Page 113 of Curse of Darkness
“No!” he roars. Onward he urges his horse, a scythe of pure black forming in his right hand. His counterpart turns, catching a glimpse of him, and that scythe cuts right through those startled eyes.
Slamming into the other’s horse, he drives them away, but it’s too late.
The arrow forged of Darkness has found her.
Death leaps from his mount.
He holds her in his arms, begging for her to live, trying to extract that wretched seed of Darkness within her from where it creeps toward her heart.
“It’s all right,” she whispers, blood on her lips as she touches his face.
Tears gleam on her skin.
Tears of pure light.
The wound starts to smoke, and then light pours from the tear. It heals before his eyes, though it leaves a black, ugly mark.
It is only then that he realizes he is touching her. That his caress does not steal the life from her lips.
The shock of it…. That he could touch her skin without draining her life force….
That she could burn the Darkness from within herself….
“I was forged from the Darkness itself,” Death whispers. “I did not know then that there were fae who held a kernel of Light within them. A drop of sunlight, if you will. One that cannot be smothered, not even by my affliction.” He breathes a laugh. “They were created to end our kind.But what they did not realize was that we would be drawn to them.”
A child appears, blinking black emotionless eyes up at me. His hair is a tuft of gold so like his mother’s. I reach out trembling hands as she places him in our arms, barely able to contain the lump in my chest, in my throat. Easing the swaddling back, we touch his chubby cheek, a lump in our chest the size of a kingdom.
He is perfect. So small. So helpless. Ours.
And then the child sucks in a shocked gasp.
Tiny cracks spear across his cheek like a barren desert desperate for rain. His lips turn blue, his chest heaving for air.
“No,” Death whispers as his touch threatens to steal the life from his son. “No, please.”
“Give him to me!” the woman cries.
She staggers away from us, hauling her son’s swaddle around him as if she cannot bear for our hand to touch him.
“Get away from him!” The woman curls the bundle protectively into her arms. “Don’t you hurt him!”
“I would never hurt him,” Death tells her—begs her—but she is gone.
I sense him stir within me, worn thin with sorrow. “Her curse broke,” he whispers, “the moment she held our son in her arms. For the first time in her life, she knew fear. Fear that I would steal him from her.”
And then she did what all the others had done.
I catch a hundred fleeting glimpses of her as she ages. Glimpses stolen in the night, or from the shadows as Death rides by. He watches over her as she sleeps, and some nights he presses a kiss to her temples and steals away the ravages of age. They are but signs of impending death, after all. When she wakes, clear-eyed and vibrant, she calls it a miracle, but we both know she glances over her shoulder as she says it.
The boy grows into a warrior, and then one day, there’s a child in his arms too. A little girl. Two boys follow. Another little girl.
The mother’s hair softens and silvers as she becomes a grandmother. Those bright blue eyes slowly film over. Each kiss he graces her with only seems to roll back the ebb of time so much. The choking knot of fear fills our throat. This shouldn’t be happening. Death can conquer all, can he not?
But this one time—when it counts the most—
“Set me free,” she whispers, late one night, after she has seen the last of her siblings fall. The Light within her has long faded. “Set me free. Please.”
This last kiss is release.
