Page 22 of Cursed Shadows 4

Already, shorter strands of hair have come free from my scalp braids. One thin tendril whips my cheekbone over and over as the winds whistle down the mountain, weaving around the trees.

I shove onto my front. Snow falls from me, all that dusted coating that smeared me now flitters down to the ground.

Knees cutting into the dirt, I press my hands down—and make to push up. But before I can, my ears pop. And the distant screams, the shouts, the grunts and the cries,theechoes, all suddenly sound so much clearer.

I go rigid. Freeze all over.

Slowly, my eyes widen and I drag my gaze around.

A sickly dread unfurls through me like an acidic ribbon.

I am not alone.

I am not the only fae to have landed here.

6

DAXEEL

††††††

This is a land of ice sheets and cracks and crevices. It is a diamond blue landscape that looks as though a violent sea has frozen in time—and down the cracks, fae slip.

Eyes of oceans, deeper than the sea-blue all around, sweep the crevasse, watching fae lose their footing or being kicked over the edges, then plummeting to their deaths down the cracks and crevices.

Only sixty or so, Daxeel counts. That’s how many contenders have landed in this ice hell. And yet, it’s enough to spill blood of onyx and crimson.

The urge to join the fight, any of the dozens scattered around the eternally spanning glacier, curls Daxeel’s fists at his sides. His jaw sets, firm, but the twitch of his upper lip reveals a silent snarl, a bared-teeth look as primal as the violent, gored urges pulsing through him.

The mission.

It’s the only thing stopping him from pushing from his crouching position, shoving into a run, drawing his axe, and butchering the litalves within eyesight.

The mission.

Tension bolts through him.

A hard swallow swells his throat for a beat. Then he yanks his gaze from the nearest battle of two lights and one dark, just as his comrade is skewered in the gut, and he turns to study the hollows some distance behind him.

Most of the rocky openings are small and narrow, but all of them are sheeted with ice. The largest cave is a tangle of ice-spikes right at the opening.

Daxeel stares down the glacier lances spearing up from the ice sheets, stabbing down from the cave’s entrance—and the slack face of the unfortunate dark warrior who landed right on them.

It isn’t a place to land, that much is clear by the faint dying coughs of the impaled dokkalf. But it also isn’t a prime position to take cover. Just to run and close the distance between his landing spot behind an elevated mould of ice and the caves is to announce himself to all the litalves around.

It takes more than an arrow to bring down a dark one. But an arrow in a precise location of his body would end him. Litalves know where to aim.

It’s more than just his life at stake out here. It’s Nari’s, too. And the mission.

The mission calls for him to camouflage, take cover, avoid the battles that his instincts are called to.

Turning his cheek to the caves, he looks down the ice-slope… and suddenly understands exactly where they are. Or, more like,whatthey are on. Not ordinary mountain floor, not ordinary ice and glaciers. This is a frozen lava field. Molten lava defeated by winter, stopped dead in its tracks.

It offers a favour to him.

Down the sloped lava rolls, that resemble twisted black ropes coiling over the ground, then sheeted with ice, a grainy obsidian smear catches his attention.

Daxeel narrows his eyes on the textured black haze, something that—from a distance—looks so similar to the texture of ateralum, but without the faint glitter of pulverised minerals. Down the slope is a horizon of lava rocks. Lumps, elevated, declining, bump after bump—a spread of black hills.

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