Page 28 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

DAXEEL

??????

Time freezes.

The cold has frosted over the world, his world, and Daxeel can do nothing, absolutely nothing… but watch.

The litalf slams his hand down on the ledge—but not on the ledge. His hand smacks down on Nari’s throat, and his weight is too much for her, her limp body.

The litalf’s mistake costs them both.

His weight pulls down on her neck… then drags her body to the blood-soaked ledge. She slips, and the litalf with her.

They fall.

For a beat, a heartbeat that costs too much, Daxeel is stone. He is frozen, frosted, and he simply stares.

Face slack, he watches as her limp body slips over the side of the ice-ledge… then falls into the cold air.

The litalf’s hand leaves her throat, but his panic, his realisation of his own mistake, it’s too late. He’s falling already.

They both do.

And for that one, pulsating heartbeat that thumps throughout Daxeel’s body, of hot rushes and icy fear clashing in his veins, he can’t move.

Thunder splits the air. A thunder louder than the quakes rattling the earth.

Caius shouts it, a roar, a blast—a farewell.

“For Dorcha!”

The moment the declaration leaves him, Caius leaps from the ledge—and he jumps for the litalf who dares fall into his path.

Mid-air, Caius barrels into the light male.

And in a blink, Daxeel sees the flash of metals as their brutal fight begins in their plummet.

But in that same blink, Daxeel is torn out of his frozen state, thawed so quickly it’s as though lightning struck him where he stands, and he swerves his gaze back to Nari, just a reach beneath the two fighting fae.

Nari falls.

On her back, the wind rushes up at her, arms seemingly floating as though she’s already dead. But the flittering of her serenity, her calm, it strings through the threads of their bond, and so he knows she is still alive, but without the fight to stay that way.

The lashing of a whip cuts through his vision.

Daxeel flings his gaze to Dare.

He runs the cusp of the crevasse-split ground, dodging drops and holes and slippery spots of ice as he throws out his whip with precise cracks—and aims each strike at Nari.

But the lashes don’t reach her.

He can’t lasso her, can’t stop her plummet. It’s a desperate act, to secure her with the whip and yank her into himself. But Dare has no other means of stopping her plummet.

Daxeel does…

The strike of realisation is violent, and it shoves Daxeel from his stance into a barrelling sprint. His shoulders boulder into any fae in his path, light or dark, they are sent flying out of his way.

His boots smack down on the rocks that line the crevices. The jagged surfaces stab into him, but as though he feels nothing at all, nothing more than the sheer cold of the panic spreading inside of him, his run is uninterrupted.

His hands unfurl.

Fists come naturally in a sprint, but he lets his fingers relax—feels the licking of the Cursed Shadows over his palms, spreading out like inky ribbons falling from his hands.

The whip lashes out and out. Dare desperately throws each strike at Nari, too far up in her fall, but too close to the impact that will not just kill her, but explode her.

Dare must know, as Rune does, as Samick, as anyone who watches Nari fall, as the litalves do, the ones who simply stand and stare, waiting for their victory to come, both Caius and Nari to die…

They all must know that no whip coiled around her wrist or her ankle will stop her hitting the frozen earth so hard that her limbs and head and blood and insides will ricochet into oblivion, and they will all be covered in what’s left of her.

The shadows unravel.

Daxeel’s pace is punishing, thunderous boot-strikes on the river of rocks, and he focuses, forces every ounce of shadow in him, calls on his authority to the darkness within him, and crams it all into one single palm.

He doesn’t look at Caius, tangled with the falling litalf, gutting and butchering each other.

He doesn’t save him, because Caius doesn’t need to be saved. He has declared his death. Declared it for Dorcha.

Daxeel only has focus for her, eyes for her.

And he lunges off the rocks, his stare locked onto the slick blood smearing her armour, the leathers glistening, the chestnut hair lashing wildly around her face.

He throws out his hand—and a hollow shout tears out of him as he rips the Cursed Shadows from his body.

The pain is instant. It’s hot, as though blood spills from his every pore, it is dizzying and he squints through the blur of his sight to keep his stare locked onto Nari, and it shreds him as though his skin, his flesh , is being peeled from his body.

But it is the Cursed Shadows. A part of him, embedding further and further into his body, his soul, by the phase.

And he tears it from himself, he channels it into a rope of eternal shadows, and he flings it out for Nari.

But the pain does more than blind him.

The shadows coil around her ankle… and it all goes dark.