Page 24 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely (A Curse of Fallen Stars #1)

Lorel

The air is cold. Or I am burning up. It’s hard to tell, anymore.

When I open my eyes, I am lying in a box.

Shadow presses in and writhes against it.

There’s a low light from underneath me that reflects off the glass walls of the box.

No, not a box. A coffin. The kind they use to hold your body before they inter it in the catacombs.

Am I dead, then? I relinquish the book I am holding and reach up.

I expect a wound or a gash, but there is nothing.

Just the smooth fall of my throat. Dried blood flakes away against my fingers, but it isn’t wet.

It isn’t bleeding. There is nothing else to suggest the blade had ever bitten into my skin at all.

It’s even difficult to tell if the blood drying into the fabric of my dress is my own, or soaked up from the chapel floor.

I rest my hand back on my stomach and find soft, time-worn leather there instead.

The book. There’s enough room to bring it up to my face.

Red leather, no title, dry and as brittle as the last time I saw it.

Leather and paper flaking like the blood from my skin.

It is the book from my memories. The thing we had come here to find.

I grow uneasy looking at it. I have turned it over and over so many times in my mind that I had stopped believing it to truly be real.

I had picked up this book, and then I had run terrified to my room. I had silenced myself brutally and kept the curse it had given me inside me. Crushed myself in the process. For the first time, the curse sits quietly in my chest, not even stirring as my thoughts brush against it.

Perhaps that meant I had done it, then. The Heart had taken me instead of Sila. She is free of me now. My heart aches with the thought of it and so I turn my attention to the Heart of the Library.

Is this where you’re going to keep me?

The Heart’s attention shifts, brushing up against my consciousness.

Perhaps. You’ll be safe here, little vessel. Even Sila knows that, much as she fights it.

Sila. Has she not gone?

Can’t you hear her?

The sound is muffled by the glass, and then it clears, as if the Heart has let it in. Sila’s voice, furious and defiant. “You will give her back, or I will tear you down myself.”

The Heart sounds amused as its attention turns back to Sila.

Is that so? Even your own bargain is telling you that’s a bad idea. You know I can keep her safe here.

Sila lets out a sound of pure frustration.

Do you really think you can keep her safe?

The silence is as thick as the swirling shadow, trying to find purchase on the glass. Sila’s shadows, trying to find a way through.

I reach my thoughts out to the Heart, turning its attention back to me.

Why do you want me?

Because I have given you a gift, and it was a gift not easily earned. I need you to speak it and mark the traitors' downfall.

But I can’t speak.

There is a feeling of the air sucking in and rushing out. The Heart sighing.

No, you cannot. It will take time to break the silencing, but I will do it and I will hold you until it is done. None will touch you here.

“Please,” Sila says. “Let me take her place as I had intended. Let her go.” She cannot hear what the Heart speaks to me. She is pure, abject sorrow. As if she has become a melancholy wraith from an old faetale, wandering dark halls searching for a lost love. The Heart turns away from me again.

Without you, she is unprotected. Unsafe. They have come for her blood already. Who will protect her when they come again?

Long dark fingers press through the shadow against the glass. They scrape along it, a wretched sound. Sila.

“I will,” she whispers. Blood drips onto the coffin. Thick dark red, almost black spots settling against the glass. I press my fingers to where hers had been a moment before. I scratch my broken nails against the glass, seeking purchase. I need to be with her.

I remember Sila’s quiet fury at the curse mark on my skin. At the claim that someone or something had made upon me. That someone might have dared to claim what was hers.

I remember her gentle touch when she had found me in the scriptorium and the Lightkeepers lay dead around us. How ruthlessly she had taken their lives, and how soft those same hands had been combing through my hair.

I remember her journal and the way I had been a mark and become Lorel. Her obsessive notes and far-reaching research as she tried to save me. As she tried to keep me.

I remember her voice as she told me that finally, in her long life, there was someone that she did not wish to see dead.

All of them are impossible things. Things that should never happen.

Librarians did not fall in love with scribes. Scribes did not imagine themselves in love with their tormentors and guardians.

Ancient fae creatures like Sila should have no interest in simple fleeting creatures like me. It should be of no consequence if I am dead or alive.

Instead, it is everything . I had pushed her away, and she had walked to her death to try and save me from the Heart.

I had not wanted to see Sila go to her death again. I had not wanted to lose her in the labyrinth. Because I do not want to just be a scribe to her. I want to let her obsession devour me. I want to let her have me, however she wishes to have me. I want to be hers.

We have come so far and I will not lose her now.

Heart, I call out and the Heart’s attention again turns to me. I can’t feel any strong emotion from it now, just indifference. As if Sila is little more than an unruly child.

Is there another way to break the silencing?

If an existential being could look side long at something, the Heart would be doing so.

Yes.

And if I agree to break it, and speak what you wish me to speak, will you let me go?

There is a drawn-out contemplative silence from the Heart, as if it has all the time in the world. It probably does. The Heart’s attention shifts back to Sila.

Librarian.

The shadows stir and shift furiously.

“If you want to keep her, then I will stay with her,” says Sila. “I will stay until you see fit to release her back to me.”

You cannot stay here. You would lose yourself.

“I do not care,” Sila says, raising her voice. “Is throwing myself on your altar not proof enough that I would give up my life for hers?”

In my glass coffin, I choke back the sound of grief that tries to escape me.

I don’t know what I have done to deserve Sila.

I had never wanted attention. I had never wanted this.

Yet Sila has seen me, anyway. Seen me and decided there is something worth seeing.

There is no way I am going to give her up.

The Heart sits silently.

You would do that for her?

“Without hesitation. As surely as I have devoted myself to you and to my queen,” Sila says.

Would you put her above all others? Even your queen?

“I already have, have I not? Can you not feel that you are my only tether now? What more do I have to do to prove myself?” Sila’s hand comes down on the glass, leaving a dark smudge. The shadows flicker like flame.

I hold my breath, waiting for the Heart’s verdict.

Be still. I must consider.

I feel the Heart’s presence turn back to me.

Little vessel. You will read the book again and remember it. And when the time comes, you will speak it. You may be afraid of it. I do not care. That is my demand. Will you submit to it?

I do not have to think on it. Whatever I was afraid of before, I have a new fear now that far outweighs it.

Yes.

The word sits burning and binding in my thoughts.

There is a wry feeling from the Heart. I should have thought to put such a command on the book in the first place .

It turns its grumbling back to Sila. You will protect her, the vessel.

I take your bargain, and bind you to it.

You will break her silence and until the words are spoken by the vessel, you will protect it.

“I do not need a bargain or an oath to bind me to do so. I would do it willingly,” Sila says.

I would still have your oath.

“You have it, as you always have.”

Then it is done.

Without thinking, I hold the book up in front of me. My limbs do not feel like they are my own as I take a steadying breath. My fingers crack the cover, and the glass coffin shatters around me.