Page 28 of Cursed Shadows 4

All I can do is try to stay afloat.

Already the muscles in my arms feel as though I’ve done nothing but dance and dance and dance for the day and night, and the kicks of my legs are slowing down.

Iam slowing down.

8

DAXEEL

††††††

The lava field is a stagnant current of blackness, waves of ink frozen in its quest of total destruction.

The thick blackness of the field offers cover to those with black leathers, crafted from the onyx scales of dragons. It is a sanctuary of obscurity for darkness—for the dokkalves. Almost as though the dark gods themselves moulded the frozen lava currents and scorched them, just for a dokkalf to take cover.

Daxeel does just that.

It isn’t cowardice that has him crouched behind a trinity of bunched black bumps, his inky shadows curling over his shoulders or looping around his neck in something of an embrace. Everything in him itches to chase down the nearest litalf and sever their head from their body, to tear out a spine with his bare hands, to see hot blood spill from torn flesh and to feel the dying, slowing thumps of a heart until—silence.

Instinct has his fingers curling until his gloves are fists at his sides. The battles lift spatters of blood, light and dark, through the misty air above the crevasse. Daxeel left it behind for the lava field, but he falters. Hesitates. Enough that, crouched, he lets his narrowed gaze slide back up the slope.

The flattened ice of the crevasse should melt with the amount of hot, fresh blood spilled. Heads roll, fae are kicked over the edges of crevices, falling to their deaths.

And not a face among them that Daxeel considers worthy of saving. To pause the pursuit of his mission, the fae he runs to the aid of must be a soul brother.

None of them landed on the crevasse.

Landings are not as random as they might seem. The iilra warned him of this. The portal distorts the placements of the intruders, in the free-fall through the abyss the gods meddle. Dark and light. Mother does not.

Whatever gods got their sticky fingers into his fae of the soul, his brothers, his blood, his evate—they made sure to spread them apart on the mountain. How far apart, he’s yet to learn.

But they each have their own objectives.

Samick and Dare won’t search for Daxeel, not until they have found Nari. The pair of them move better, faster on their own.

Their hunt has already begun.

So, among the faces of the fae sprinkled around the lava fields and the crevasse, Daxeel searches for three faces. For Nari, who he is convinced is nowhere near him on the mountain; for Rune, his cat eyes and yellow ribboned hair; and for his blood brother, Caius.

He searches in the fae ran through with swords, the dokkalves toppling over the edges of the crevices, in the hacked bodies that litter the white floor.

He finds none of them—so he turns his back on the bloodshed and, with his shadows engulfing him, races down the lava fields.

His footing is faithful. Each landing boot is steady on a soft mound of frozen lava. Without pause, he chases the greystone hill far down the sharp decline of the mountainside, untilhardened black rock gives way to black ice coated in a thin layer of snow.

The snow smear doesn’t give Daxeel any comfort.

One wrong step, one boot too firm, and the snow will not protect him from the fall down the sloped greystone, a decline so steep that it borders on a cliffside, and might well become one in time.

He moves slow, now.

Careful footing from bulging rock to smooth stone, the threat of the ice still lingers. It is a constant.

The snow pads his methodical steps.

The crunch of the snow comes again and again in the quiet of the greystone slope. An icy wind carries the distant cries of battle he left behind. The hum of it is something of a comfort to his shadows, still wrapped around him, as though they sense that the time to part is nigh, and they will be taken from their true home.Him. The Sgail bloodline.

Daxeel’s thoughts are severed, fast, as though a blade struck through his mind. He stills.

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