Page 177 of Cursed Shadows 4

The courtyard!

Get up, get to the courtyard!

My body jerks with a cough. Breath fights to fill my lungs again, and, as I twist my neck and look up at the stone structure I’ve landed on, I make anughsound at the back of my throat.

Landed on another body.

Fell with a marble one, bounced, landed on a stone one on the grass.

A gravelled sound draws through me as I reel off the corpse. I leave behind the strange solid feel of it against my warm, prickled flesh. I suddenly feel a bit softer.

I flop onto my back.

Pressing my cheek to the dewy blades of grass, a gentle touch, a kiss from an old friend, I squint up at the hard face of the dead fae, I squint up at its head—hishead.

It’s hard to make out his face through the thick darkness. I have been gone from it so long that the sudden return to black, it strains my eyes and dizzies my mind.

But I don’t think I am imagining this.

That the tinted-blue face of the dead litalf, one who has been dead for some time, perhaps frozen by the mountain, is one that I recognise.

Pale pinkish hair, the softest shade, not unlike the petals of a cherry blossom, have turned white with death.

I am staring, numb, at the first fae I killed with my own hands. A friend, a betrayer, an ally, an enemy.

Now… a frozen, blueish corpse.

A nauseated burn crawls up my throat.

With a groan stirring deep in my chest, I roll onto my side—and I stare at the courtyard of Comlar.

Last time the portal sucked all the contenders back to our lands, I was in the stands. I was part of the audience. A spectator.

Still, I remember the screams, the panic, the fae grabbing their younglings and running, the fret of the other spectators checking the bodies for the faces of their loved ones. The panic, the cries, the scratch of parchment as generals and admirals and their seconds crossed off names from their scrolls, names of those warriors who died in the first passage.

I don’t hear that now.

A silence has taken over Comlar, a glacier, a silence that has no business being as loud as it is.

I stare up at the courtyard, the back of the grandstand.

Spectators rise up on the stands, the wood of the benches creaking under the shift in weight. Heads turn, faces are slack with shock, some alight with panic, others simply numb. Babes are cradled to the bosom, hands are reached out and entwined with others, breaths are released with too much force.

But no one screams or cries, no one calls out to their loved ones, no one rushes off the stands to check the faces of the dead.

Silent.

A silence that presses down on me with the weight of the Cursed Shadows above.

The Cursed Shadows…

A darkness that flattens out in the skies and thickens the darkness so much that I now have to squint to see the faint light of the torches lining the courtyard, a blackness so dense that the glowjars are fading away to nothing.

The Cursed Shadows are here.

They spiral out of the portal, pure darkness unravelling.

I watch the consumption, and now I am the numb one. My eyes burn, my throat thickens.

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