A battle cry came from Elyria’s back. She turned, eyes widening asmembers of her garrison were getting to their feet, the enemy’s crystal arrows crumbling into pieces.
She gasped, realization barreling into her. The power of the crown had washed over every injury on the battlefield. The soldiers had been healed too.
Still, not everyone rose. Save for Elyria, those who had died remained dead. She didn’t know why she was the exception. The timing of her death? Was she just that lucky?
Or perhaps she was very, very unlucky.
Because that’s when she saw it. The shadow. The darkness. The silky, smoky wisp that came from the castle, from the same place where that healing light had originated. It slithered between Arcanians and cultists, newly engaged in battle, unaware that the war was already over. Daephinia and Malakar were both gone. Their soldiers fought over ghosts.
“Stop!” she tried to yell. Her voice and body didn’t cooperate. She didn’t quite know who she was trying to stop anyway. The soldiers, immediately back to bloodying each other even after being given a second chance? Or the darkness, which continued sliding between bodies and over the damp earth. Searching.Hunting.
For her.
Elyria gasped as it latched onto her. As black tendrils coiled around her legs, her arms, up her neck, and finally, dove into her mouth. She felt it slide down her throat, spread through her insides. It was like drowning in ice. Suffocating in tar.
Shadows poured into her, filling her with a grim, heady power. It was all wrong. The darkness seeping into her veins with whispered vows of strength and greatness—wrong. The way it gnawed at the edges of her resolve, promising vengeance—wrong. The way somewhere, deep inside, a part of her relished it—wrong.
Elyria—past and present—screamed inside her head, helpless as the shadows smothered her, buried her. She watched in horror as her limbs moved of their own accord, dark magic swirling in her open palms. She stalked through sets of battling soldiers, shadows pushing them aside until she found him.
The one who killed her.
He was fighting one of the soldiers from her garrison now. Elyria recognized the girl—a fellow fae she’d bunked next to for a short time. A new, bloody weapon glowed in thesanguinagi’shands as he brought it down against the soldier’s shield.
Elyria cried out in her mind again, but it did nothing to stop the shadows from shooting out of her hands. Did nothing as they wrapped around the Arcanian soldier, flinging her aside. Did nothing to prevent the gruesome crunch as the soldier collided with the gatehouse wall.
The darkness didn’t care. It narrowed its focus on the cultist, whose eyes were wide with shock. Like he didn’t know whether he should be grateful for the assistance or run as far and fast as he could from the dark creature in front of him.
He chose wrong.
And as the cultist approached Elyria with a cautious expression, she felt the shadows swirling around her arms tighten and condense, solidifying into a gruesome black sword.
Raw, jagged edges ripped through the cultist’s flesh and muscle like butter as she thrust it into his chest.
He fell limply to the ground, still impaled on Elyria’s blade. She planted her boot on his shoulder and shoved him off with a kick.
It wasn’t enough. The darkness was not satisfied.
Elyria was a passenger in her own body as she charged, wings flaring, into the thick of the battle. She slashed, she squeezed, she raged.
She killed.
A dark tendril wrapped around the throat of asanguinagiwho was accosting a soldier. Elyria clenched her fist, cinching the shadow tight. The soldier cried out in shock as the cultist’s head fell from his body.
With a flap of her wings, Elyria was in the sky. The shadows took the shape of barbed spears. She hurled them into the battlefield below.
As if somehow the darkness knew which side of the war it had latched onto, it focused on the cultists. But it wasn’t careful. It was imprecise.
And it was merciless.
Elyria could do nothing but watch as innocent soldiers were caught up in her bloodlust.
Screams sounded—some in defiance, others in surrender—but thedarkness did not care.
She couldn’t stop.
She didn’t want to stop.
“What . . . are . . . you . . .” The cultist’s words were wet, barely audible through the blood that gushed from his mouth.
