Page 104 of Skyshade
That didn’t make sense. Was this a coup? But Grim’s entire army wouldn’t dare rise against him. His death would mean death to the mall.
No. This was something else.
Windows began shattering from above, in the highest corners of the chamber, one by one, glass raining down, fracturing against the marble.
Branches and rocks like blades skewered from every direction. Guards up on the balcony were sucked out of the room.
Grim reached for Isla, seeming to anticipate something she couldn’t; but just before his fingers met hers, the ground below her feet split open like a broken stitch.
And she was swallowed up.
Isla was dragged through the ground, a tunnel forming below her feet. If it wasn’t for the Starling shield that she made around herself and her snakes, they would have all been shredded along the rock. She fought against the invisible hold, clawed at the walls with her power, but whatever this was, it was stronger.
Just when she managed to overpower it, she was deposited into a room. She was deep underground. It was dark save for fireflies, stuck against the cavernous ceiling.
In front of her stood a woman. She had long dark hair, large eyes, and tan skin. There were vines wrapped around her arms and legs. Her clothes were nothing more than a tapestry of woven branches, flowers, grass, and leaves.
“You’re Wildling,” Isla said, thinking back to the vines and branches that had crashed through the castle. “You’re the Wildling that attacked the village.” Her resemblance to Isla was uncanny. She now understood why, from a distance, the witnesses had believed it to be her.
But Astria had spoken about a Nightshade army. That was impossible. Were the Wildling people planning a coup behind her back, with this woman at the helm?
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” the woman asked. She was speaking softly, but her voice seemed to echo, resonant in a way Isla had never heard.
She didn’t. And though Isla had barely been a ruler to her people, she knew them all. “No. Should I?”
The woman looked sad. “No. I suppose you shouldn’t.”
Isla felt around for her powers. They were right there, just like her blades, waiting for her to take them.
But this woman had attacked a village. She had ambushed Grim’s castle. She apparently had an army. She had captured Isla for a reason. Before she escaped, Isla needed answers.
“What do you want?” Isla demanded.
The woman smiled. “To make this world anew.”
Whatever she’d been expecting to come out of the woman’s mouth wasn’t this. “What do you mean? What do you want with the Nightshades?”
“Simple,” she replied. “I want to kill every last one of them.”
Isla’s vision narrowed to a tunnel. Whoever this was, she was done listening to her. Fast as lightning, Isla’s fingers curled around a blade at her thigh, and she threw it right into the woman’s chest before she could blink. Isla watched the metal pierce her heart.
The Wildling looked down. She didn’t collapse, didn’t bleed, didn’t die. All she did was frown, and Isla watched in terror as her knife slowly inched out of the woman’s chest and dropped to the floor, clean.
Impossible. Isla gathered all her power—energy, fire, ice, vines, shadows—and unleashed it onto the woman. The Wildling was punctured in a hundred different places at once. One arm was sliced clean off.
Isla was panting, waiting for the woman to drop dead. Waiting to feel the curl in her bones at yet another kill.
But it never came.
Isla watched in horror as all the gaps in her body filled again, without a single drop of blood. As her arm was remade, before her eyes, the arteries and skin growing like bark and vines.
“You didn’t let me finish,” the Wildling said, sounding annoyed, as she stood again to her full height. She took a step forward, and Isla backed away, until her spine hit the wall. “I want to kill every last one of them...and use them to build something better. A new world.”
“What makes you think you can create a world?” she asked.
She smiled. “Because I’ve done it before.”
The snakes around her began to hiss. They started to uncurl. Isla watched as every serpent slowly slithered down her body, one by one...
