother Stone.

My eyes widen at the sight of the mountain’s peak, torn apart, as though monstrous, godly hands reached into the earth itself,then shredded it open like it was nothing more than a loaf of bread.

From that torn abyss in the mountain, an ellipse of grooved obsidian and sleek marble protrudes, then stretches too far up before it vanishes into the thick clouds whirling and whisking around it.

There is a distance between us, gathered here at the overhang, and the Mother Stone. A spanning glade of snow and mist. Yet, through that distance, I can make out those coarse grooves that rake down the polished stone, like a beast’s talons have scraped and clawed at the stone itself.

My throat swells at the sight of it.

I’m too consumed by the looming presence of the Mother Stone that the mere thought of the dangers lurking in those trees yonder is a fleeting fear, too frail to take root.

A hushed whisper gathers behind me, “Whatisthat?”

I cut a glance over my shoulder.

Mika pushes through the snow. Her gaze, as wide as mine, is fixed on the Mother Stone. “That sound—is…” She pauses to swallow, thick, and her throat bobs. “Is it coming fromthat?”

My frown settles on her for a beat, then I sweep it around the faces of the other dark fae, each one more severe than the last.

Samick and Rune hold a steady, uneasy look between them—but Dare, like me keeps a frown to his face, one that tilts his mouth down at the corner.

“It’s humming,” Daxeel’s growl is anything but pleased. Not even a hint of curiosity as he fixes his steady stare ahead at the Mother Stone.

“No.” Samick wrenches his ice glare from Rune. He turns it to the Mother Stone ahead, and as he does, his head tilts downwards, almost into a bow. “Whispering.”

My nose wrinkles. Snowflakes caught on my skin fall away, melt into my pores. “What? Who whispers?”

Dare shrugs a shoulder.

Rune keeps his gaze downcast, as though to look directly at the Mother Stone is to stare into the pits of abyss, of hell itself—the chamber of the gods, where no soul should ever go.

Rune’s voice is soft, almost…afraid, “Mother whispers.”

Dare makes a face. “That is the creepiest thing I have ever heard.”

My voice is small, “We can’t hear it.”

Gilded eyes cut to me.

“She doesn’t whisper to us,” I say.

Daxeel lifts his chin. “Mother does not whisper to the light.” There’s a hint of victory in his posture, a premature ghost of a smile dancing over his pinkish lips.

He does not look at me.

If he did, he would see sorrow in my fallen face. Defeat in the sag of my shoulders. He would see that I drop my gaze to the snow, that a frown forms in the middle of my brow, and then, finally, that my jaw hardens before my mouth moves around words so quiet they are inaudible to anyone but Mother: “You will hear me.”

Her answer is instant—an echo of a throaty otherworldly sound I wish I never heard, wish I never felt clawing at my bones.

‘Ssssssssssssssssssssssss.’

The hiss whirls around me.

I stagger around, eyes wild, as though I might find the whispers, those awful layers of sound stacked on top of each other, and yet hardly a sound at all.

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