Page 181 of Crown of Darkness
There’s no answer, but I can feel her presence over my shoulder, like thunder thickening the air on the horizon. The little hairs down my spine lift. And I give myself to the Hallow.
There’s something wrong with it.
Not merely the way the stones were cut, but with the Hallow itself.
Every other Hallow I’ve met has been a conduit between the ley lines and myself, but this one doesn’t give up its energy. It drinks it in, like a sucking chasm of nothingness that seeks to fill itself. It feels like reaching your arm into a bottomless pool of oil; thick and viscous and choking. I could drown in that pool if I let myself, and it would slowly haul me under, a clammy sucker mouth clamping over mine as it drinks the very oxygen from my veins.
Something watches me.
Something enormous in the dark.
A little flutter swims through my stomach, but there’s a hand in mine, suddenly squeezing.
“If you stare too long into the abyss,” the Mother of Night whispers in my ear, “then you risk capturing His attention. He is Darkness, Princess. True and utter Darkness, and you don’t want that staining your soul.”
I have to stare back if I want to have any hope of binding myself to the Hallow.
But she squeezes my hand again. “Not this Hallow, Iskvien. If you bind yourself here—now—then all you will do is drink your own poison.”
“How do I defeat him?” I cry.
“You don’t.”
“They’re going to kill her.”
I can see Angharad now, her bare feet slapping on the stone as her black skirts whisk around her legs. She moves like a creature of the night, drawing the long thin dagger from her hip as she grabs Amaya’s wrist.
Isem, her pet sorcerer, stands by the Hallow chanting.
“Please,” cries a small voice. “Please don’t hurt me.”
And everything inside me goes still.
They’re the first words I’ve ever heard Amaya physically say—and I know, with a mother’s instinct, that they come fromhermouth.
“That’s enough.” The voice trembles through the cavern, shaking rocks from the walls.
I lift my sword, but my hand pauses as Angharad hauls my daughter upright and puts a knife to her throat.
“Throw down your weapons,” she commands with a cruel smile.
“Don’t you touch her.” The words are a growl from my throat. “If you hurt her, then I swear I will destroy you. I will destroy this entire fucking Hallow, so you can never resurrect him.”
Reaching out, I summon the power through the Hallow.
The sensation of that dark presence is stronger, and its attention turns to me the second I link with the Hallow, but this time I push further. I slip past that leviathan waiting in its dark waters and plunge directly to the Hallow’s core.
There.
There’s the ley line.
And I know Angharad can feel the floor shivering beneath her feet, because she looks down in shock before slowly lifting her head.
Our eyes meet.
“It seems we are at a bit of an impasse.” Angharad bares her teeth in a smile, and Amaya squeals with fright as the knife clearly cuts in.
“Stop!” I scream, holding that roiling power within my grasp but helpless to do anything with it.
