Page 192 of Curse of Darkness
Her features blur, her figure becoming hunched and stooped over. Nanny Redwyne appears, but she’s the nanny of my youth, the one who brushed my knees off and bandaged my cuts. The one who taught me games and told me forbidden stories.
Not the one my mother tortured.
“I sent her to you,” the Mother admits as her features blur back to her own, “and sometimes she would let me look through her eyes while you slept in our arms. She was a hobgoblin with the blood of the otherkin in her veins, and she worshipped me many years ago. She was my eyes, my ears…. And she was my hand when we brushed the hair from your face.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you were never alone. Because you were never unloved.” She meets my eyes. “Before I sacrificed myself to the Hallow, my name was Imrhien. It means ‘bringer of night’ in the old tongue. My daughter—the child I lost—was named Iskvien.” Tears blur her dark gaze. “It means ‘bringer of light.’”
I can’t look away from her as our eyes meet.
And then she smiles. “I whispered in your mother’s head too, all those nights she lay asleep. I wanted to give you some part of me. I wanted to give you some part of my daughter, so she would live on in some way. But I never realized you would change me too. That you would remind me of what it felt like to know a mother’s love. Now go and save the world, Vi.MyVi. My precious Vi.” Her gaze drops, just briefly, to my own mouth. “The child I couldn’t help loving.”
A crack sounds, and one of the standing stones guarding the Hallow crumbles into dust.
The Mother looks around. “We’re running out of time. I can only hold this for so long.”
She’s wasting her power, her energy, merely for this….
“Do something,” I beg, trying to sink my toes into the cliff-face. It feels like my boots are made of lead, fighting against the intent to move. “You can stop him.”
“My time is gone, Vi. I have little strength left. All I have is this…. This one last chance to tell you that I loved you. That you were never alone. And that you have the strength to stop him. I didn’t come here to fight. I came here to give you the push you need to defeat him.” She leans down and whispers in my ear, her thumb brushing my cheek one last time.
Then she kneels back and smiles, donning the hood of her cloak as I try and decipher what she meant.
“One last chance, Vi. One last chance to save them all. Goodbye, Daughter of Light.”
40
Time catapults back into being, gravity suddenly catching at me with vicious, gnawing fingers. A lash of raw power snakes out from the Hallow, latching around my boot and hauling me toward it as if it yearns to consume me.
“Vi!” Thiago screams, my fingers slipping in his.
The Mother pushes slowly to her feet, her smile still soft as she straightens. She holds a handful of dirt in her hand, as if she longed to touch the soil again and feel the wind on her face. The enormous horned figure rises over her shoulder, a sword of pure darkness lifting high. Lightning crackles in the clouds that form around him.
“Watch out!” I scream, throwing a handful of flame at him.
The Horned One laughs as he sweeps them aside, the sound echoing through the world. “Ah, Iskvien. Your pathetic fae magics don’t have the power to stand against me.”
I try to summon the land’s power, my thorns spearing through the surface toward him.
“Stop,” the Mother says in my head. In my heart. “Save your strength. This is not your battle.This is where I have always seen my path ending. Trust me, Vi. Let go.”
“Vi!” The muscles in Thiago’s arm strains as he tries to haul me out of the crevice.
The golden lash around my foot strains to pull me under.
“You have one chance, Vi.First you must fall,” she whispers, all her attention locked upon me. A vicious smile crosses her lips, as if she knows her death is nigh. “And then you will rise. Rise and use your power to light the world on fire, Vi. Ascend, my daughter. Become what you were always meant to become. Break them free. Break them all free.” Her voice falls to a whisper, the howling wind that accompanies the Horned One’s sword tearing the words from her lips, even though I swear I hear them imprinting themselves in my mind.
The sword descends.
Lightning flickers.
And in that moment, it’s difficult to see if the sword obliterates her, or if the magic eating her alive implodes within her.
I scream, on and on. Fingers digging into Thiago’s as the explosion of power threatens to tear me from his grasp.
And then it’s gone.
