Page 4 of Blade of the Nightking

I wanted the quiet.

“—Elowen!” His hands were on my face, trembling, tapping. “No. No, no, don’t—you don’t get to leave me, El! Not again!”

I fought upward through the dark, through the shroud of pain, dragging myself back into a body I no longer wanted to occupy. I pulled in a ragged breath and forced my heavy eyes open. Aedric leaned in immediately, his face lined with worry and relief, and brushed his lips softly against mine. His hand stroked my hair.

We lay on coarse, frost-bitten moss atop a ridge. Tall, skeletal trees rose around us, their gnarled branches reaching toward a low, iron-gray sky. The ground was broken rock and patches of hardened earth, the air cold enough to sting my lungs. Far below us, fog hung in silver sheets over a barren expanse of black volcanic stone. No city. No walls. No welcoming guard.

Definitely not Dheren.

Aedric stared around us, chest heaving, ash streaked across his face in dark smears. “This… this isn’t right.” His voice was hoarse, shaken in a way I’d never heard from him.

Skelding never failed.

His magic never failed.

“Gods, no…” he choked as his gaze snagged on something in the distance. He lurched suddenly to his feet, raking both hands through his hair until it stood in uneven spikes as he fixed on whatever horror lay before him.

With every ounce of strength I had left, I turned my head.

Beyond the valley of volcanic rock, across the plains of black basalt and wind-carved ridges, the Cauldron rose in the distance. Lava spilled over its brim in brilliant cascades, flowing down the mountainside while ash belched skyward in thick, roiling plumes that smothered the sunlight into a haunted coppery half-glow.

Above, the winged beast cut through the spreading cloudbank that unfurled from the eruption like dark, reaching arms. It banked once and hurled another blast of blue fire into the shattered summit, its roar carrying across the land with terrible clarity despite the distance.

Aedric crumpled to his knees beside me, tears carving stark tracks through the filth on his face. He watched helplessly as the molten blanket oozed down the slopes toward his city.

A moment later, Solmire vanished beneath the fire and was no more.

CHAPTER 2

There was nothing above us now but a churning darkness.

Ash drifted down in slow, swirling flakes, settling over our bodies like strange, silent snow. It reminded me of my father, burned with the rest of the Infected outside Midland. There had been ash in my mouth then too, when the Plague-Hunters strapped me to the wagon to deliver me to the Veil. I’d wondered if some of those flakes had been him.

I wondered who was falling on me now. Whose remnants sifted down from the sky. Which faces I might have passed on the streets of Solmire, now nothing more than dust on my skin. I groaned, the vibration slicing across my charred vocal cords like a blade.

Aedric carried me with a desperate, stumbling determination, as if sheer will alone could hold my soul inside my ruined body. His arms were strong around me, but I could feel him trembling. He was breaking, crumbling from the inside out. I wished I could take his grief with me when I left.

He spoke to me.

I watched his mouth moving, felt the vibration of his voice in his chest, heard the rhythm of his words. But their meaning slipped away from me, scattered and shapeless. My mind couldn’t hold them anymore. My brain was shutting down. Piece by piece, I was disappearing.

My gaze clung to him, his face the last fragile tether that kept me from letting go and slipping away completely.

The fiery blue of his eyes, the hard line of his jaw, the sharp planes of his cheekbones—these were the images I would hold onto. When I crossed over, it was his face that would carry me to the afterlife.

I wasn’t sad about dying. I wasn’t thinking about living. Living wasn’t possible, and I knew that. The burns had reached too deep, the pain gnawing up my left side from thigh to temple. I could feel the char of my organs inside my body. They were half-cooked, and were failing.

My heart beat sluggishly, each pulse weaker than the last.

The magic in my core flickered, as frail as the vessel that held it. Still, it writhed beneath my skin, desperate to mend what could no longer be saved. It felt thin now, stretched to breaking—no longer the swell of power I’d once known.

It did nothing for the pain.

And I would have given anything to feel nothing.

Oblivion beckoned, soft and vast and merciful. A black horizon opening its arms. An end to the agony. An end to everything.

I wasn’t frightened. I was relieved.