Page 75 of Serpent and Shadow

None of that was true here.

I had a few cushioning spells, but they’d be worthless in this.

I didn’t know anything strong enough to stop me landing hard after plummeting straight down from two hundred plus meters.

Not only that, it was all happening too fast.

The Eyrie, where I’d learned to fly, was so much taller.

It also stood perched on a rise overlooking a deep valley, so the height of the mountain’s base got added to the height of the Eyrie itself, lengthening the distance to the ground. For both of those reasons, it took so much longer to fall before you could see the ground rushing towards you in a way that blanked out your mind.

Falling from the Eyrie was closer to jumping out the door of an aeroplane.

This fall felt much, much shorter.

I had my arms outstretched, but it didn’t seem to be slowing me at all.

The roof went from far away to expanding rapidly in size, until all I could see were the stone slabs that made up its upper arches.

A warm wind blinded me.

When I first jumped out the window, panicked yells and shrieks erupted behind me, but I couldn’t hear anything now. Only air rushed in my ears. The shouts and screams of Jolie, Nyx, Alaric, and Luc faded abruptly as I dropped.

It took all of my strength to pull my arms in front of me, but that survival thing told me I had to put something, anything, between my head and face and that stone arch.

I managed to choke out a terrified, wailing scream.

I was going to die.

Luc was right. Nyx was right. Jolie was right. Alaric was right.

I hadn’t been in my right mind. Why else would I have done this?

I hadn’t given myself a single failsafe, a single ripcord or crash cushion, a single friend hovering nearby as backup, wearing a fully-functioning set of wings. There were so many ways I could have done this that would have been better than the one I chose.

If I was dead, there was a good chance he was dead, too.

The roof rushed nearer, so close it blotted out everything else.

I squeezed my arms in front of my face, closed my eyes, gasping too much air into my lungs. So much oxygen filled my chest, I felt light-headed.

There was a jerking, disjointed pull, somewhere in the area of my navel––

––and everything went white for the third time that day.

17

Darkness

Icrashed into something a lot harder and colder than the wooden wardrobe.

Again, it happened so fast, I didn’t manage to take a breath, or even comprehend I hadn’t crashed into the roof itself.

I managed to stay mostly upright, a miracle in itself, mostly because I had my hands out in front of me, and, even though it all seemed to happen in an instant, something about phasing must have slowed my momentum.

If it hadn’t, I still would have broken a few bones, if not my neck.

Yet another thing that hadn’t occurred to me until now.