Page 158 of Cursed Shadows 4

It bleeds.

Pulsations, like heartbeats, thump through the pores of the grey streaks, and from them, secretions of blue and red and black and white, all ooze down to the torn flesh of the mountain.

Nausea burns my throat.

My skin prickles, my shoulders tense. A hiss bubbles up my chest, a bile-laced burp that I cannot force back down.

I shrink into myself.

Shoulders curve and my arms wrap around my middle.

“What will happen?” My question is wrapped in a whisper, one that stills around us, not carried away on the winds, because up here, there are no winds. Only absolute, utter stagnancy.

An unnatural sensation.

And it isn’t softened at all by the fifty-or-so sets of bootsteps crunching into the snow, the steady breaths of the dark fae all around me. The unnatural stillness, the eerie silence of the summit, it cannot be masked. It only feels as though we are intruding on it.

Daxeel is a mere step behind me. “What do you ask?”

My wide gaze is glued to the mist gathered around the Mother Stone, concealing the tip from our view.

“If you are victorious…” I start with a shaky whisper, one that I am sure should carry through the clearing as it would an emptychamber, too cold, too still, too quiet, and yet the sound doesn’t travel very far at all. “What will happen to the darkness?”

If the warriors around me, an army marching into the unknown, hear what I ask, none answer.

None but Daxeel.

“Darkness will be restored to the descendants of the Sgail line. The iilra will remove the power from the bloodline—and expand.”

“Expand,” I echo the word with a whooshing breath. It frosts the air in front of me. Clouds my face for a heartbeat.

Into the human realm, the darkness will venture. It will swell and suffocate and destroy.

I know this, but the question that swirls in my mind starts to slip onto my tongue, “And to my land?”

Daxeel tosses a look my way, and it is a hot burn of blue flame that sears my cheek.

Out the corner of my eye, I catch the tension in his jaw, the darkening of his dimples with deep shadows. I see the shudder of shadows rippling over him, tendrils of darkness peeling from his shoulders, his arms, and slithering out as though to reach the distance ahead, to return to its true home—Mother.

Daxeel does not answer.

“What’s to stop the iilra from invading Licht?” I breathe the wretched, ugly question that thickens my insides. “What is to stop the iilra from taking Licht until there’s nothing but darkness beneath our sun?”

I throw a look over at him.

Daxeel has his gaze fixed ahead. Those dimples darken with his eyes. He doesn’t look at me.

And so there it is.

The answer I expected but dreaded.

The confirmation I needed…

I have been so certain of my plan since I arrived here. To survive. And if I made it to Mother’s Ear, if I was forced here as I am, then I would make a wish and a sacrifice to Mother, in exchange for my life.

Now, my heart finds a shift.

A cold, solid understanding hardens my face. My mouth puckers with the sudden waver of a brewing sob. But the sob does not take hold.

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