Page 5 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

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I plummet, spinning, whirling around and around in this new wind, air that tumbles me and floods my lungs with a sharp chill.

The sense of the abyss is lost—and now, I free fall from the clouds down to the Mountain of Slumber. I know I am close, out of the clouds, when branches whip at me, ripping at my cheeks. Through the constant whoosh of air rushing up to meet me, I hear screams, cries, shouts, what sounds like an echo in a stagnant cave. Fleetingly, I realise that it's other folk falling, landing, hurting, maybe fighting.

I care nothing at all about them.

Not as I whirl down from the skies, and I can hardly make out more than the blur of white snow and the brown of barren dirt smeared over my vision in patches.

Too fast, the ground is rushing up to meet me.

The panic hitches my ice-cold breath.

I should be screaming, but my lungs are frozen in fear.

The scratch of a sturdy branch strikes my neck, then hooks on a braid plaited to my scalp—my head snaps back.

My mouth circles a grated gasp. Hands flail, as if to reach up and grab the now-broken branch that falls with me. But all I manage to do is flail.

I don’t know how far from the ground I fall, if it really was from above the clouds.

I just know that I hit the earth, hard .

The impact punches the air out of me and reverberates through my bones. My spine is screaming, my ribs are thrumming. The backpack digs into me in all the wrong angles, and I choke on a breath that doesn’t come.

Snow has lifted up around me. I’m submerged in white dust, disturbed. The icy sprinkle of it peppers my twisted face. My lips part on the gasp for a breath. No sound comes.

Silent, my back arches against the burn of my starved lungs, and it’s all I can do to writhe mutely until the cold, sharp air sucks into me.

The warmth of the gloves protects my hands as they fist in the icy foliage. Lamely, I squirm, a mouse poisoned and too close to the end.

Ears ringing, still I hear the echo—the shouts and grunts and cries of the other contenders. Fae landing on the mountain, some I suspect with broken bones, others straight into a fight.

I have no fight in me.

My fingers clutch onto the remnants of earth. I feel the crunch of the light snow, the creak of the soft, stretched branches beneath me, the patches of dead, dried dirt packed under the weight of my body.

But I can see.

And for that, I am mildly grateful.

I stare above at the tree looming over me. It is raining. Chunks of snow floating down to me.

I blink.

A frown is slow to knit onto my face.

Then I realise, I slammed into a branch during my fall, hard enough that the wood broke and fell with me. Now, from its mother-tree, a hunk of dead leaves and snow rains down on me.

It dusts me.

Coats me.

Freezes me.

A grunt balls in my throat. Teeth bared against the burn of my lungs, I roll onto my side. Then—

I’m limp again.

My temple sinks onto the cold ground. I stare ahead—and see the slope of the mountain at an angle that my ankles ache in response at the mere sight of it.

But the prospect of rolled ankles aren’t my concern right now.

Where I landed, it’s midway on the mountain, or lower down than that, maybe. If I was high up, the snow would be thicker, it would cover the dead, brown dirt and hide all the soil’s cracks in a perfect sheet of fluffy white, or I would be slumped on a sheet of ice ready to splinter under my pressing weight.

There is no ice supporting me. And the snow is peppered around, some patches thicker than others, some melted and watery, like a poorly tended garden in an old, rundown manor in the midst of winter, or a sludgy village road that—with one wrong step—has folk flying and skidding all over.

I must be far down the mountain, far from the summit.

I can’t yet decide if that is a good thing or not. I don’t know where Dare has landed, and he’s supposed to be the one to hunt me, to find me faster than the others. For all I know, he’s landed at the top, and it’ll take him weeks to get to me. Or Rune has landed just behind me, and with that, I’m captured.

Either way, I am cursed.

An ache starts to sear the deep muscles of my shoulder. I have laid on my side too long. I let the burn ease in my lungs, feel the loosening of their constrictions.

Already, shorter strands of hair have come free from my scalp braids. One thin tendril whips my cheekbone over and over as the winds whistle down the mountain, weaving around the trees.

I shove onto my front. Snow falls from me, all that dusted coating that smeared me now flitters down to the ground.

Knees cutting into the dirt, I press my hands down—and make to push up. But before I can, my ears pop. And the distant screams, the shouts, the grunts and the cries, the echoes , all suddenly sound so much clearer.

I go rigid. Freeze all over.

Slowly, my eyes widen and I drag my gaze around.

A sickly dread unfurls through me like an acidic ribbon.

I am not alone.

I am not the only fae to have landed here.