Page 43 of Every Spiral of Fate (This Woven Kingdom #4)

Forty-Two

SLOWLY, AS IF EMERGING FROM sleep, Alizeh straightened.

She was blinded by a wash of light so pure she could hardly see.

She blinked painfully, her eyes tearing as they adjusted, and it was long moments before she was able to look down at the ephemeral nothing beneath her.

She seemed suspended in light, fixed like a wick within a flame.

There appeared to be nothing beyond luminescence, nothing above or below it. Alizeh turned slowly to study this impossible interlude, and as she searched the scene for earthly boundaries, she realized with a jolt of shock that she was alone.

There was no ground, no sky, no sound.

No friends or witnesses.

Only infinite radiance.

Alizeh did not experience fear. Somehow she knew that this task was meant to be hers to resolve alone—that the others were likely safe, that she would see them again—and it was as she’d completed this thought that the Book of Arya materialized in the nothing before her.

Alizeh plucked the article out of the light, searching its skin straightaway for new clues or keys, and she was relieved to find that the book had changed, once again.

Where once it read BLOOD , now it read—

HOPE

Only then did Alizeh see the shadows. They surged in the endless distance behind her, gathering like storm clouds, growing wilder as they steadily devoured the radiance of the landscape.

At once, Alizeh began to run.

She didn’t know where she was headed or why.

She only knew, without precisely knowing how, that this was the right thing to do, and that she was already low on time.

She ran with the ferocity of her preternatural strength, moving so fast she made her own wind, and yet it felt, for all the world, as if she were running in place, for there was no change in scenery.

No landmarks, no variation in color or depth—nothing to indicate she might’ve been moving in any discernible direction; and Alizeh, who had no reasonable idea of how long she’d been running, soon began to flag, gasping for breath.

It was as she felt the first touch of suspicious fatigue that she realized she was poised, all at once, at the edge of a cliff.

Alizeh screamed.

She caught herself, scrambling backward, but only just. Below her feet dropped an infinite fall of blackness, a yawning void so deep and vast the sight of it nearly stopped her heart.

She turned back to find the rushing shadows encroaching ever faster, and her pulse raced mercilessly now, panic devouring.

Alizeh forced herself to stare once more into the chasm before her—even as her terrifying, crippling fear of the dark caused cold tremors to course down her spine.

She knew, unequivocally, that she was supposed to jump.

She knew this, and yet she felt paralyzed, illogical fear holding her mind hostage.

She peered into the dizzying, lightless abyss, and its impossible gravity drew her incrementally forward so that she was soon bent over the edge, caught like a comma between thoughts. Her heart pounded ever more recklessly.

Alizeh could hardly breathe.

The creep of sleep pulled at her, drugging her, and now she knew the feeling for what it was: she was nearly out of time. In fact, she was losing her grasp of reality. Her perspective felt suddenly wrong; the landscape surging, turning upside down—

No.

The darkness of the chasm was somehow eddying upward, rising like a tide to consume the light from whence she came.

Slowly, dizzily, she was being entombed in shadow from all sides.

Alizeh’s ancestors had spent long centuries abandoned by the sun, the moon, the stars—compressed by the heft of an unlit, expanding universe.

They were slowly killed by this simple darkness, their eyes blinded, bodies crushed under a blanket of unforgiving, lightless night.

Her fear of the dark was practically embedded in her bones.

Alizeh had begun to tremble like a child.

She knew she would have to jump, and soon, even if the effort cost her what was left of her despairing mind, but she felt herself flattening under the weight of her fears, tears welling in her eyes.

It didn’t matter that it was insensible to be afraid of the insensible.

She was nearly out of light. She was being inhaled faster and faster by veils of gloom—

Without warning, she heard a child scream.

Again and again, these screams echoed with piercing horror.

Too late, Alizeh realized it was the sound of her own voice, her own childhood terror, her own wretched cries playing back at her in a loop of memory—

And she was drawn deeper into her own darkness.

She saw her father’s bloated body being disinterred from the bottom of a well; she saw her mother’s charred face slowly melting away from her skull; she saw a crush of Jinn bodies being shoveled into mass graves; she heard the draining sounds of the gutter as she lay frozen in the winter street; she saw scores of orphaned infants screaming beside their dead and mutilated parents; she felt the torment of starvation as she studied families through lighted windows; she watched as her shackled people were locked into buildings and set on fire—

She braced against every cruel blow delivered her body, and she lifted her shaking hands to see that they were raw and blistered and bleeding.

Alizeh felt herself begin to falter.

Her fears were too great, her mind too weak, her grief too strong. How much pain could a body hold before fissuring at the seams? How much hope could a soul conjure before surrendering to sorrow?

Her heart was a grave.

Alizeh’s eyes flickered slowly. This was not sleep, she was realizing. This was not the strange lull of the previous magic.

No, Alizeh felt as if she were dying.

She felt her breaths slowing, her bones unlatching, her skin releasing, and she wanted, desperately, to give in to despair. She wanted the pain of this world to be over. She wanted to close her eyes and never return to this cold, merciless place—

Do not fear, my dear, the fall

“Mother?” she whispered.

Alizeh lifted her head with difficulty, surprised to find that tears were streaming down her cheeks.

Alizeh had heard her mother speak these words before: after she’d awoken at the Diviners’ temple, when she’d been visited by a wave of grief.

Even now, she missed her parents with a shattering intensity.

She wiped with great effort at her eyes, then held still, hoping to hear the voice again.

It didn’t come.

There were but ghosts of light left in the nothing that unmoored her, and Alizeh understood, dimly, that she would need to jump while it was still a choice; before the shadows took her against her will.

Alizeh fought valiantly to hold on, to win out against the force of her own mind, and soon her body began to glow with a soft bioluminescence.

She took a bracing breath.

She couldn’t promise to save the world from its own inhumanity. She couldn’t control the cruelties of tyrants and oppressors. She couldn’t predict the future or erase the past. She could only vow to be a just queen in her own kingdom, and that would have to be enough.

Alizeh blinked back despair as if shouldering the earth, and then, with her eyes open, flung herself into the abyss.

Like a lit match in the dark, she was enough to light a path.