Page 70 of Witchlight
He stumbled forward. The pain was stealing his grace, the cold was numbing his extremities. If Leopold had hoped to lose him with more trickery, then he would be disappointed. Aeduan could discard all scents he did not need.Lilacs and apple trees.No.Rainstorms and salted fish.No.Gnawing hunger and empty eyes.No, no, no.New leather and smoky hearths.
Yes.
Aeduan locked on to Leopold’s blood and moved faster. His wounds barked; warmth streamed down the front of his body. But he wouldn’t let Leopold distract or evade him. He was tired of this game. He wanted to stop dancing and to simply face the prince once and for all.
But soon, the entirety of the tunnel became ice, and soon, human-sized shadows appeared within the bright blue glow. Each possessed a blood scent. Each was a person that was still alive.
That was when the pain hit its peak. A brutal ambush from all six wounds at once. It stole all breath from Aeduan’s lungs and replaced it with fire. Literally. He felt the flames overtake his lungs. He felt magma carve out from his chest.
His footing failed him. He slid on a patch of unseen ice and pitched toward the nearest wall, the nearest person, the nearesttomb. His hands lifted on instinct, but where he should have hit tunnel wall, he didn’t. He kept falling. Mere fractions of a heartbeat that felt endless.
Then his fingers made contact. He finally collided with something. It wasn’t ice, though. It was warm, pliable,alive. And it was speaking. Shouting:“Blood on the snow! Blood on the snow!”
As quickly as he’d lost it, Aeduan’s footing returned. And the pain—itsnapped off like a spigot had been turned. Suddenly he could feel himself fully, feel his magic too, andseewhat was right before him: a woman’s robed body was exposed. Her face, wrinkled and brown, had wide, panicked eyes of burnished silver. She shouted again at Aeduan:“Blood on the snow! Blood on the snow!”
He retreated, clawing away from her. Except the ice gave him no purchase. Each time he tried to grab hold and pull, tried to dig in heels and flee, it sprinted from him like metal shavings from a magnet.
More bodies erupted from the ice. Limbs. Feet. Faces. Mouths all screaming at him with different decrees.
“That which is closest!”
“Winds of flame!”
“Knife with two sides!”
“Blood on the snow! Blood on the snow!”
Aeduan finally found a stride. He ran down the tunnel. Desperate, ungainly, with the unthinking terror of an animal facing its death. His muscles were not his own. His magic was silent. He was simply a child trapped in a nightmare that he couldn’t escape. There were hands climbing out of the ice. That snatched at him. Ripped at his cloak and clawed at his skin.
“Fissures in the ice!”
“New ways to travel!”
“Knife with two sides!”
“No coincidences except when there are!”
Aeduan couldn’t get out. The tunnel had no end. The ice kept thawing wherever he turned. The bodies kept tumbling out—always women. Always old. And always with eyes of moonlight that saw too much.
Run, my child, run.
He wanted to. Desperately, Aeduan wanted to wake up and find this was all a dream. Boots would be beside him, and his mother too. She would stroke his hair while his father crooned a lullaby or told him the story of the monster and the honey again. But it wasn’t a dream, and Aeduan didn’t wake up. Instead, when the tunnel finally ended, he found himself in an even worse place than before.
He was finally inside the mountain’s cavern. Finally inside the storm and stone, the lightning and earthquakes. Worse though, was the ice. It zigged, it zagged, shrinking away as Aeduan ran toward it. Which was why he didn’t realize until too late that he’d raced onto a stretch of ice no longer reinforced by stone.
He stepped off a cliff’s edge.
He fell.
Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.
“Run.” Blood drips from his mother’s mouth as she speaks.
It splatters his face.
With arms stained to red, she pushes herself up. She wants him to crawl out from beneath her. She wants him to escape. “Run, my child, run.”
He does not run. He does not move. He waits, as he always does, for the flames to overtake him and the world to burn alive.
