Page 31 of Fractured
Putting aside the doubt, I focused on my senses, on trying to open my eyes, trying to hear whatever there was around me.
Silence—that’s all. All I heard was silence, and while I struggled to open my eyes, I tried to feel underneath me, to understand where I was lying.
Something hard and cold—stone. Smooth stone was underneath my hands, and for a second, it threw me off. For a second, I was convinced I was still in that cave with Rune and what remained of the Broken Crown.
Until I remembered the screams and the magic and the blood. Until I remembered that we’d been found by the Seelie soldiers, possibly by Lyall himself.
And Rune wasnotwith me.
The sudden fear and panic opened my eyes all the way. I sat up with my breath held, ready to scream out his name the moment I was able to actually use my voice—and I finally saw where I was.
A room. A large hall with a ceiling so tall I barely saw it. Adarkhall with smooth stone floors and walls, and furniture, old and covered in dust, and paintings wrapped in silver frames, and wooden tables that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time…
I was on my feet before I knew it, and my legs somehow held me. My heart was beating frantically, shaking me like a drum, but I was standing and I was blinking.
I was all alone.
The room was big,huge,bigger than that bedroom where I’d slept in the queen’s palace. It was cold here, too, and I kept expecting a white cloud to come out of my lips every time I breathed but it didn’t. Every inch of my flesh had risen in goose bumps as I spun around and around,trying to take in every little detail that I could in the dark, trying to find a way out.
Doors.
Two sets of double doors, large and on opposite walls of the oval-shaped room. They were made of metal, it seemed, embossed and engraved in figures I couldn’t make out, because the only light that came through here was from these tiny windows at the edges of the ceiling right where they met the walls. They were made of colored glass and the light that came through could have been from the moon or the sun. There was no way to know because they were colored a deep blue, those small windows, and they went all around the tall ceiling, so high I had no hope of ever getting to them to look outside.
But I could always get to the doors.
I didn’t give myself another moment to look, to make sure I really was alone, to see everything there was to see around me. I just ran for the doors on the left that were closest to me, and I basically slammed against them with my whole body.
Locked.
The handles were big and made out of silver-colored metal, curved and smooth against my hands, and no matter how many times I pressed down on them, or how hard, the doors wouldn’t give. They were locked and the keyhole was empty. No key anywhere near them that I could see—but that was okay.
Surely the other doors would be open, I thought, and so I ran for them even faster, and slammed against the metal even harder.
They, too, were locked.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I made it all the way to the middle of the room again, right where I’d woken up,spinning around and around, trying tomakea door that would open on those stone walls out of sheer will, just manifest it into existence, but it didn’t work. No new door appeared anywhere that I could see, and no bird made out of blue light found me, andno Rune-no Rune-no Rune.
I screamed.
The sound ripped out of me and it took me by surprise, too. I screamed with my everything and for a good long while, until I had no more breath in my lungs. I didn’t collapse, though. Instead, I went to the first doors again and I tried to open them. I went to the others and tried to kick them, but all I managed to do was hurt my foot. I moved back and forth for possibly ten times before I got dizzy, and before my legs decided to give up on this madness.
The doors were locked. Whoever had brought me here had trapped me in this room and I wasn’t going to get out no matter how hard I kicked.
I sat on the floor, shaking, tears streaming from my eyes, the unknown a dark cloud over my head just waiting to strike me dead. With my knees against my chest, I closed my eyes and lowered my head and I willed time to go back to when I was with Rune, when his hand was on mine, when we were running together.
But time didn’t work that way, unfortunately. And the only thing that changed as the moments ticked by was the sound of my crying slowing down, then fading away completely.
Magic was such a strange thing.
You saw it working with your own eyes, saw the way it altered reality, the way it became real itself, and yet there was always a part of you that suspected you made the whole fucking thing up.
Or maybe it was just me.
Who was I kidding—it was definitely just me. Fae didn’t go around doubting their sanity and their own senses, their own memories about magic. They were born with it, raised with it, it was a part of their daily lives since forever.
Then there wasme.
A freak of nature. Something that shouldn’t have even existed. Something too complicated to even have a name—other than that word,noxavira.The shadow between truths.
