Page 103 of Fractured
“Raja.” I don’t know why I said her name. I suddenly just…needed to.
Her eyes opened wide, locked on mine. “Follow me.”
And so we were on the road again, Raja leading us while Vair and I walked side by side, never making a single sound. I wasn’t sure how long we walked, how many corners we turned, how many Midnight fae we passed. I wasn’t sure where Raja got the carriage she told me to get in, if she paid for it or stole it—and frankly, I didn’t care. There was a single seat inside the tiny carriage, a single horse attached to it, and Raja put something in the pocket of my cloak when she opened the door for me—the mirror—then sat outside while Vair and I climbed in.
Again, we didn’t speak. My mind was so chaotic that the rest of me had turned numb. For once Iwantedto cry, but the tears refused to come.
Instead, I wrapped my arms around my knees, rested my forehead on them, and I went over everything I had heard and seen until I was no longer conscious.
The carriage stopped.
This time Ihadfallen unconscious—or maybe just slept? I wasn’t sure, but when the carriage stopped, I felt it. When the wheels stopped turning and my body came to a halt, it jerked me awake.
The next second, the door to my side opened, and Rune’s face filled my vision.
I jumped off the edge of the carriage and into his arms so fast I hardly saw myself. Rune was there somehow, and I could smell the scent of him, touch the back of his head, soit was okay. His arms were wrapped around me and my ankles were locked around his hips. The sky was dark and there were trees around us, but I didn’t much care to try to figure out where we were.
Rune was here.
Everything else came second.
DidI ever mention how deeply I’d come to hate caves?
Because I had, and only recently.
Before, I thought they were cool, and then I decided that they were nothing but fucking traps—butthis?
My mouth opened and closed. Could this even be considered a cave? Because it looked very,verydifferent.
We’d walked a great deal through tunnels underground in silence, all four of us, one after the other. Rune hadn’t let go of my hand once, as if he’d known that the moment we came in here—or out?!—I’d have trouble standing.
Because, no, this was most definitelynota cave, but a hollow carved beneath the crust of the goddamn continent itself.
The air trembled with strange pressure, as if gravity forgot what to do here—just like me. At the far end, where the stone fractured into jagged shards, the world simply…stopped. My God, there was no sky beyond it, no land, no horizon—just a pulsing, endless dark. Not anightsky that looked like a soft piece of velvet, no— a true abyss.
Stars drifted lazily in the nothingness beyond, bigger and closer than they should have been, than I’d ever seen them here or on Earth—but that wasn’t even the strangest part.
We were under the Eternal Water, the sea that stretched behind all four fae courts of Verenthia, and down here, that same sea bled down in a quiet, eternal waterfall. It was pouring from somewhere over our heads and into space like liquid glass, vanishing far into the nothingness below.
Impossible. This whole place was impossible.
Water shimmered through gaps in the high stone ceiling, casting warped reflections across the cave floor. It glittered every few feet—and the walls, too. They were laced with dark crystals—black diamondsI’d seen before on the Ice Queen’s grimoire and her mirror. These were much bigger, though, rough pieces every few feet. It was almost like they’dbloomedhere on this surface, some sharp as blades, but most smoothed out by time, I imagined. So much magic in the air that I could have sworn it was humming near my ears. The faint metallic scent came at me in waves, too.
But it wasn’t all stone and water and precious gemstones. Here and there, I could spot rusted pickaxes and broken pieces of wood, shattered glass that looked to have been lanterns once. A lot of them all over the space that couldn’t have been bigger than the Ice Queen’s throne room. A collapsed wooden cart lay on its side, its wheels cracked. More tools were scattered all over, half broken and forgotten, which could only mean that someone had tried to mine this cave.
Why hadn’t they finished the job, though?
“We’ll be safe here.”
Rune’s voice filled my ears. I remembered he was standing next to me, holding my hand.
“For now.”
I broke down immediately, as if up until this moment I hadn’t been me. I hadn’t really realized what hadhappened, and now everything was hitting me all over again—Rune was here. Rune was with me.
Leaning against his side, I tried to hide my face before he saw my tears. He pulled me under his arm, kissed the top of my head, and he moved us forward for a few feet, then sat us down.
“We’re okay, wildling. We’re okay,” he told me, and he said it over and over again while I tried not to sob, not to shake, not to reveal to him just how completely broken I felt.
