A face that both did and did not belong to Varyth Malchior.
Realization slammed into Elyria like a boulder, knocking the breath from her lungs. Or perhaps that was the shadows, suddenly rushing back at her like a multi-tailed flail. They wrapped around her torso, pinned her arms to her sides, twined through her legs.
Shock forced a whimper from Elyria’s throat as her own shadows held her, suspended in midair, winding around her waist, her chest, the base of each wing.
Cedric and Nox and Kit and Tenny were shouting, screaming, yelling, but she barely heard any of it. Her mind was too loud, her calls to her shadows—her despairing pleas—going unanswered.
The entire tower shook, vines shooting up and over the sides, tearing through the rift in the floor. They erupted from the ground far below, uncontrolled, called by the wild magic swarming Elyria’s veins. And all the while, she reached, grasped, dug into the hole in her chest where her shadows lived.
She found only silence.
Like a wall had been erected, a door locked, cutting her off from them. And Elyria’s voice was strangled, a gentle cry as the name fell from her lips. “Malakar.”
The dark sorcerer’s features sharpened as the traitorous shadows drew her closer to him. They were an amalgamation of Varyth Malchior’s face, melded with something else—something ancient. Pale skin. A sharp jaw. Thin lips and a nose that turned down just slightly at the tip. And above them all, eyes so black that Elyria could not discern pupil from iris.
“It’s mine,” he growled, darkness flowing behind him like a sinistercape. “Mypower. And you will return it to me.”
Fear iced over her insides.Take it!she wanted to shout.I never asked for this!I don’t want it!But the words died before they could form. Because they weren’t true. The shadows were a part of her. They were hers and they wereher. And though the silence in her chest only seemed to grow more vast the longer Malakar used them against her, Elyria knew that despite being smothered under his hold, that was still where they belonged.
“Elle!”Cedric’s voice sliced through her thoughts, a whetted blade carving through brush.
She fought against Malakar’s binding grip, managed to turn her neck just enough to see Cedric, Kit at his side, fighting through a mess of thorny vines that had ensnared them. Something like panic lit the knight’s features, the air around him refracting, like he was shedding heat. The light around him bent as he burned through the vines in a blaze of sunfyre. He and Kit grabbed hold of each other, readying to launch across the rift in the floor.
Malakar watched the pair with amusement, head cocked to the side, a cruel smile carving across his face.
Elyria’s vision tunneled, dread spinning up from her stomach. She knew with sickening certainty that the only thing keeping Malakar from slicing her into pieces was the fact that some of his power was tied to her.
She also knew he would extend no such grace to anyone else.
“You want your power back?” she hissed. “Take it. Take me. But you will leave them alone.”
The soulless depths of Malakar’s gaze flitted from Elyria’s face to her ears to the wings fluttering limply behind her shoulders. By now the shadows had wrapped around her so thoroughly, so tightly, that she couldn’t even fold them down, let alone muster the magic to cloak them. The ground had long stopped rumbling, the well of her wild magic drying up as the darkness cinched tighter and tighter.
“Interesting,” Malakar mused, his eyes trailing to Cedric once more. “You would sacrifice yourself for one of us? How times have changed.”
“He isnothinglike you.”
A pale finger stroked down the side of Elyria’s face, and she couldnot contain her shudder. “Mmm,” Malakar said, lip curling over his teeth. “On that, I think we are aligned.”
Elyria held her breath, time slowing as she watched the calculations occur behind the sorcerer’s visage. She saw the instant he decided. Her lungs deflated. Relief spread through her chest as he tore his gaze from Cedric.
With the flick of his wrist, the shadows around her loosened infinitesimally.
“Fine,” he said. “Come.”
And then there was only pain.
Agony so sharp and so bright, it rivaled only the ice-cold sting of death she’d felt once, long ago.
It ripped through her shoulders, scored her soul, her very essence.
It was pain, and it was heartbreak, and it was . . . loss.
Something warm and thick ran down Elyria’s back.
And she barely heard Cedric’s shouts, the pained, desperate plea of her name on his lips, before the darkness swarmed her and she was pulled into the void.
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