Page 173 of Cursed Shadows 4

I clammer onto my hands and knees.

The strain of my thundering head, it’s enough to blur my sight. I squint through the quaking earth and disturbed mist to the snowfield.

Daxeel is limp on the ground between me and the warriors, the warriors who run around in a shambles, some away from the summit, others towards us.

It takes my dazed mind a moment to understand…

The trees and rocks and snow—all start crumbling.

And Daxeel is not moving.

‘Four… Five…’

I slap my hand onto the snow and start to crawl for him.

The sobs that rattle me are as coarse as my grated lungs. The pull of my mouth as it stretches around my ugly cries aches my cheeks.

I crawl for the male I might have killed, the male I… I loved.

I make it two paces before the shadows erupt from him, and their thunderous darkness blasts over the entire fucking summit.

The scream that splits me is hollow.

Shadows whirl all around me, thicker than the snow and the debris and the blood coating the battlefield. I can only make out Daxeel’s silhouette as the Cursed Shadows course through his body like smoke from a funnel.

The sound is as thunderous and rumbling as the black tornado in the courtyard at Comlar. I can hardly hear the shouts from the battlefield over the deafening pulses of the Cursed Shadows.

Gritting my teeth, I crawl my way through the thunderous assault. But the closer I get to Daxeel, the better I see the battlefield—and what has become of it.

Fae are swept from the snow and whirled through the air. Some are snatched straight from the mountain, others collide and spiral in all directions.

Screams lift up higher than the mists.

I cringe as a body flies overhead.

I throw my wild gaze upwards and watch it—a female dokkalf—getting sucked through the air. Then she’s gone. Vanished behind the wall of eternal mist stuck to the mountain.

A cry splits me.

I stare, stunned, at the sudden blast of darkness…

The Cursed Shadows… they rip free of Daxeel’s body and soar up to the skies.

Their pulsations thrum against my ears.

I blink on erupting darkness; I blink on Daxeel who’s as limp as a fresh corpse, inky blood trailing out from his ears and nose; I blink on the battlefield, half the warriors gone already, and I watch as Samick is snatched from the mountain like an invisible hand, a hand of a god, steals him away. But not a flicker of panic warps his face, not as he is lifted from the ground with a sudden wind of force, then he is pulled back through the air—and gone.

The portal is stealing everyone back home.

The gods have dismissed us.

Mother has returned to her slumber.

And so the iilra steal us home.

I turn back to Daxeel, but not before I see Rune swept away from the mountain.

I crawl for Daxeel.

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