Page 98 of Curse of Darkness
“That’s the last one in this book,” Vi protests.
“Please.”
Vi crosses her legs. “Very well then. Another story, though this is one I will have to recall.” She clears her throat. “Ever since I made that deal with the Mother of Night, I’ve been reading stories about her and the otherkin. In the book Princess Imerys gave me, there was something about the primordial Darkness that I thought might interest the pair of you.”
Tension slides through me. “Oh?”
Vi’s dark eyes slide toward me as if she can feel the stiffness leeching through me. “In the beginning, there was Darkness. The primordial Darkness that spawned the monsters and the otherkin. A Darkness that was shattered by the light of an exploding star when Creation first struck, drawing back the veil of Darkness and forging a world of beauty in its wake. The Darkness was night. It was absence and silence. It was a void, through which the monsters tore screaming.”
“Tell her to stop,” hisses Death.
The world flashes around me: Amaya, finally relaxing on the other side of her mother. And Vi, her voice light and lilting as she launches into her tale.
I freeze. “Shut up.”
“It’s why the fae feared the night when we first conquered Arcaedia,” Vi continues. “To them, night was a forest full of teeth. The breathless panting as you sought to hide or flee from the Wild Hunt. The vicious shadow of the Deathless One riding through a nightscape of predators. It’s why we put out the lanterns on Samhain, in order for the hunt to pass us by. It’s why we burn the bonfires on Beltane, in order to prove that the sun reigns supreme, and to protect ourselves with the sanctity of the smoke from those fires. The seelie became the Bright Ones. The light and shining. The peoples of the sun. But in the north, those that lay down with the monsters and birthed the unseelie abomination into the world gave themselves over to the Darkness. And it became a spreading plague, a blight that warped the hearts of the righteous fae and stole the light from their souls.
“Books were written—stories of the monsters who lived on this world once, and the brave fae who conquered them. We were always the heroes. The ones who ventured into the dark places and slew the beasts. The ones who rescued princesses when the monsters stole them away. The ones who locked away their old gods in a vicious war between light and dark. But the author of the book was fae and she suggested that much of our literature was formed from the need to cast ourselves as good and true.
“Her name was Keelian, and she sought out the stories of the otherkin in order to write her book on their myths and their gods, and in so doing, she began to understand them.” Vi draws her knees up to her chest, turning her face to the sun. “To the otherkin, the night was the realm of the Mother of Night and her kin. It was peace and silence and safety from the invading fae. All the forests and shadows the fae feared were the safe harbors the otherkin fled to. It was the night in which they raised their voices to sing. The moon and the stars they worshipped. To them, the sun was a gaudy thing that flaunted itself. It was a glaring light looking for flaws, gilded in its false sanctity, one that took away their safety, their havens….” She pauses. “And the primordial Darkness was never a place to be feared. It was where the souls of all otherkin who had been birthed into this world would return to. The loving night. A place where the monsters of this world—those who had been feared for so long—could show their faces. A place where they could await their rebirth. The peaceful silence. The enduring eternity. The pitch black of the Underworld, where one could rest before returning to this world in rebirth. Only those that left this life unfinished—those that fought to return—were granted no peace there.”
The breath explodes out of me as Death grips my heart in his claws.
We’re both right back there.
Lost in the Darkness.
Consumed by the primal need to retreat to our most base selves to survive.
Monsters come at us. I tear their throats out with my claws, but there are so many of them. Dozens. Hundreds. Fueled by the taste of my blood on the wind. Hungry for flesh.
“Let me rise,” Death whispered in those moments. “Let them learn to fear us.Let me save us.”
I fought for days. Weeks. Months. Wounded and exhausted. Hunted to the highest slopes of the darkest mountains within that silent world until I finally cracked.
I broke.
And I let it happen.
I let Death rise.
Silence fell over me, stillness seeping into my heart. There was no rage, no fear, no grief in those moments. No pain, no suffering, no exhaustion. Merely… nothing.
Nothing but the sounds of screaming as the monsters fought to flee us, and the rippling violence of the ruin that Death cast across the world. The shadows that danced around my fingers turned into scythes of misery.
And with every step I took, the dry, arid terrain crunched beneath my boots as I became the scariest monster of all.
I lost myself in the Darkness.
Coldness seeps through my veins, until my breath comes on a fogged exhale. To survive in that world, I let the Darkness in. I letDeathin. And when I blinked out of that moment, when all my enemies were fallen, their lifeless bodies splayed at my feet, I realized there was no going back.
Death has been with me ever since, entwined around my soul like a possessive lover.
Vi doesn’t notice the faint tremor in my hands.
But Amaya does.
Her heart skips a beat, her gaze sliding toward me.
