Page 24 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

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Dare kicks dirt onto the hot embers.

The sizzle reaches through the distance and irks me. This is the sort of morning—or wake up time, whatever time it is—that I crave coffee.

No, I do not crave it.

I need it, I need it like I need water, food, air, clothes.

But I am without it.

That has woken me up on the wrong side of the log.

So as I fill my waterskin in the creek, I shoot a dark look over my shoulder at Dare. He’s started stamping out the remaining embers now.

Backpack secure around his shoulders, the pack itself is flat against his spine. At first glance, one might think they are scabbards, so perfectly compressed and slight.

But in that backpack is the rest of the cooked meat, wrapped up firm and stowed away for when we need it.

He’s supposed to have coffee in there.

That’s what he told me.

“Lost it down the cliff when—”

I stopped listening after that.

Don’t care what happened.

Just that we do not have coffee.

Now, it’s all I can think about as I tug the waterskin strap over my shoulder, then follow Dare out of the campsite.

We keep uphill. The direction he means to take me. The way to the summit.

“How long have we been here?” I ask, running my fingers through my loose waves.

“Six phases.”

Six phases ... That is how long it took Dare to find me.

I cut that time in half and decide that’s how long it will take us to reach the summit. Without all the obstacles, without the distance between us, and with us paired up now, another few phases sounds about right.

That gives me time.

I don’t plan on reaching the peak.

I have mild, fleeting schemes. Running away when Dare faces battle, but long after I am fed and restored; finding a hiding spot and sneaking off to hide out alone; robbing him while he sleeps, steal the food, then leave him behind; or, my personal favourite, jump into the first river I see, let it carry me down the mountain so far that there is no way there will be enough time to take me back up to the summit before the portals weaken and the iilra have no choice but to pull us out.

I don’t have to race against the litalves, the dokkalves, or even Dare, my companion.

I only have to outlast the iilra.

Their grips on warped time and space will slip.

I aim to be far from the summit for when they fail, when they hurl us back to Comlar, and I make it home unscathed.

As it is, Dare is convenient—for now.

There is a clock on our alliance.

I can’t risk Daxeel finding us. With Daxeel around, I doubt I’ll make it very far in the other direction.

An icy trickle falls down my chest.

I bring my hand to my breastbone and add pressure, as though to ease the ache, the prickling pain.

Daxeel.

I haven’t felt him.

I shouldn’t care.

Yet I do.

“You said you don’t know where he is.” I don’t have to specify who I mean.

Dare cuts a side-glance at me.

“Have you seen him?” I ask.

Mute, he shakes his head.

“You haven’t seen him at all on the mountain?”

“No.”

My shoulders slump. “I haven’t felt him.”

Maybe I felt a glimmer once, when I was drifting to sleep, but it was such a faint flicker that I question if it was at all real or mere delusion.

Dare considers me. “Do you want to feel him?”

My face crumples into a scowl. “No.”

If Daxeel can feel me in his soul, then maybe he can close the distance between us, track me down—and all the easier it will be for him to deliver me to death.

And still, my tongue prickles with the lie. I start to chew on it.

Dare rolls his eyes back. “You two are something of a headache. A hammer to the skull, if you like.”

I throw my scowl at him.

“He picks you, you slight him. You pick him, he slights you,” he drones the words with such tedium, the same monotony in his sidesteps of the boulders and the trees. “He makes to pick you—and you slight him. On and on, I wonder if this will last an eternity, if I am to suffer your wretched love for the rest of my days.”

“Only until the summit, then he will kill me, and you will be free of the burden that I apparently am.”

Dare chuckles something dry. “Are you so sure? I am sure you broke his dark little heart at Hemlock—but then you did something extraordinary.” He turns his grin on me, but there’s no sincerity to it, and it looks so much like a bared teeth warning. “You filled him with regret.”

My words are a huff, “He feels no regret.”

“ That loneliness is what you deserve ,” Dare echoes the very words I spoke to Daxeel. “Quite the knife in the gut.”

My nostrils flare. I scramble some steps to reach his side. Then I shove his arm, hard. “He told you what I said?”

“Don’t be silly.” He ducks under a branch. “Rune and I were merely eavesdropping.”

I rush to keep up with him, but I’m just under the branch, and he’s already a length ahead of me, standing on a boulder.

His chin is raised as he scans the area. “You both should learn to close windows for your vicious fights. Anyone could be lurking on the rooftops.”

My lip curls into a silent snarl I throw his way.

But one look at him, and everything warps around me.

Dare has flickered and melted through the mist in a glimmer of porcelain white and ink black. The sheer speed of his movements is a swift brushstroke over a naked canvas.

I startle and fall back a step, but not before he’s standing in front of me, his hand flattened to my mouth.

Liquid gold eyes have hardened to rocks.

He looks down his nose at me and his free hand lifts.

Slowly, he presses his gloved finger to his full lips and shushes me. Then he turns his chin and his gaze slides to the peculiar wall of rocks and dirt—a wall that almost looks made by fae hands, not born of nature. But it is old, crumbled, and utterly uninteresting.

Whatever he sees, I don’t.

Whatever he hears, I don’t.

Whatever he smells, I don’t.

Dare’s instincts are two sharpened sword edges, one of darkness, one of light, then blended seamlessly together.

I trust his instincts as well as I trust my own. Better, even.

I keep silent as his hand slips away from my face.

Steel-gazed, he steps back. His bootfall is utterly silent.

He takes me by the elbow and, careful-footed, leads me to the rock-and-dirt wall beyond the trees.

He pushes me down, hiding me behind it, then he flattens his hands against the air. ‘ Stay ,’ the silent command tells me.

I really hate commands.

My mouth purses in answer.

I crouch against the ribbed earth, my fingers digging into the soil. Slowly, I inch closer to the edge—and peer around it.

Beyond the wall, the ground elevates into a plateau. Uneven, flat ground that spans miles in every direction. It goes on so far and long that I can hardly make out the landscapes on the horizons through the wisps of mist clinging to the whitish stone. Boulders and lone trees are dotted around the flat ground, but not enough to move through, to take cover behind.

If we walk this plateau, we do so exposed.

Dare crouches beside me. His hand comes down on my shoulder, firms, then adds enough weight to pull me down from the ledge.

I shoot him a dark look.

I make to speak, to ask him how he passed this flat, exposed area to come down the mountain, but the slow shake of his head silences me.

My brow knits into a frown.

Silence has us gripped.

Dare pushes his weight onto his boots, then slinks back away from the dirt wall embedded with grey rock. He raises his hand in a repeating stay gesture, then creeps away, back into the trees.

I blink, and he’s gone.

No sign of him among the lush trees flecked around me.

I don’t obey his command for longer than a moment. In just a few heartbeats, I twist around and sneak in the direction he went.

I trace his steps to the arched tree, whose trunks come out from the earth in a pair, then merge into one looming tree that reaches as far up as the low-hanging clouds.

I slip under the arch. Foliage crinkles under my weight, but it’s an oddly hushed sound, as though the arch muffles it. My movements are slow as I crawl under the arch—and I pause when I reach the dead, frosted bush.

It blocks my way.

Reaching out my frozen hands, I peel aside the shrubbery, and peer over the mass of twigs to the small leaf-littered clearing ahead, no bigger than an ordinary bedchamber.

It’s not the clearing that has my shoulders tensing. It’s not the size of the clearing that shrinks me down behind the shrub. It’s that the moment, the exact second I pull aside the shrub, the noise of battle is quick to blast my eardrums, as though the bush works in tandem with the arched tree trunk to silence the fight that I land my gaze on.

A sharp breath cuts through me, and I am rigid behind the bush. One hand stuck into a mass of twigs, knees digging into the soil, I watch as an ateralum sword comes cutting down the air. Crushed black powder of sorts, a glittering blade, slices through the gut of brown leathers. Intestines spill out of the perfect incision—and I blanch at the horror of that ghastly sight.

I swerve my gaze around the battle.

Five litalves, sheathed in brown leathers, closing in on the dokkalves with their backs to me. Even with their backs facing me, I recognise them.

Dare.

Caius, his bulky self and his massive ateralum sword.

And Samick, the familiar icy hues of his hair, spattered crimson; the starkness of black leathers on marble pale skin. He’s farther down the way, three corpses at his feet, their blood staining his black leathers, splashed over the sharp cut of his face; a glassy dagger in one fist, and a handful of throwing stars in the other, each tucked between his fingers.

I found the battle in a fleeting moment, a standstill. I suppose that Dare’s sudden arrival split the fight up, but only for a moment, a heartbeat, and now the clash ignites again.

Three litalves run at Caius—and that’s a smart move. I doubt just one could take down muscle wrapped in flesh.

I grimace as they are about to collide.

But before they can, the trio splinter off at the last moment, then whirl around him. They have strategy. Caius is as much of a target as I am, as Daxeel is. Take down Caius, take out one of three threats to the victory of the Sacrament.

The realisation strikes me much the same way as their daggers strike down Caius’s arms. Black blood spills out of him freely, as a gasp spills out of me.

I press my hands to my mouth.

Dare wanted me hidden. Kept away from the battle he sensed nearby. Because Caius is a target—and so am I.

I’ve just brought them another target. Kill Caius, kill me—win the Sacrament.

Dare and Samick shudder into movement. Their instinct turns to Caius’s attackers, the urge to protect one of the Sgail bloodlines. But neither of them close the distance, not before the remaining three litalves rush at them.

The strategy is obvious.

Keep the three dokkalves separated.

Now, Caius fights off three light warriors on his own.

Caius staggers around to follow the attackers on him like flies to honey. The kind you can never quite swat away. That’s how he looks at them. Withering and bothered, but not at all afraid.

That fear only flickers through the blue of his eyes when he lurches around with the weight of his sword, severing the throat of a litalf… and his gaze lands on me.

Startled, Caius hesitates the rising of his sword.

His gaze pins me under the split arch of the tree, my face poking out from the bush.

I blink, frozen in place.

Caius lets a roar of frustration thunder through him before he swerves around the litalf who traced his stare to me, the one whose face alights like it’s the morning of the Sabbat, and his muscles tense as though ready to pounce—

“Target three!” he bellows, and the thunder of his shout threatens to rupture my eardrums.

Caius moves fast, a blur. Swinging the weighted sword, the blade cuts through the litalf’s waist and…

My face twists with a grimace.

The top half of his body slides off. I hear the slicking sound before it thumps to the forest. It takes his legs a moment longer of twitching before they crumple.

The curt breath I release is a cloud at my mouth. But it’s premature, too reminiscent of relief—because I have been realised.

All eyes swerve to me.

Target three.

I guess that’s what I am.

Not Narcissa, not Nari, not one of them.

A target. Not even a high one. Just an easy one.

I shrink back, letting the twigs close over on my face. Better hidden, I crouch behind the bush, but I watch through the gaps in the dead foliage.

Samick throws a glaring look at me, all ice daggers and frozen threats, then he’s lunged the distance to land in front of me.

Back to me, he takes a stance—

Caius, too.

Dare narrows a dark, slitted look over his shoulder at me, it lingers, and I think he might want to kill me himself.

A grimace tightens my face. An unspoken ‘ oops’ that earns a scoff from Dare before he’s turning his back to me.

The three of them face off with the remaining three litalves. And I do nothing but hide as the shouts erupt and the two walls of fae come crashing together.

I notice, in the dance of war, Samick doesn’t wear gloves. His pale fingers are bare, his skin exposed to the cuts of his throwing stars, but no cuts indent his marble flesh from the expert throws he aims at the litalf closing in on him.

Glint after glint after glint, a procession of three stars strikes the litalf—and he wobbles on the spot, as though stunned, then crumples to his knees. The line of the stars—one embedded in his forehead, another in his chest, and the third right in his… uh… right in the crotch . My teeth bare at the sight, a cringe that has my thighs pressing together.

That’s got to hurt.

And it was no accident. Each strike is precise, it’s expert and mathematical. The stars must be poisoned, because the litalf dies too quickly, and the green sludge that foams out of his mouth is too unlikely from mere wounds.

I blanch at the thought of Samick handling those poisoned stars without gloves, the sheer saturation of trust he has in his skills.

But just as he’s finished with that litalf, the one that crumbles, and he reaches for a dagger fastened to his waist belt, a blur sweeps overhead.

I fall back onto my bum.

My gaze widens and swerves upwards—

Just as a light female swings from the branches above. A newcomer, not one of the warriors I stumbled upon here, but one drawn in by the song of battle.

My screech strangles the clearing.

I should shout a word, a cry for help, but a scream is all that rings through me.

Caius swerves his murderous gaze to me.

First, he looks to the ankle of my boot, caught in the shrubbery, but that fleeting moment passes quickly, and he’s watching the female above land on the tip of the arched tree.

He drops the sword and lunges for the seam of the arch.

Just as brown boots thump onto the bark right above my head, Caius is a swinging boulder that crashes right into her. His legs-for-arms hook around her, like an embrace, but a deadly one.

His hold tightens.

I turn my cheek just in time—a mere moment before the litalf is crushed in Caius’s hold.

A burn of sick itches at my throat.

I don’t look.

Not even after Caius releases the definitely dead corpse that slaps to the soil, all limp and loose from shattered bones.

If I look, I might be sick. That’s too much for me.

But as I fast realise, squinting up at Samick as he moves like mist around a light male, and when he’s passed him, he holds his fucking throat in his hands, I realise it’s all too much for me.

One left standing. I blink a weary, dazed look on her.

Dare moves for her, slow and predatory steps.

Run , I tell her, a whisper in my mind, a plea in my glare.

I don’t want my own folk to die.

I don’t want any of them to die.

And maybe… seeing this… seeing the brutality of the dokkalves, it’s that wakeup song I needed to be afraid of them, to find that dormant fear I once had—and pin it on my so-called allies.

A ball lumps in my throat.

Her fiery gaze swerves between us, lingers over me with a frown, as though she reads the panic in my gaze, the panic I have for her.

She reads it well.

Her backstep is an obvious sign of retreat.

She means to run.

Dare doesn’t let her.

He swirls around just once, and his arm moves with a sudden fling of a blade. It winks through the air.

And it plunges right into her forehead.

A quick death. One of mercy, I might suspect.

But a death all the same, and she drops like a sack of grain.

Dare closes the distance in three strides, then yanks his dagger out of her skull. It’s only with the loss of the blade that the blood spills out of her, as though the dagger was a plug—

A retch jolts me.

The others move into motion. Picking up their weapons, cleaning them off with rags, and Caius loots through the bags of the dead.

I stay crouched under the arched tree.

I very much get the feeling—between none of them turning to look at me, ask me if I am alright, or even to curse at me—that I shouldn’t move.

And I don’t. Not until Dare gestures with a lazy wave-over for me to follow, and we leave the clearing behind.

Still, none of them speak a word to me.

I find that their silence, how they ignore me, is sort of worse than being berated, like I expected.

I don’t loathe to disappoint. I prefer not to be shouted at. But to be… left out, now that’s a whole other sort of discomfort.

And they make sure I feel it.

All the way through the forest, Samick behind me, Dare and Caius leading the charge, I am stuck in the middle, and I feel very much like that annoying little sister that hangs around the older siblings too much.

I was that sister, once.

I hated it then.

I hate it now.

The frosty tongue forks above me and shivers. The python hisses a silent hello from the safety of the weeping willow.

I return the greeting with a small smile.

To the untrained eye—a male’s eye, even—this python might seem like any other, or another of the same species. But I recognise it as the one who saved my life.

I look into its pearl eyes, and I just know.

I keep its secret. I don’t alert anyone to the python, lest they harm it, kill and cook it.

So with forward steps, I bring my gaze back down to the lake. Unlike the lakes near my home, these crystal blue waters span horizons I can barely make out through the mists. Pine trees arch up from the wispy clouds clinging to the turquoise waters and seem to touch the darker skies—skies that will, within hours, be the colour of bleached stone.

That is what drew us to the lake.

Far across, on the other side, the pine trees arch up the groove of the mountain. But on this side, weeping willows sag into the glittering waters, shield the shore from onlookers that come from above—those leafy curtains offer us shelter, layers and layers of it.

I slip through a hefty drape of leaves and approach the shore of flattened stone and wild weeds.

My steps are careful over the mossy stones as I advance on the ice-statue that’s crouched in the crystalline waters.

But I am not quiet enough.

The ice-statue throws a glare over his shoulder at me.

Boots planted on two separate rocks, mid-step, I freeze.

The glint of green aimed at me like a notched arrow is enough to pin my heart to my throat.

Water rushes over Samick’s boots. It ripples around his calves. Knees bent, his hands hover above his thighs, but his chin is tucked to his shoulder and his lethal gaze fixed on me.

I read the warning in that look.

Be still. Be silent. Or I’ll serve you up for dinner.

Apparently, I made too much noise in my bones and muscles. What is quiet to me is thunder to him.

Makes me wonder how I’ve survived this long if I’m too loud at just, you know, existing.

Samick turns back to the water, his chin leaving the groove of his shoulder.

I don’t dare move an inch.

Stuck on two rocks, hands out at my sides, I am now like him—an ice-statue.

I have little to do but watch as he hunts.

Turquoise waters ripple around his calves, glistening the leathers clinging to his muscles. Just some steps from the rocky shore, Samick stays crouched and utterly still. Even his face is frozen in time, and all I can do is watch and wait.

I fight the urge to move, to shift my weight from one foot to the other, to release a weary sigh, to blink too loud. Any one of those mistakes might get me a throwing star in the thigh if Samick’s arctic glare was anything to go by.

So I’m silent as he pierces his seafoam stare into the waters, as though the gentle current isn’t there at all, and he can see all the way down to the individual tiny stones and pebbles and debris of the bed.

Samick reaches out his ungloved, pale hand, as white as the frost of the trees on the West’s end of the lake. The dusting of snow that covers the shore miles up.

His movements are glacier.

His fingertips dip into the water—

And my eyes widen.

My lips part with a silent gasp.

Because, at his touch, the water starts to frost.

Miniscule spears of ice crack over the surface of the lake.

The deeper his reach, the more of these motionless snowflakes that form in front of my very eyes.

Muscles are bolted to my bones. My eyes are as wide as plates and utterly glued to the depths of his hand in the water.

He turns his palm to the current and—

Water freezes.

In front of him, like a block of ice forming faster than nature could ever achieve, ice spears ahead and cracks and crinkles its way over the incoming rush of blackfish.

I watch as Samick clasps his hand like a fist over a string of ice. Then he pushes up from his crouched position and lifts a block of ice with him—a block littered with eight blackfish entirely frozen.

I aim my frown at him, the gape of my mouth as stunned as the stupefied expression of the caught fish.

Samick doesn’t spare me a glance before he’s trekking out of the lake, the string firm in his grip and the hunk of ice dragging over the rocky shore.

What the fuck was that?

Those words hum in my mind. The words nipping at my tongue. The words he expects as, when he passes me, he throws me a withering look.

Samick is different.

That, I know.

But different how?

That’s what I wonder as I turn my back on the lake and follow him up the flat rocks to the small camp we built in the clearing tucked between curtains of willows.

My mind is stuck on Samick as I dip under the dewy cold of the willow and closer to the hot perimeter of the simmering fire.

I follow the warmth, the crackle of kindling, the song of a blade being sharpened as Dare sits on a log and looks down the perfection of his black blade speckled with gold.

Samick chucks the ice-hunk to the ground, right next to the firepit, throws it like it weighs nothing more than a pillow. As his fingers slip from the frozen water rope, the ice starts to melt away—until it’s nothing but a sudden puddle of water soaking the earth, and eight dead fish slap down.

The look I throw Samick is a cautious one.

I sidestep my way around the stone-circled firepit to perch myself beside Dare on the log. I scoot a little closer than I would without Samick and his strange powers so close by.

“Where’s Caius?” My voice is a whisper in the stagnant chilled air of the clearing, as though all the surrounding leaf-curtained trees suffocate us.

Dare lifts his chin and jerks it to the side.

I trace the gesture to the sturdiest willow.

Takes me a moment of throwing my gaze around the glistening leaves before I spot Caius, all the way at the heights of the tree. His upper body protrudes from the draping greenery, and if I wasn’t in such a severe mood, I might find the sight of it a little on the humorous side.

It’s a decent vantage point.

And at least he’s far from the camp, far from me , so far that I can hardly make him out through the thickness of the willow.

My eyes squint as though to better see him. But he’s still a shrouded-in-shadows lump of meat and muscle.

He extends, as though sprouting an extra limb.

Dare traces my frowning stare to Caius—and the moment he does, I realise what Caius is doing. Lifting his arm way above, a black pole of sorts in his grip.

Then a spear of light arcs into the clouds.

A gleaming pillar soars from the tufts of the willow, reaches all the way up to the misty clouds—then erupts into a glowing confetti of red, as though a ball of embers and bleeding rubies swells through the clouds.

Shooting sparks.

Caius ignited shooting sparks, just like the ones I removed from my bag before I left Hemlock House.

The red, like glistening rubies, is different.

Mine were black and silver.

The red must mean something to the dark ones, a message, a signal that the litalves aren’t in on.

That signal is about me.

‘Got her.’

I guess the message means something along those lines.

‘Now make for the summit.’

It’s a guess, but it feels like the right one.

My mouth slants.

I watch the fiery eruption roll through the skies like a bleeding thundercloud. It churns overhead. I expect it to extinguish any moment, but it doesn’t. It grows, brighter, stronger, then starts a roll over the mountainside before it begins to fade away into the distance, like it’s on a patrol, making sure every dark one sees it before it dies out.

I drop my dull gaze to the tufted peak of the willow.

There, in the gleam of the crimson cloud, I can better make out Caius.

His pale blue eyes are faint as diamonds in dusk. Cheek to us, he seems to run his focus up the incline of the mountain. Whether he’s on watch or eyeing up ways to reach the summit, or assessing the movements of the crimson cloud, I don’t know. But it keeps his scowling face out of my way, so I have no complaints.

I hug my arms around the chill of my damp sweater, and I wonder aloud, “What will he sacrifice?”

Being too near the lake brought me closer to the eternal mist in the air. I feel that cold pebbling my skin through my damp sweater. I rub my hands up and down, up and down.

Dare returns the dagger to his thigh holster. “Who?”

Samick throws more wood onto the fire.

I say a silent thanks for it, though I know he only does this to start cooking the fish he’s gutting his way through.

“Caius.” I scoot closer to the roar of the flames. “What will he sacrifice to Mother?”

He has no evate to sacrifice, like Daxeel will offer me up to Mother.

“I haven’t asked.” Dare braces his forearms on his thighs and leans closer to the glowing red of the fire. “He’ll offer up something, but I don’t know what.”

The stink of gutted fish floods the cosy clearing.

My nose wrinkles against the pungent stench.

Still, I watch as Samick throws the flesh of the blackfish onto a metal grate that he fixed over the flames.

The sizzle hisses around us.

“There have been those who reached Mother’s ear…” Samick says, his tone quiet, but not soft, never soft, and I fleetingly think of a sword being sheathed. “And failed.”

I frown. “Were their sacrifices not accepted?”

Dare shrugs and fights a yawn. “Some lost their anchors, so Mother devoured them. Some were killed in avalanches. Some met fates that remain a mystery to us and our scriptures.”

“Two on record succeeded where all else failed,” Samick says and turns over the fish one by one. “Mother listened . And yet they still failed. Mother was… displeased,” he adds and lifts his glacier green eyes to mine. “By their promises, their sacrifices—or their hearts.”

Dare scoffs. “No one sits down for a tea with Mother and discusses her reasons for devouring souls or rejecting bargains. It’s speculation.” He cuts a glance at me. “Old lore, that’s all.”

He means to reassure me.

Samick doesn’t. His eyes flash, like emerald shards caught in the light.

The glow of the fire dances off his face, ivory painted with strokes of red and orange. “One word on record argues otherwise.” He turns his gaze to me. “It is written in the scriptures of the iilra—one word that both of the failed dokkalves heard before the avalanches reclaimed the mountain, and our kind were thrown back to where we belong.”

The way he speaks of our presence on the Mountain of Slumber, it’s the same sense I had when I first landed.

We don’t belong here.

This mountain belongs to the gods.

I never picked Samick as the most devout of souls, and yet now, as I study the flare of his eyes, the harshness of his fine features, the tension in his slender body, I think he is so devout that if he was born female, he might have been iilra.

The crackle of the fire and the sizzle of the fish almost drown out my whisper, “What was the word?”

He’s quiet for a moment before, “ Unworthy .”

My toes curl in my boots.

The way he says it, drawls it in a layer of frost and ice, it chills my insides.

Dare rubs the back of his hand over his left eye. “That’s what they claim to have heard.”

Weariness has its claws deep in him. He wears the fatigue with the same early-phase moodiness I’ve seen on him a few times before.

Little sleep, and not enough coffee.

For a lethal assassin, Dare is a bit of a priss.

Samick shrugs, a slight and glacier gesture. “Whatever unworthiness Mother meant, whether it be souls or sacrifices or the balance of the proposed bargain itself—the result was the same each time. Dokkalves attempting the ultimate bargain with Mother herself, but failing to recognise that she is as benevolent as she is malevolent.”

I look up at him from under my frown. My furrowed brows line my sight as I whisk through his theory.

The dark ones appeal only to Mother’s sadism.

That’s what he means.

The ones who offer sacrifices to Mother might forget that she is also the good kind of god, the first of all life, and that means she is both dark and light, evil and pure.

“Do you think she’ll accept this one?” I ask, a whisper.

Dare drops his hand to his thigh and, out the corner of my eye, I see the flicker of his jaw. A clench.

Samick studies me for a moment before he starts to plate up the cooked fish meat onto thick, green leaves.

Neither of them gives an answer that isn’t threaded silence. Whatever thoughts they have, they don’t share them with me.

I am left alone in wonders of Daxeel’s worth.

Is it enough for him to sacrifice me to Mother? Will that tempt her to deliver the full power of the Cursed Shadows to the iilra?

Or will she roll her eyes and turn over to fall back into her slumber?

I hope for the latter.

Selfishly, I hope she thinks the offer unworthy, not for the human realm and the survival of that race, or even for the risk to the light lands, but for me and me alone.

My compassion always struggled to extend to others.

This is no different.

I want only to protect myself.

And, as Samick hands me my leaf of pinkish flesh, I decide, I will do anything to protect my own life. Even if it means to leave Daxeel behind on this mountain, to whisper my own prayers to Mother, to live while all else dies…

Even if it means plunging a knife into Daxeel’s heart, I will fight for my life.

No one on this mountain or in Comlar loves me enough.

And so I will love myself most of all.