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“I’m as stubborn as my father, or so they tell me.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “But, are you telling me that we… don’t exist? Or shouldn’t exist?”
“If we’re being hunted down by this creature, then yes. Something happened somewhere to write us out of existence. We’ve been cursed.”
“Cursed…”
“This creature was sent by Fate to… tie up the loose ends. We are the loose ends. Sooner or later, that creature is going to find us again, and when it does, it’s going to try to finish what it started.”
“You fought it back, though.”
“I did.”
“How?”
“It has a weakness to pure, light. It can’t kill it, but it can discorporate it for a while. It’ll be back, and we have to be ready.”
“But… why us?”
“I don’t know. Someone could have targeted the Royal Selection with dark magic, but the kind of magic necessary to pull something like this off would have been immense. And they would have had to contend with the castle’s own protective magic to do it. No one would have been able to do something like this without alerting the entire Winter Kingdom. They would’ve needed power comparable to the Veridian to break through the castle’s defenses.”
Unless the target was no longer under the castle’s protection.
That cube of ice turned into a solid block. I felt entirely cold, now—like I was freezing from the inside out.
“I… don’t understand how,” I lied. Now, more than ever, I knew that dream I’d had wasn’t a dream at all. In my desperation I had agreed to something I should not have agreed to. I gave a memory away to someone, or something, and it didthisto me; wrote me out of existence.
And by extension, Valerian.
It’s all my fault.
Guilt wracked me, and it was like physical pain. I clenched my jaw to endure it, to push through it, and turned my eyes away from Valerian. I couldn’t look at him, but I also couldn’t bring myself to tell him. He was the only person that remembered me, and if I confessed it was somehow my fault that he had been roped into all of this, he would leave me.
And then I would truly be alone.
I swallowed the ball of guilt in my throat and looked at him. “I don’t know why the two of us have been written out of existence,” I said, “If that’s what’s actually happened, anyway. I didn’t really know you until I met you a few days ago.”
“I think I have an idea,” he mumbled.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “I don’t think we should be focused on the why, right now, but instead focus on the how.”
“How?”
“How are we going to get out of this.”
“You seem to know a lot about this creature, and about Shadow Wraiths, and even about Souldirges. You had an amulet that could create pure light, and you have a weird cupboard back in Lysa that you can access from a distance. If anyone has any idea how to get us out of this, it’s you.”
“It may look like I’m prepared for everything, but I’m not.”
I turned my head down. “It’s more than I have. I can turn into a wolf, and I have a little magic to my name. I’m not ready for any of this.” I scoffed. “I thought I was. It’s laughable how wrong I was, and now I’ve lost everything.”
Valerian placed a hand on my shoulder, and I looked at him. “We’re going to find a way out of this,” he said. “I swear it, Princess.”
I shook my head. “Don’t do that. I’m not a Princess anymore.”
His lips pressed into a thin line, and he released my shoulder. I wanted to tell him not to dothateither, but my mouth refused to cooperate.
“How do you know so much about this thing, anyway?” I asked.
