This must be it—the brink of death.
Still, I push myself forward, determined to reach Father. I stretch my fingers, knowing he’d chastise me for not running. But he always protected me with his entire being. Loved me with his whole soul. He deserves a proper goodbye.
Father is within reach—his body still. His expression frozen and his skin pale. His eyes brighten as the sky opens above us. But just as I reach for him, his mouth moves, forming a single word.
“Run.”
He’s dead, so he couldn’t have said it. But I hear it in every part of me. It echoes between my temples, and I stumble back just as the rebels begin to inch forward again.
“How did you do that?” one of them seethes.
“Her hair. What is she?”
“She summoned magic.”
“She summoned evil.”
More voices join the chorus of confusion as I scoot back, dragging my bloody palms over the stony street. Sweat drips down the back of my neck as the circle of judgment closes around me.
“Run, Elorie,”something whispers.
Nudging me.
Offering me a kernel of self-preservation.
I push myself to standing, not sure how I don’t immediately fall with how much I’m bleeding from the wound at my side. Leaving my mother’s sword in the street, I turn and run.
“Get her!” someone yells.
They’re close—tooclose.
I cut into the forest, trying to escape. There’s only one place no Fae will dare follow. One place I’m safe from them, even if I’ll be at risk of what’s inside.
Alyssium’s prison.
The spires stretch as if it hears me thinking about it. They extend high into the sky, replacing the clear day with shadows. Not overcast, but some other darkness that takes hold as I near the gate. Like something beyond is reaching for me, crawling past the line where the morning glories used to grow and slithering through the frozen brambles.
My cloak catches on a bush, but it lets go like it wants me to get through. Even in the thickest parts of the forest, the branches flex and the sky yawns, carving a path to the prison.
I must really be on the brink of death to be imagining such things.
Before me, the obsidian gates unlatch. Or maybe, they were like that already?
“She went this way.” Voices and bootsteps follow.
Slipping through the gate, I shove my body against it from theother side to latch it closed. It won’t stop them, but the obsidian will hurt them enough to slow them down.
“This way.”The breeze tickles the back of my neck, summoning me.
Guiding me.
A final whisper hangs in the wind before I gather my breath and step through the black arch that marks the entrance to the prison. The moment I do, my surroundings turn from day to night. From light to emptiness.
This must be what the After feels like.Nothing. While also somehow feeling like everything is in one place, swirling.
For a land of no magic, something stirs here. There is no light, and yet, a clear path leads me deeper.
I’ve only ever collected bodies from outside the prison gates, so I’ve never wandered the depths. But the human guards tasked with finding corpses and dragging them out tell stories of the prison. How it is dark in a way that nothing can be seen, and yet, somehow, everything is also perfectly clear. It didn’t make sense then. But as I stand, staring into the darkness, something stares back.
