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“You will control them today!” He squeezed my arms, distracting muscles that struggled to hold back my gift. “Time to step up to your fate. Time to be a man. Serve the house Khysal!”
“Enough!” Mother pressed herself between us, placed her hand on the back of my head, and pulled until my forehead rested against hers. “Why the goddess placed this curse into your cradle, I cannot say, but you mustn’t succumb to its darkness. Now go!” With one quick move, she lifted Naya from her hip and reached her to me. “Take her to the lower chambers and play with her until this is over. I love you.”
I inhaled a deep breath, taking in the fading traces of her scent—rose petal and lemongrass. “I love you, too.”
I looked over at Harlen, who gave me a curt nod. A gesture that sent a chill down my spine, but it had nothing on the frigidness of Father’s voice.
“It’s a good thing you’re the spare, Malyr,” he said. “I swear on the goddess, you were born worthless.”
His words struck deep, rendering me mute as I turned. I carried Naya along the pathway between the gardens and towers that lined to our sides.
“We go fjy?” she asked and bounced on my hip, pointing at the sky. “Up there? In the sky? Majyr fjy and Naya jook?”
“Not today, little bird. How about you show me that doll Father gave you, hmm?” When dark tendrils hushed across her chunky arm, I intertwined my hand with her much smaller one, and lowered her to the ground. “Uh-uh, no shifting. The last thing we need is Naya’s fledglings hopping around a siege. Come on. Walk.”
Something thrummed the air, letting a warning cord vibrate in my chest. A loudboomfollowed, and the ground shook. Something sharp hit my head with a dullthud.What was happening?
“Majyyyr!”
Naya’s shout echoed around my spinning vision, quickly drowning under the moans of wood and the rumble of stone. Naya yanked at my arm. I squeezed her little hand as pain pricked my shoulder, my neck. It encapsulated all of me, ripping me to the ground.
Still, I held her hand.
I stared at the ground, weighed down by heaviness. The faster I blinked my eyes, the more they burned, blurring my vision. One hand wiped the dust and grit from my face. The other tugged Naya toward me.
She refused.
“Naya. Come to me…” Another tug as I struggled to my knees, letting a piece of rock or masonry shift off me. “Naya! We need to get away from here.”
Disoriented and with a ringing in my ears, I looked down at our intertwined hands. My gaze followed the red cuts and wounds that speckled her arm. Higher. Higher. Stone.
“Nooo!” Mother’s high-pitched screech pierced through my muffled surroundings. “Nayaaa!”
I looked up, watching Mother’s distorted outline collapse to its knees as she stared at me. Father stood beside her, paralyzed. Only Asker and Harlen moved, running toward us, shouting something.Shift the tomes? Lift the tomes? Stones?
Head throbbing, I looked down at Naya, but all I saw was her mangled arm poking out from stone. Stone everywhere. Beside me. Around us. On top of her?
My stomach heaved. My chest convulsed as I reached for the angular boulder that rested where her head should have been as blood-streaked the horizon. I pushed at it. Shifted it until a red daisy came into view, sitting between a tangle of black hair, splintered white bone, and oozing pinkish-gray creases.No…
My chest caved.
Naya. My sweet, innocent Naya.
It started in my heart, the pain that cracked through my chest. Gnawed itself through the gap in my ribs one vicious bite at a time. Scratching. Scraping.
Shadows surged out of me in a burst of black tendrils. They slithered into the sky at a rapid speed, casting a darkness over the sanctum that chilled the air. Ravens fell from the heavens as a result, thudding to the ground where they writhed, flapping their wings between my shadowy tendrils that crawled over the ground in all directions at once.
They curled around Asker and Harlen, where they’d come to a dead-halt only a few feet from me, spreading their offshoots toward my parents.
Letting my hand slip from Naya’s, I rose and stumbled toward them. “No… not them. Not them!”
The moment I stepped into a thick fog of shadows, excruciating pain clawed at my legs. Like strangling vines, my own shadows wrapped around me, anchoring me down as they climbed higher.
I tried to absorb the shadows back into me. Commanded them to return.
They did not listen.
Freed at last, they cloaked my parents in blackness, swallowing them whole until their shouts faded into silence—a silence that soon spread across all of Valtaris, turning kingdom to crypt.
