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Dying…
I must be dying.
Can’t move.
The ache in my ribs is blinding, swirled all around me. It burrows deeper into my tissue with every failed inhale.
Can’t breathe.
I’m buried beneath the rubble. The shards of the grandstands that blasted through the courtyard, the stone and debris of Comlar, the fae that were thrown through the air with me—we are a pile of unmoveable rubble.
I need to get out of here.
My chin is turned sideways, pinned, and I can see little more than a cloud of dust and smoke and shadows. The occasional shadow cuts through the smoke, but it’s so quick and fleeting that I wonder if it’s real or if it is the end of my life ebbing into my mind, tricking me.
I worm my boot under what feels like a round rock. Maybe a head. Still, slow, I squirm my boot against it.
It’s the only movement I can manage.
Others are here with me, buried, trapped like I am. Their moans are faint. There’s a blubbering whimper close to me and on the verge of panic.
If I could make much sound at all, my cries would be joining theirs.
But I am silenced… strangled .
The solid weight of a leg is crushing down on my neck. The cartilage in my throat creaks against the muscled leg with every stifled breath that wheezes in and out of my parted lips, up and down my aching chest.
The ringing in my ears is humming through me. My lips part around grating noises that are too soft, too quiet.
No one is coming to save me this time.
Slack-faced, I watch the cloud of smoke disturb with shadows. If it wasn’t for the thudding symphony of boots smacking down on stone, I would return to my thoughts of hallucinations, that what I am seeing is the trickery of death drawing nearer and nearer—but it isn’t. It’s folk, fleeing the thundering, rumbling bass of the Cursed Shadows, of the darkness… of the fall of Comlar.
I can’t flee.
I am trapped.
And those folk run right past me.
This can’t be the end.
Not after all that I survived in the Sacrament.
I fought for my life, I fought to the bone for this.
I stabbed the male I loved, I clawed my way through bogs of churning blood and…
…and this is how I die?
Crushed under the weight of spectators while Comlar falls. Battered and bruised, blood smearing my face, dried and caked onto my flesh, my hands are raw and frozen, my legs stretched and aching deep into the bone—and still…
Still, I have some fight left in me.
How I have this, this little flame of defiance; how I can break, then rebirth myself as formidable—I can’t possibly know.
Maybe my human mother was a fighter.
I even surprise myself.
I am not full fae. I am not fullblood.
I am halfling.
The human in me is the roll back of my eyes as I inch closer to passing out; it’s the slowing of my rocking boot, the surrender of my lame fight; it’s the weakness in my muscles, the softness of my bones, the flimsiness of my flesh.
The full fae in this crushing debris pile have better chances than I do. Their bodies can withstand the weight better, longer, but not forever.
There is not even enough air in my lungs to cry out for help. Not that I am sure many would come to my aid now.
It’s not the Sacrament anymore. The dark fae have no loyalties to me, no motivation to save me—and the light fae will watch me die just for the sheer audacity that I had to stay alive and not die for their cause.
I am on my own.
And I will die on my own, now that the strength is fading from me, the rock of my boot against a head, back and forth, is slowing, slowing, slowing…
I suffer through the agonising moments, the time passing me. I am limp, waiting to learn which tear will be the last to fall from my eyes before the gods finally take me.
It’s longer than I would like.
A quick death is mercy I am not afforded.
My heart thumps in my head, in my throat, in my belly. I feel it, the pulsations, the dizziness.
I watch the smoke disturb with running fae, the cascade of bootsteps as thunderous as the crashing collapse of Comlar.
I watch as the smoke turns milky.
Thick, dark grey, bulbous clouds are warping before my eyes, turning dewy .
For a beat, I think my tears are glossing my vision.
But it isn’t the tears.
I blink, a tired flutter of wet lashes, and a glacier breeze shudders closer.
The faintest frown tugs on my brow, it tugs and tugs, trying to form without the energy behind it, then it fades, and my face is blank again, slack.
Death is near…
My breath wheezes out of me, lame and tired, inching closer to its end.
And he has come to watch it…
Come to watch me die.
Samick stands there.
He is a stroke of ice on the edge of the smoke cloud. So close to me that, if he reached out his hand for my face, the whisper of his fingertips would graze me.
He does not touch me.
His head tilts to the side as he considers me, and it would look passive, almost fleeting if it wasn’t for those pale, green eyes like blades of grass caught in a blizzard.
I look up at him.
He stares down at me.
He risks his life in the collapse of Comlar, in the violence of the Cursed Shadows lashing through the courtyard and whipping through the stone.
He risks fatal injury out here.
He should run to Kithe with the rest of the fae.
But he doesn’t.
He just watches me.
I think he means to watch me die, to watch as I take my last breath…
That thought wisps through my mind, a ribbon swishing and swishing, tangling in on itself—then it vanishes the moment Samick takes a step closer to me.
I would flinch if I could, if I wasn’t starting to see the stars of unconsciousness, of suffocation dancing through my vision.
In the star speckled darkness taking over me, Samick moves for the stone above me.
My head is locked in place, my chin tucked to the side, cheek pressed into a metal plate of armour, and so I can’t see what he does. I just know he touches his bare hands to the rubble—and everything suddenly is cold.
Cold, like the mountain. Cold, like frost and ice and the river when it tried to drown me.
Cold like Samick…
I am losing my fight against the gods of death.
My eyes are rolling back now, slowly, and I struggle to watch as Samick turns his hands to the rubble beneath me. Lashes flutter, disturbing my warping vision.
Still, I make out Samick drawing back with a reeling fist.
A startled breath tries to suck in through my parted lips, but my lungs are empty, burning me from the inside out.
Samick’s eyes flare like emerald flames, then he collides his fist into the frozen rubble—and a sudden breath floods me.
It happens in such a blur, clouded by the smog and the blasting debris, but I feel it all. I feel the grips of Samick’s icy hands snatch me, fast, too fast, and yank me out of the falling rubble; I feel metal and boots and buttons scrape over every bare spot of my skin; I feel the weight disappear.
And I am limp, floating, as Samick throws me over his shoulder.
Still, I feel it all.
Not just the crushing pressure of my middle on his solid shoulder, or the thumping of dizziness through my body with every one of his steps.
I feel the cries of the folk still in that rubble, the shifted weight and the crushing bones.
Samick leaves them behind.
I feel all of that… until my eyes finally do roll back into the border of my lashes, and I feel nothing at all.
Table of Contents
- Page 1 (Reading here)
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39