Page 162 of Cursed Shadows 4

Knees pushing into the thick snow, I keep low to the ground and feel along the meat of my thigh, up to my hip.

Some weapons are gone from their place on my belt. Grooved and leathered handles of knives and daggers, that is what should press against the palm of my hand. Instead, mostly I feel the contour of my hip, the dip of my waist, and the tear of my trousers right where the arrowhead sank into me.

Sheathed in the belt, I have one throwing star nicking into the flesh of my palm and the hilt of a short knife grooving over my thumb.

The breath that slumps me is somewhere between a dismayed sigh and prepared huff. Two weapons aren’t enough.

And yet, they have to be.

I push into a crawl.

Head down, I keep myself on all fours. My movements are slow and creeping through the smog. The raw skin of my hands slips over pools of tar—pools of black blood, freshly spilled, warm to the touch.

I don’t stop, not for the bodies of fallen dark ones, the ones motionless, or the ones that stir and moan.

Ahead, deep into the smog, maybe beyond to where the air is clear and crisp, with only the mountain’s mist to distort sight, gravelled, hollowed war cries lift up.

A different war cry. A call that comes from the chest, not the throat. A harrowing sound—that I know to be of the dark warriors, the ones that survived.

I cringe against it, that booming song scraping and clawing all around me.

I hunch into myself—and hear the thundering bootfalls stampede the snowfield.

The dokkalves charge.

The punishing vibrations of their boots shudder the snow. The earth rumbles under their siege—and the litalves rush to meet them in battle.

I pause at the slump of a body.

A quick scan of his face, and I see that he has found his life in the beyond. Slack, eyes glazed and staring above at nothing. I do not know this face, he is unfamiliar to me.

But I know how he died.

The gaping hole in his middle.

Too much blood pours out of him.

I turn my cheek to the sickening tar pooling on the ground, melting away the snow.

I clamber over his corpse.

I crawl for the battle.

For the first time since I came falling down to this mountain, I headtowardsthe light warriors.

Each one of them will attempt to stop me.

My own kind will cut me down before I can reach the Mother Stone and fall to my knees.

Because every single litalf here on this snowfield, on the mountain’s summit, knows that it is too great a risk to let me pass, no matter my intentions.

“Narcissa—”

My insides bolt.

Hands buried in the snow, numb, I loosen a shuddered breath.

“Narcissa.” The whisper is close. Too close, as though a hand might reach out of the smoke any second now and snatch me up whole.

---