Page 30
Story: A Cage of Magic and Darkness
Ahead, there is finally a change in the darkness. I’m unsure what it is at first—it’s not full light, but a loosening of the black around me, so it no longer feels so oppressive.
A crackle and snap—a noise I recognize—filters through to my ears. Then I see the flicker of light. A fire is burning.
I don’t know how anyone could have a fire this deep in the hillside, but as I walk closer, I see I’m not mistaken. The bright light after the sudden darkness has hidden the person seated behind the fire, but as my eyes grow used to the change in illumination, I can make them out.
“Come closer,” the Mage says from where they’re seated on a carved wooden chair on the other side of the fire.
I haven’t spoken a word, and I’m sure I’ve been treading near silently, yet they must have heard me.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I know everything, Princess Taelyn.”
Their knowledge of my name catches my breath. “How did you?—”
“I know everything,” they repeat.
Now I’m closer, I’m able to make out their features. The Mage is hideously ugly. In the center of their face is a flattened nose, the nostrils wide and flared, so they appear as though they’re just holes in their skull. The lips are pale and cracked, their teeth an array of yellowed tombstones.
But those aren’t even the features that capture my attention. The Mage is completely blind. Where their eyes used to be, now thick black stitches close their lids.
Their voice is cracked and creaky. “You’re wondering what happened to my sight?”
“No, I—” My instinct is not to be rude, but the Mage cuts me off.
“I can see more now that I removed my eyes.”
My stomach does a sickening flip at the thought. They removed their own eyes? By the gods, who does that?
Are they completely insane? Is that what centuries of living alone in this cave does to a person? I think of Ruarok. Would he have ended like this creature after centuries if I hadn’t found him when I did?
It occurs to me that the rot actually worked in Ruarok’s favor. If the king hadn’t been killed, his magic may never have worn off, and I would never have found him. My heart skips at the thought. How could I have just gone about living my life while he was locked up down there?
I wonder why the Mage has a fire when they can’t see anything, but then realize it must be for the warmth it offers.
Do they ever leave the cave? What do they eat?
I can’t imagine going for any length of time living this way, never mind a thousand years.
I lift my head to try to understand where the smoke is going—we saw no sign of it outside, and a chimney at the top of the hill would surely have allowed smoke to curl into the air—but there is nothing. It just seems to vanish.
“Come closer, Princess.”
I’m not sure how it’s even possible to know everything, but if that’s true, they’ll also have the answer to the question I’ve traveled all this way to ask.
The Mage lifts their hand, the nails long and sharp, the fingers curled and bent, and lightly runs their touch down my face, starting from my forehead, down my nose, over my lips to my chin, where they linger.
“A beauty,” they say, and then lets out a wistful sigh. “How it must feel to have such beauty.”
A part of me wants to tell them it can be a curse, especially for a woman. It’s far harder to get anyone to take you seriously. If I were six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a plain face, I’m sure fewer people would question my decisions.
“Let me touch your wings, girl. It’s been a long time since I was close to a Fae.”
Internally, I shrivel at the thought. I don’t really want their hands on me. It feels too intimate, but I can hardly refuse. It’s a small price to pay for what I’m asking.
I turn to the side and remove my cloak. My wings unfurl and spread, and I beat the air lightly, working out any stiffness from being confined for so long. The Mage reaches for me and runs their gnarled hands up and over my wings, pressing them between their palms.
“It used to be the Fae could really fly,” the Mage says, half to themself. “Their wings would fill the skies. Now they are too big and heavy. Too much inbreeding.”
I bristle at the comment. “I am of an ancient Fae bloodline. There is no inbreeding in my family.”
They chuckle at that, but the sound is like a knife scraping on stone. “You are not, Princess. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you as much.”
They don’t sound sorry in the slightest.
My stomach lurches. “That’s not true.”
“I already told you; I know everything. Have you never wondered why your magic is so weak?”
My cheeks warm at their words. Of course I’ve wondered about my lack of magic.
It’s something I’ve been ashamed of my whole life.
It’s not as though I don’t have any—I’m not sure I’d have found the key to Ruarok’s cage if I didn’t—but it certainly isn’t as strong as either my mother’s or the king’s had been.
I’ve always had something of a complex about it, worried that it somehow made me less of a Fae, but I told myself I simply hadn’t grown into my magic yet, and that it would come, one day.
But now the Mage is telling me what, exactly? That I’m not full-blooded Fae? What does that mean? That my father wasn’t who I’d been told? Or that my mother, or father, or perhaps both, weren’t as full-blooded Fae as they’d believed?
The Mage speaks again. “When two people come together to create a child, that child gets half from its mother and half from its father. But who knows which halves. While you may look Fae on the outside, that doesn’t mean it’s who you are inside.”
Their words are like a blow to the stomach, winding me. This isn’t the news I’d come here to get.
Have I been judging Ruarok all this time on how he looks, how he’s not full-blooded Fae, when, in fact, I am no different? The news has rattled me to my core. I’m grateful, at least, that no one else is here to overhear. It will be my secret to keep, if I choose.
Maybe neither my father nor mother lied about who they were, but they believed themselves to be full Fae, except they weren’t. Then the part of my father that wasn’t Fae somehow found its way into me, as did the part of my mother that wasn’t Fae.
It’s true that we’ve inbred with other species for thousands of years.
How could we ever fully understand our bloodlines, even if we claimed to?
How we’ve changed from those original Fae, who were tiny and light of bone, and whose wings were strong enough to allow them to fly among the clouds? They simply do not exist any longer.
Though I’m aware I’m not here to be asking these questions, I can’t help myself. “If I’m not fully Fae, what am I?”
The Mage takes my hand. “Does it matter?”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “Maybe.”
“You need to be your own person, away from the expectations of others. ”
“I am to be queen of Askos. How can I not focus on the expectations of others? That’s all I exist for.”
The Mage curls their pale, cracked lips and shakes their head.
“No. You must accept who you are before you can lead anyone else. A person who is not strong within themselves cannot expect to be strong for others. And sometimes strength reveals itself in strange ways. Sometimes to be stronger, we need to accept that we are weak.”
I hesitate. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“You will.”
Their breath is like a snake’s rattle, shaking in their lungs. I do my best not to show my revulsion.
This kind of questioning is too easy to get lost in. I need to remain focused.
I inhale and start again. “The reason I’ve come here is to ask how to stop the rot from destroying the kingdom. It’s already taken my mother and the king. People have been left without their homes. It destroyed my homeland of Torremora. I can’t bear to see the same thing happening here.”
“A great query like that requires a great sacrifice.”
“I’ll do anything,” I say. “What kind of sacrifice?”
“A sacrifice of love.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“For everything that is light, there is dark. For everything that is good, there is bad.” They curl their hands into fists and press their knuckles together. “The rot is a great badness, is it not, so to fight it there must be good.”
I feel frustrated and helpless. “What kind of good? I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s personal, an individual choice. Whatever a person loves the most in the world they must also sacrifice.”
“The kingdom,” I say automatically.
But how can I sacrifice that?
Unless the Mage means a person, and I don’t even want to go there. The person I’d loved most was my mother, but she’s already gone. Then I have Skylar and Balthorne, but no, I won’t even entertain the idea.
To kill one in order to save the many?
I blink back tears at the thought.
Table of Contents
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- Page 30 (Reading here)
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