Page 19 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely (A Curse of Fallen Stars #1)

Lorel

The darkness in the hallway is claustrophobic, pressing in breathlessly on all sides.

I follow along behind Sila, trailing like the barest shred of a ghost. The entrance has long since been consumed by the endless void behind us.

The path ahead is undetermined and entirely opaque.

Sila is confident and sure as she strides into the dark, boots clipping on the stone sharply.

I study the outline of her as I walk. She had called herself wraith-like, and down here with the halfhearted light glancing off the edges of her hair and cloak, she is. The light only serves to emphasise the dark shadow of her form.

And it is an entirely lovely form. Without warning, that sudden desire threatens to overwhelm me. It makes my heart race, and for a moment I think it will give out. My breath catches silently in my throat and I choke on it. A heady, overwhelming wanting sending me loose-limbed and desperate.

And just as quickly as it came, it dissipates. Bleeding out of me and back into the darkness. I falter, my toe catching on the stone. I fall to the ground in a pile, the lantern hitting the ground hard enough to likely cause a dent. Another emotion hits me, and this one I am all too familiar with.

Useless. Unworthy. You will hold her back.

The thoughts crowd me, and this time it is despair that threatens to overwhelm me.

The knowledge that I am nothing more than a useless, sad little scribe.

Something to be pitied. It is relentless.

I can hardly see the lantern light. It must have gone out.

I couldn’t even keep my lantern lit. My chest aches and I can hear Orielle’s voice admonishing me again.

And again. And again. Why can’t you just be more?

Don’t you want to be more? You’re betraying their memory.

I want to scream back at her. I could. I could scream at the top of my lungs. Scream?—

Long fingers wrap around the sides of my face, nails digging into the flesh of my cheeks and scalp. Cold. Shockingly cold. The pain, sharp as anything, cutting through the dark reverie. Everything is dark.

Where did the light go?

I should call for it. Summon it back to me.

I take a deep breath, dragging air down into my lungs, and one hand moves, smothering my mouth.

I try to bite it, try to reach for the owner of those hands.

How dare they? I try to find purchase with my nails and fists.

I squirm against them. I wrench free, breathing deeply and the other hand moves, slamming my jaw shut and holding it fast. I struggle against ink dark eyes, welling over with blood.

Light glancing off them. Sharp teeth, bloody and clenched.

Blood sprays across my face. I am pressed against a body, firm and unyielding.

I don’t know this creature that holds me, know nothing but the dark.

“Lorel. Little mouse, please. Come back to me. Don’t let it hold you in fear,” it whispers into my ear. It?

Cold self-loathing sinks through me. Despair. Dark and overwhelming. As if I have already lost.

I should give up.

Yet I still struggle against my captor. Why are they even bothering ? Nails dig into my skin, holding my jaw and face tight against the urge to scream. I don’t know why they’re trying so hard. I can’t make a noise, anyway.

Oh.

The darkness clears. My little lantern light returns, offering a glimpse of Sila’s horrific form, the one that I had seen in the scriptorium that night.

Her breath caresses my cheek, a constant whisper begging me to return to her.

Shadows wrap around me, holding me to her while she keeps my jaw shut.

I go limp as all the fear and hatred and anger slides away.

Disappears back into the dark. Her grip goes slack.

“Lorel?” there is panic in her voice. I rest my head against her collarbones, trying to catch my breath.

The soft curve of her breast presses against my cheek.

She lets out a breath. Relief, maybe. Her fingers comb through my hair, as gentle as anything.

Reassuring. She doesn’t move, just holds me there a moment as if she’s trying to get her breath back, too.

“Are you alright?” she whispers. I nod. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you. I did not realise your thoughts ran so dark, little mouse.”

When I lean back to see her face, her eyes are normal again, the darkness confined to the irises. Worry written stark across her features. The shadows— Sila’s shadows— release me.

What was that?

“The Heart, playing its games,” she says. “It is a dark and lovely thing, but it is dangerous, too.”

Like you .

Sila stares at me, a soft smile playing at the corners of her mouth as I realise what I’ve signed. Warmth flares across my face for the second time.

“You are a wondrous thing,” she says. She grimaces, her fingers gently touching where they had dug into my skin. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t let you make a noise. Otherwise, you would be lost to me.”

I shiver at what I have narrowly avoided.

Don’t apologise for saving my life. Again.

The corner of her mouth tips in a grim smile. “Come, there is a branch up ahead.”

How she knows that, I’ll never know. Outside the circle of light, there is no ahead, no behind, only deep impenetrable darkness.

Sila pulls me up from the ground as she stands. “Try not to think too long on anything,” she says, smiling.

Will it try it again?

“Only at the edges. It will ease as we go further in,” she says. “Of course, then it will be replaced by other things.” She does not elaborate on what those other things are. I shiver, wrap my arms around myself and follow as she walks on.

The points where her fingers had dug in sting, but they keep me grounded in the dark. They aren’t nearly as bad as the cuts my own nails had made. Those I still had scars from.

Sila’s definition of up ahead and mine must differ, or perhaps it is only that time seems meaningless in the endless dark.

The stone walls, an imitation of the Library’s halls, turn to rows and rows of shelves, packed to bursting with books and papers and scrolls.

It isn’t so different from how Sila organises her own shelves.

I keep my mind carefully blank, focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

There are brief surges of feelings again, but they no longer take me by surprise and I turn them aside easily.

They lessen as we walk, just as Sila had said, until they no longer come.

We continue to walk in silence. I’m grateful for the small bit of light I have, otherwise I think it would be easy to become lost. Both in body and in mind.

Occasionally we pass a door, or an arch between the shelves. There are ghosts of things at the edge of my sight. A room of dancers, a pale imitation of the Dawn King’s courtiers in the hall of mirrors. Children sitting on a rug in front of a hearth, the sigil light making them shadows as they play.

Hacking coughs rattling out of an open door. Children crying.

Even in the Heart they haunt me.

Sila comes to a stop beside me, holding out an arm to stop me from walking headlong into a wall.

Here the corridor finally branches in an intersection that leads left or right.

The corridor has grown larger as we’ve walked, no longer narrow, crowding tunnels.

Instead, the ceiling is vaulted, arching high, meeting the tops of the shelves that stand more than twice my height.

As if in answer to my thought, when I turn to look the other way, there is a ladder that I am certain wasn’t there before.

Sila looks amused when I look up at her. “It likes you,” she says. “Don’t let it distract you.” Her fingers find mine, threading through them tightly.

First Sila’s attention, now the Library’s. I had hoped to disappear into obscurity in the Library. What had I done to deserve this kind of torment?

Sila turns left, pulling me along as I cling to her.

Everything is quite ordinary for a moment, and then at the edge of my vision, the shelves begin to shift as the other corridor follows us.

I can feel a headache coming on as my mind tries to make sense of it.

It tries to convince me that the corridor had always been there.

No, not there— there. I keep my lantern cast on the ground, so that I can focus on putting one step in front of the other.

The curse shifts and settles again, a soothing kind of presence brushing against my senses. For once it puts me at ease, and it isn’t much longer until the second corridor gives up its pursuit.

The monotony of the hallway winds on as Sila follows this turn and that. I keep a tight grip on her hand to keep me anchored. I’m terrified that if I let go, I’ll be left adrift. If I were to get lost here, I doubt I would ever find my way out again. Which I am sure is the Heart’s intention.

There’s nothing to mark the passing of time. Objectively I am tired, and growing hungry, but I’m also not. As if time is suspended and me with it.

The air shifts ever so slightly, and my heart skips with it.

As if it doesn’t care what change is coming because it will take anything at this point.

It changes as swiftly as everything else has, the shadows opening up into high, towering ceilings like the Library proper.

Wide sweeping staircases lead up to shelf lined rooms. Balconies similar to the common area open up onto the open space and high above our heads hangs a dimly lit chandelier.

Beyond the rooms and archways, the dark fog sits thick.

I have no doubt that it would open on to more halls, more rooms, more corridors.

Sila brings us to a stop at the foot of the main staircase. She untangles her fingers from mine and I try to ignore how tightly I’d been clinging to her. It’s hard to do so, what with how they’re cramping.

I collapse onto the stairs, my feet aching now that we’ve stopped moving. Tired right through to my bones. I press my palms against my eyes and try to suppress the yawn that follows. I feel so very small, and we’ve walked so far already and I’ve no doubt we have so much further to go.

“Little mouse, here,” Sila says, keeping her voice down. Her hand rests on my thigh, cool even through the wool of my dress. She’s kneeling on the step below with a wry smile. “I don’t imagine they’re very satisfying, but you should eat something.” I take the little parcel she’s offering me.

Wrapped in the cloth is a dry, dense flat bread. It’s the kind of thing made to be edible for a long time, at the expense of being actually edible. It’s sweet and a little salty. It’ll have to do. Sila passes me water and I try to wash it down.

Where are we?

“Where we are supposed to be,” Sila says, as opaque as the surrounding darkness. “The labyrinthine Heart of the Library is constantly shifting and changing. The only way through is to know where you want to be going, and to go there, regardless of what the Heart throws at you.”

How helpful.

A smile plays at the corner of her mouth. “So long as I know what we are looking for, we will find it. Trust me, little mouse, I won’t lead you astray.”

Won’t you?

The cramping in my fingers is easing, the aching in my feet fading, but my limbs feel heavy still. The thought of moving on is an unpleasant one.

“Not in here,” she says, smiling. “Now come, before you fall asleep and turn to stone.”

The hallways and rooms and staircases are certainly more interesting than the endless corridors, but when I follow Sila through the hallway that I swore we entered through for the third time, it’s easy to believe we are hopelessly lost. I have to remember that the Heart is an insidious thing.

I’ve already witnessed it tricking my mind into believing the corridors hadn’t been moving.

It could very well be playing the same tricks again.

I had trusted Sila when I took her hand in the scriptorium. I had to keep trusting her now.

“You think so loudly, little mouse,” Sila teases.

It all looks the same.

“It is,” says Sila. “Mostly.” I frown at her, holding my lantern aloft to see if she’s still teasing me. Her face is as deathly serious as I have ever seen it.

What is it we are looking for, exactly?

“There will be a door,” she says. “And that will be the next test, because the labyrinth would dearly love to keep you.”

Keep me? You said it liked me.

“It does. We are rather alike, the Heart and I. Ah, here it is.” For the first time, the darkness shifts and a wall appears out of the gloom with a tall door shut fast. It doesn’t budge when Sila tries to pull it open.

She glances at the dark above her. “Oh come now, don’t you want to let Lorel see what you’ve prepared for her? ”

There is something like an embarrassed silence hanging in the air. Almost bashful. Then, with a soft sigh, the door opens just a touch. Somehow it only serves to settle a scowl on Sila’s face.

“So eager to please,” she huffs. She turns as I go to follow her, forcing me to stop short and look up sharply at her. “Whatever happens, just keep walking. Do not stop for me. I can take care of myself.”

What?

I give her an alarmed look as she grows taller, eyes going dark, blood welling in them and the shadows bleeding out of her. “Just keep walking,” she says. It echoes in soft whispers as she turns and wrenches the door fully open. We hardly have to step through it before we’re plunged into darkness.