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The light…
How I miss the light. The warmth on my skin, the heat in my blood. Now, everything is so … cold. Empty and miserable.
I would feel completely empty and miserable if it wasn’t for my brief and sharp reminder of April, the dark fae’s wife. Human, at that.
Perhaps he won’t be so terrible to serve. He must hold some compassion to have married this human who was once his lover, I heard from the rumours circling the Courts. And so if I am to be his lover (if that is what he intends for me), it mightn’t be so different to the experience I had with Ocean. Slight respect, though still a distaste of what I am in my position not my blood; lavish gifts, affection, much of my wishes granted…
Beyond that, I can think of little else that he offered me.
Yet I know that what I received from him was more than what the other concubines ever did. I was his favourite. His jewel in the harem of silvers.
The sigh that escapes me is a trained one. It is restrained, elegant and silent. Still, my shoulders relax (never slump!) and I watch as the light pillars grow fainter and fainter until they all eventually disappear and I’m all over again trapped in the dark with a dokkalf prince, a human, and a sour-faced little half-breed.
I loathe what is to become of me.
Leaving the Wastelands behind means to leave behind the bridge between these dark and light lands. The sense of loss is overwhelming and I dare to feel dizzy for a moment. My eyes flutter shut on the pain and I rest my forehead on my slender fingers.
I am no house slave or kitchen worker—and yet, I do find myself wondering (hoping) that my servitude might be assigned to these lesser positions. The thought of laying with a dokkalf…
Fear shudders my spine, but thankfully I am much too rigid to rattle in my seat too much. No one in the carriage seems to notice my inappropriate ripple of fear.
If they did, they don’t mention it and for that, I am grateful.
Still, the silence in the carriage is thick with unspoken tension and I ache to shift in my seat to find a somewhat comfortable position in this terse environment. Of course I do not. I force myself to remain composed for the rest of this horrid ride, feeling the glare of the brat beside me every so often, and keeping my eyes on the window, though it’s terribly dark out there and I only sometimes see flickers of lights—torches, fireflies, illuminating willow trees that are quite spectacular and I would like one day to get closer to them, white fields of grass that glow. Many things in this land have adapted to the dark.
Yet, this place is still what it is and, as the carriage turns to a place I recognise to be the Royal Valley, my heart falls into my bottom and I find it a struggle to take a breath beyond the lump trapped in my throat.
There are many palaces and castles on the tip of the tall cliff on the other side of the valley. I have no way of knowing which one I will belong to until the carriage takes a stone bridge across the valley, leading all the way up to the darkest and tallest castle of them all, so dark against the white-mountain backdrop that it looks as though it drips fresh ink.
My insides shudder and I finally manage to swallow back that lump that was choking me. The carriage climbs higher and higher up this winding bridge, and I know not whether I am nauseous from all the spinning around or the sheer terror I am tickled by when I look upon this dreadful castle of nightmares.
With a shaky breath that I cannot prevent, I throw a flickering look of fear at the human opposite me. Her face is aimed my way already, watching me, and her mouth is flattened into a grim line. She looks down at her hands folded on her lap and, with a glance down, I see that her hands pull at each other. Human signs of nerves.
I do not know why she is so nervous. But it only serves to feed my own fears—
Especially when the carriage finally rolls into the courtyard, whose floors look like pools of tar around black and non-functioning fountains, and the only one in the carriage to stir is the dark fae prince himself.
I watch him out of the corner of my eye, my body tense and suddenly pushed up against the wall as though I can melt away into the dark wood. He fixes on a pair of gloves then, turning his attention to the human, he hesitates before he leans for her and plants a kiss on her cheek.
It confuses me. This pairing has confused me since I first heard of them, their story leaking out from the dark lands and into our Courts.
Dokkalves are almost incapable of love, unless they find their evates. So that is what she must be, I understand. However, even then, with an evate, a dark fae prince must sacrifice so much of his reputation and worth toweda human.
I do not understand it.
No human has a right marrying a dokkalf royal. It is not done. Not right.
Distaste curdles my insides for a while before the carriage finally stops and I jerk in the seat at the sudden pause. The dokkalf is quick to sweep out of the carriage. And he closes the door behind him.
I blink at the closed door, then look to the door on my side—no one comes for me, for any of us still in the carriage.
I almost think we have gone to the wrong castle until …
April lunges for me, hands gripping mine and her ordinary eyes alive with fear.
I lean in slowly, without the humanness attached to my movements as is stuck to hers.
“It is Prince Elden,” she whispers, terror clinging to her tone—and it hits me like a blow of a sword right through my chest. “Only a short sentence, but deadly all the same. If you perform your role well, you will survive this. You might be on loan from Prince Ocean, but when it comes to Elden, that protection only goes so far.”
