AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tiny lights like Earth’s fireflies lit up the garden, and the whispers I’d been hearing grew louder as the lights moved closer. They swirled up into a larger shape - a faceless figure with great, sparkling wings, made of thousands of the little fairy-like lights.
Oh, fucking hell.
I realized what my mind had observed a moment too late.
The fairies, each barely bigger than a wasp, dove for me en masse, their tiny vicious mouths open and screaming in a whispered language I couldn’t understand. My whip was useless against their minuscule bodies - all they did was zip around the snaking leather.
Pricks and stings began to rip into my skin as they tore into me with needle-like teeth. I tried to run, but they flew just as fast.
Stupid humans thought fairies were so cute. They had no goddamn idea.
Rolling on the ground to crush some of the ones gnawing on my back, I finally gained enough presence of mind to pull up my ice magic.
Bad fucking idea - the armor only pinned hundreds of right to my body, and I gritted my teeth against the sensation of being trapped in a hornet’s nest. Screaming would only draw in larger creatures.
Dropping the armor and lashing out with my ice magic in an arcing blow instead, I latched onto some of their pulsing minds and froze them in mid-movement. Their tiny bodies rained down on the ground like hail, and I felt a brief reprieve before hundreds more rose from the little bell-shaped foxgloves.
I must have somehow disturbed their resting place, and they were out for vengeance.
There was no water source near enough to use my new spell with, so I threw wave after wave of icy mindspeak magic at them, locking up every fairy mind I could while trying to get some distance between myself and the foxglove garden.
I backed up a step at a time, praying to the Goddess that they wouldn’t follow me forever. Maybe it was a territory thing, and I just needed to get out of their garden home.
Just as I found another corridor to turn into and started to sprint down it, my stomach began to burn with its telltale gobbelin radar.
Fuckinghell.
Running into this section had been the worst Goddess-damned idea I’d had this whole Trial.
I tried to turn and run, but somehow there was a whole new cloud of fairies waiting for me, and my skin smarted all over from their tiny bites. I was bleeding in so many pinprick places, my entire arms were red.
I was a moving target for anything that craved blood, and if those fairies were in this section, who knew what other types of fairy creatures I might run into.
Not to mention how easy it would be for the gobbelins to scent me now.
I didn’t know what all of this had to do with prophecies, but there was a reason nobody besides the fae ventured into Aralia’s forests at night.
Taking a chance, I turned back the way I’d come, speeding toward the creek where I’d found my whip. If Janus and Collette were still there, at least the fairies would have a bigger buffet to choose from. I’d rather fight two vampires than a horde of gobbelins.
Flinging icy mind magic over my shoulders, I sprinted down the corridors, trying like hell to keep all my senses open so I didn’t run into anything else.
––––––––
RUSH
I sensed the ice magic before I heard the fairies screaming.
There was a vampire in trouble, and I prayed it wasn’t Kana. The ice magic would not only whip the fairies into a vicious frenzy, but it would attract the gobbelins I’d avoided earlier.
Part of me also desperately wished it was the princess - I’d been searching the labyrinth for her for days now.
Glamoring myself as one of the blood slaves that the nobles were sacrificing to the maze had been risky, but I’d managed to escape the pair of vampires in the Prophecy section by glamoring myself invisible.
They’d still scented my blood and spent hours hunting me, but it was easy enough to stay a step ahead when they couldn’t see me.
It had occurred to me that perhaps Kana wasn’t even in this section, though I was fairly confident that her energy signature had been near the pond with the crimson stag. She’d had pleasure there recently, and it had drawn me like a beacon.
Sneaking carefully through the corridors, I tracked the ice magic.
