Page 15 of What Whispers in the Dark
“Yes, sire.” He twisted toward the darkness of the castle wall before Garrik could dismiss him. Not that it bothered him. The male always sensed when their meetings concluded, to which Garrik appreciated.
Fading into the darkness, his spymaster disappeared and left Garrik with nothing but memories surrounding him. They stabbed into his soul with every breath he suffered.
‘Please, no. Oh … stars. Your Majesty, please!’
Garrik pressed his eyes closed, grounding himself on a raised flower bed that had his knuckles whitening.
‘Don’t do this. I will kneel—I will kne—no. NO, please!Please—plea—NO!’
The watery squelch of blood and cracks like wood popping forced Garrik to a knee.
Clutching his chest, he retched in the dirt, barely able to keep himself from falling to his face at the memory. At the name Zayn repeated in blood-curdling screams when Garrik could notcare at all, turning his back on the young king to find little amusement in their High King’s eyes.
Voices beyond the garden ripped Garrik from the soul-damning memory. From those chestnut eyes full of infernal wickedness and the onyx-spiked amethyst and ruby crown on the head he had imagined relieving from Magnelis’s body a hundred million times.
Those voices drew closer, accompanied by torchlight illuminating the silver armor and purple cloaks of High Guardsmen—Magnelis’s personal elite Ravens patrolling the night.
If Garrik did not move soon, he would be discovered. And in this state, heaving on the ground, his exhausted body shaking while rejecting the past that still hovered on the borders of his mind, he could not be certain crossing blades with the guardsmen would go unnoticed. Let alone if he would be successful in warring them off.
Garrik sank to both knees now as his fingers and palms curled in the soil. His senses stretched out as his mind attempted to recall the tranquility once alive in the gardens, fingers pushing deeper into the earth.
Nothing.
There was nothing left of the life that once grew there. Nothing to steady him. Or perhaps he wasn’t alive enough to feel it anymore. Just another wilted stem, filled with decay and loathing. Always on the edge of crumbling.
It was an effort to move, let alone think straight enough to give the command. But regardless of the pathetic attempt, darkness gathered around him and shadowed him to the only place that could calm his damned heart.
In a burst of Smokeshadows, he misted from his mother’s gardens and dawned into the quiet of her wing instead.
But even there … the screams from that day in Illmataria followed.
Throat taut and chest constricting, Garrik half-stumbled into the High Queen’s bedchamber, peppered with flawlessly preserved pearlseas, perfect as the day they were picked, in vases peppering almost every surface.
Garrik’s back hammered against the wall and slid down it, across from her favorite reading chair, before slumping on the hardwood.
He would stay there for only a moment, then return to camp.
A heaviness settled in his veins when his unsteady gaze stared at the sea-blue cushions across from him. At the sketchbook and quill covered in decades of dust, waiting for their artist’s return. For that tender, loving touch that he desperately wished he could feel. Wishing he could hear his mother’s voice telling him that all the horrible things he had done were forgiven.
But it would never come.
Because even if she were alive … he was not worthy of it.
Demons merit no forgiveness.
They deserved toburn.
The crashof waves reminded him of wind breezing against the leaves outside camp. And sunlight, bursting rays through the balcony threshold, would have been a pleasant waking touch if not for the fact he was still against the wall, unable to move.
He had stared into the darkness all night. Frozen by the screams. By the recollections of the thousands of bloody hands he had slain, reaching to him, pulling at his armor and skin, damning him to the depths of Firekeeper’s pits.
And now … he needed a shower,badly. Not only to wash away their touch, but from the sweat slicking his skin all night.
Garrik kept his focus on his feet as if the simple flick of his eyes would have the ground deteriorating beneath him and stood.
There was a shower in his room. Hisquietroom. Not the one in his tent surrounded by camp tending to their morning duties and demanding his attention the moment he showed his face.
His steps were near-silent as he closed the doors to his mother’s wing, and in a daze, ambled across the stones of the hallway toward a staircase leading to his.
