Page 37 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

The thick air is suddenly hot, and it is rushing up at me.

Darkness whirls all around.

I tumble through it, limbs whacking against me at all angles, a boot knocking off my knee.

I am free-falling.

Snatched off the summit, torn through the portal, and dropped somewhere high above Comlar. The warmth, the darkness, the cries and shouts of the spectators, it’s a sudden explosion of changed atmosphere that rings in my ears and flurries my breath in my chest.

I don’t fall on my back, floating downwards to my death as I fell from the cliffside before Daxeel lassoed me into unconsciousness and safety.

I spin.

Spiral.

Tumbling around and around in thick, bleak blackness.

A cry is unribboning from me, hollow and gutted, and my hands are snatching out, desperate for something to grab onto, anything.

My fingers slip over the leathers of falling fae all around me. Slick with blood and melted snow, raw and numb, my hands can’t find grip, not on boots, or sleeves or trousers.

Bodies are plummeting through the darkness all around me, but it is only my cries that screech in my ears, the wind rushing over me, my own strands of hair lashing at my face.

I am surrounded, yet I fall utterly alone.

I have been so consumed, so concerned with how I would survive the Sacrament, that I never gave it any more thought than that.

I never considered what came after.

The drop.

In this drop of tumbling bodies, many will have strategy, they will know how to land, and that is something Dare never fucking taught me.

In the spiral, colours whirl by me, the darkness broken up by the gleam of leathers and the sharp glare of swords—until a pair of yellow eyes flare above me, like fireflies.

Before I can focus my gaze on them, understand the rush of yellow brushing over me, something clutches me by the ankle—

Then I am thrown through thick, dark air—and right into a solid brick wall. My spine smacks into the brick, hard.

The grunt burrows deep into my gut.

Air is sucked right out of me at the impact.

The brick wall winded me—but its limbs, arms and legs, tumble at my side.

I suck in a sharp breath, a gasp of panicked understanding before I’m grabbing at the wall. Only, it’s not brick, it’s a solid, limp body. Cold and hard like falling marble.

I clammer onto it.

My fingernails threaten to snap clean off under the ferocity of my grip. My knees press into the thighs of the falling fae, the dead one that I pray breaks my fall.

My eyes squeeze shut—

And, with a loosening breath, I let my body relax.

Tension will injure me, wound me, break my bones and wreck my muscles. I must let the corpse break my fall.

It does.

The thud is sickening. The crunch of bone and the crack of a skull on the hard ground, it should shudder the darkness itself.

I bounce.

My body arcs through the darkness, inches above the shattered corpse, and the pain is quick to shred through me before I slam back down on a surface as solid as stone.

The impact reverberates through my spine. An icy punch to my chest, the winding ache is quick to choke me.

Can’t move…

The shadow of my lashes fringes my vision.

Need to move…

Lips parted around a wheezing breath, I watch the darkness skitter above, bodies spitting out from the skies. Dead fae hit walls and towers, tumble into each other, corpses tangled and spiralling towards the stands like bombs.

Get up, get up, get up.

The survivors, the ones who live, are twisting mid-air, diving and curving and arching before disappearing out of my line of sight, landing on their boots in the dirt, or barrelling into the stone structure of Comlar, or crashing into the stands.

Two surviving fae smack down an arm’s reach from me.

One of light, one of dark.

And still, I’m winded, spine arched off the ground, lips parted, breaths wheezing.

I blink on the dokkalf as he lands with a stumble—a stumble that has him staggering, hard, into the litalf’s back.

Their hisses and snarls are quick to come, too quick, and I watch as they shove at each other… then…

I blink.

They just stop.

Stop, as though realising now where they are. Not on the summit. Not on the mountain.

Not in battle anymore.

Comlar has us now.

Mutual lands.

My frown is tired, faint, as they start a gradual pace uphill—and that’s when I understand where I am. On the short hill behind the grandstands, just before the battle blocks.

The courtyard!

Get up, get to the courtyard!

My body jerks with a cough. Breath fights to fill my lungs again, and, as I twist my neck and look up at the stone structure I’ve landed on, I make an ugh sound at the back of my throat.

Landed on another body.

Fell with a marble one, bounced, landed on a stone one on the grass.

A gravelled sound draws through me as I reel off the corpse. I leave behind the strange solid feel of it against my warm, prickled flesh. I suddenly feel a bit softer.

I flop onto my back.

Pressing my cheek to the dewy blades of grass, a gentle touch, a kiss from an old friend, I squint up at the hard face of the dead fae, I squint up at its head— his head.

It’s hard to make out his face through the thick darkness. I have been gone from it so long that the sudden return to black, it strains my eyes and dizzies my mind.

But I don’t think I am imagining this.

That the tinted-blue face of the dead litalf, one who has been dead for some time, perhaps frozen by the mountain, is one that I recognise.

Pale pinkish hair, the softest shade, not unlike the petals of a cherry blossom, have turned white with death.

I am staring, numb, at the first fae I killed with my own hands. A friend, a betrayer, an ally, an enemy.

Now… a frozen, blueish corpse.

A nauseated burn crawls up my throat.

With a groan stirring deep in my chest, I roll onto my side—and I stare at the courtyard of Comlar.

Last time the portal sucked all the contenders back to our lands, I was in the stands. I was part of the audience. A spectator.

Still, I remember the screams, the panic, the fae grabbing their younglings and running, the fret of the other spectators checking the bodies for the faces of their loved ones. The panic, the cries, the scratch of parchment as generals and admirals and their seconds crossed off names from their scrolls, names of those warriors who died in the first passage.

I don’t hear that now.

A silence has taken over Comlar, a glacier, a silence that has no business being as loud as it is.

I stare up at the courtyard, the back of the grandstand.

Spectators rise up on the stands, the wood of the benches creaking under the shift in weight. Heads turn, faces are slack with shock, some alight with panic, others simply numb. Babes are cradled to the bosom, hands are reached out and entwined with others, breaths are released with too much force.

But no one screams or cries, no one calls out to their loved ones, no one rushes off the stands to check the faces of the dead.

Silent.

A silence that presses down on me with the weight of the Cursed Shadows above.

The Cursed Shadows…

A darkness that flattens out in the skies and thickens the darkness so much that I now have to squint to see the faint light of the torches lining the courtyard, a blackness so dense that the glowjars are fading away to nothing.

The Cursed Shadows are here.

They spiral out of the portal, pure darkness unravelling.

I watch the consumption, and now I am the numb one. My eyes burn, my throat thickens.

The Cursed Shadows invade—because Daxeel won.