29. Get It Off Me
twenty-nine
Get It Off Me
A n entire horde of caenim flew out of the abyss behind me.
My inner child had been right to fear the wall of shadows because it held a terrifying, hidden reality inside.
The Court of Darkness was possessed by a true maze—shadows that carved a labyrinth of walkways throughout the land, reducing the light to almost nothing and disorienting anyone trapped inside it.
A sob tore through my chest as I watched the caenim disappearing through the veil of shadow along the border of Blythe’s Court.
Tumbling out of the darkness like nightmares coming to life, they landed on the unforgiving red dirt of the Ruins with their teeth, tongues, and claws poised to slash my friends to ribbons—my friends, who were still reeling from watching me being pulled inside the dark maze by the smoky clouds.
It was like an old movie playing on a screen bigger than my mortal eyes could conceive—a black-and-white silent film with special effects that were difficult to follow through the grainy quality of the imagery.
There were hundreds of caenim. Maybe thousands.
The shadows were teeming with them. Each time a new beast leapt past me, the magic on the other side of the darkness splintered, tugged in new directions until all I could see was a white-hot fireworks display of power shooting out across the Ruins.
Another caenim leapt out of the shadows, and Batre screamed.
Loud enough to shatter the sound barrier between us.
Loud enough to bring everything back to full speed.
Loud enough to distort the darkness for a moment that lasted only as long as was required for me to see the caenim with its ghoulish, iron-tipped claws around Morgoya’s throat.
The darkness rallied and swarmed between us once more.
No!
I shrieked with enough power to rip my head free from the confines of the shadow’s body mould, violently thrashing from side to side as I put everything inside me into yanking my arms and legs out of its grip.
The figments of darkness hadn’t felt like anything too familiar when they initially touched me, but the longer I stayed inside their cocoon, the more reminiscent of the portal they felt.
I was being plied with tacky and dirty magic until I couldn’t take it anymore, stuffed full of it like a roasted chicken.
It was everywhere—a violation of my mind, body, and soul.
My heart was beating violently as if the effort would bring me any closer to Morgoya and Lucais, but my mind was being ripped in half, the continued assault of the darkness serving to distract me from what was occurring in the Ruins.
Though I tried to hold onto that devastating connection, it soon slipped from my grasp, the clamour of battle following suit, and then I was alone with the sound of my lungs straining once more.
The dark had teeth and knew how to bite.
With every snap of a shadow against my flesh, I was overcome with a sensation of wrongness flooding my veins.
It was underneath my skin and fingernails, between the curls whipping around my face, coating the raised hairs on my arms and the back of my neck, inside every last one of my pores, filling the wrinkles of my skin and fingerprints, and between my toes.
The filthy, unnatural darkness was the moisture on my eyes, the breath in my lungs, the clenching and unclenching of my heart, and the poisoned fluid it was pumping through me.
It was me, and I was it, and there was no escape.
There never had been, and there never would be.
Reunited or split apart—
The pitch of my scream, rising through the chaos like a ribbon stolen by a hurricane, hit such a new height that I didn’t recognise it anymore.
The shrill, keening sound shot out of me like the wailing noise from a stovetop kettle as I threw my head back, escalating with every slice of darkness into my skin, leaving a trail of scalding tingles down the column of my throat.
Wretched and cross, I tried to fight it off because desperately—so, so desperately—I wanted to win. But it was futile, and part of me knew that. Had always known that. I couldn’t ward off the darkness when all I had to offer up in its place was more darkness.
Nevertheless, I still felt like I might die from overexposure as nausea gurgled in my stomach, and everything that was wrong in the world filled me to bursting point.
Flashes of light danced across my vision through the other side of the maze, searing the veil like a hot poker dragging its tip down a curtain. Sparks ricocheted for miles—an explosion that could have been an atomic bomb as easily as it could have been Lucais.
It was powerful enough to rival Batre’s scream, ferociously tearing down the sound barrier until bits and pieces of the battle came flooding through to my ears, but I couldn’t see or hear Morgoya.
The only sounds were of the caenim—grunts, growls, and woeful moans, like an orgy of death and destruction—as they continued to whoosh past me and wage an attack on my closest friends.
Feeling dizzy and confused, I started to think about the storm again.
It had either gone quiet, or the dark cloud covering me was so thick that it prevented any signs of it from peeking through.
It was too hard for me to tell whether the flashes of light and vibrations on the ground beneath my feet were the storm or the High King lashing out at the universe from the Ruins, but if I had to place a bet with my life as the collateral, I’d be betting it on Lucais.
I wondered what he was doing and what he was thinking, but our mental connection had been jammed by the veil between us.
It was still there, and I could pick it up like a receiver in my mental hand, but there was no dial tone because all of the phone lines were down.
I called him, but I knew he couldn’t hear me.
I knew it because he didn’t answer, and yet I could still feel him like a hand around my wrist—like he was also holding the receiver in his mind even though silence was the only connection stretching through the line.
Using that feeling to spur myself on, I wrestled with the shadows, pushing forwards only to spring back like I was fighting with an elastic band. When I managed to get one of my arms free, it was only ever for a nanosecond before the shadows swallowed me up again.
Everything ached.
Cramps seized my muscles and invisible cuts decorated my skin like tattoos that couldn’t be seen—only felt.
Frustration shot out of my mouth in a noise that started as a yell but quickly escalated into another howl that dragged itself out of my throat like a morning star.
What do you want? What do you want from me?
My mental cry was full of anguish, and the shadows in the Court of Darkness rejoiced.
Like a key unlocking a door, the answers to my questions came flooding in so hard and fast that I thought my head might explode.
They rammed into me, one after the other, relentlessly battering me until I lost the strength to hold my own head up, and I had to rely on the presence of my copycat shadow to do it for me.
Tears streaming down my face, I hung limply in the air, the darkness cradling me like a martyr while it drained the last ounces of self-possession from my bones. Even then, my body struggled with the transition, rejecting the caress of darkness the same way I’d recoil from a burning hot oven tray.
My reflexes were on overdrive, desperately trying to shake me free from the hideous touches slicing into my back, tickling my spine with knife-sharp claws, and pulling at my fingernails and hair. I had no control over it—
Try harder try harder try harder try harder try harder try harder—
My throat was shredded raw by my screams as I flailed, kicking my feet and turning my head so hard I thought my neck might break.
Break break break break break break break—
Something hot and wet dripped out of my nose, pooling on the plump curve of my upper lip before tracing the outline of my mouth and spilling down my chin.
At first, I thought it was from tears, but then I tasted the wicked metallic tang infiltrating my mouth as the other nostril began to bleed, too.
Let me go, I begged. Please, let me go.
Flashes of blood, weaponry, and warfare filled my mind.
Each vision came at me like a monster out of my closet, lunging as soon as I opened the door, or a bullet train I couldn’t dodge.
Every time I flinched away, the shadows spun me around, and another horror rushed out of the maze to take its place.
My head lolled back, the force of each pull and tug enough to dislodge it from the rest of my body. In truth, I wasn’t sure why it hadn’t. Unless—
See.
Images that had to have been from the Gift War tore me to shreds.
Visions of burning buildings, decimated cities and towns, empty playgrounds with merry-go-rounds covered in scorch marks that had melted half of the structures into the ground, black stillwater inside houses with their roofs ripped clean away, and fields of bodies in shining armour coated with blood and gore.
As I peered closer with my mind’s eye, my blood turned ice-cold in my veins because—
Men. Women. Children. Bloodied, bruised, and broken bodies.
Piles of them clad in bloodstained clothes covered the fields around the decaying Forest. Smoke burned, billowing up from a space hidden deep inside, followed by the gradual collapse of trees as they lost their fight and crashed onto the floor.
Wet with blood and coated in dirt, the pieces of the lifeless faeries who had bled out onto the ground lay between the burial piles—hearts, lungs, intestines.
Dead crows lay scattered between the corpses, lured in by the rotting organs of the fallen before something had killed them, too.
Some were mid-feast on a soldier’s open wound.
One had its beak stuck inside a rib cage, their smooth, feathered neck lax and their wings splayed out to the sides.
Visions of a great stone wall replaced the field, bodies slung over the battlement as if the men and women had been on watch when it struck them. Weapons were stacked neatly against walls, and there wasn’t a single trace of blood or gore to be found. Those people hadn’t seen it coming.
A town at the base of a volcano, melted by the lava that had been stopped by something only halfway through burning up the last remnants of its victims clothing and shoes before it cooled and set.
A lake with faeries face-down, floating in the water—
“STOP IT!” I screeched. “ Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
Uncontrollable sobs took over, and I was no longer able to plead with the shadows.
Saliva dripped out of the corners of my mouth as I wailed, mixing with the blood that had started to dry on my chin, and a sickly-sweet burn gathered in my chest—the kind of feeling that convinced me I was about to die and be glad of it.
Because the visions weren’t of a battlefield from the Gift War. The world I had been shown wasn’t from the past. It was in the future—a war that hadn’t started yet.
Mercifully, the darkness pulled back the most confronting aspects of its mental beating, but only so it could show me the worst. The feeling overcame me first—the precursory sense of danger that hollowed out new depths to the pit in my stomach before fleeing to hide from whatever was coming next—
And then I saw it.
But it wasn’t the dark.
It killed off the darkness, too.
It killed off… everything.
Try harder try harder try harder—
“No! No, I won’t!” I shouted hysterically.
I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could, desperate to force spots and lines onto the backs of my eyelids. My soul-deep craving for a flicker of light and colour was overwhelming. I needed to see something—anything.
“I won’t! Get off me! Get off me!” I heaved in an enormously deep breath, preparing for spontaneous combustion if that’s what it would take to end the torment. “ Get it off me! ”
Something firm wrapped around my ankles like large, rough hands, but they lacked the warmth and softness of a human being or a faerie, and a scream coiled in my throat.
It ripped out of my chest when the placebo hands tightened their grip and pulled me, hard and fast, like I’d imagined the monsters beneath my bed would do if I let my foot dangle over the side as a child.
It happened so quickly that it didn’t give me or the shadows in Blythe’s Court a fighting chance.
Cold air rushed down my throat completely out of order, leaving me gasping for breath when I fell out of the shadow prison and onto the solid ground with a thud.
Immediately, I rolled onto my side so I could heave everything up and out of my stomach.
Liquid flooded my throat, pouring out of my mouth, thin and watery like cordial but with a distinctly rotten and sickly taste.
I opened my eyes to find black water pooling on the red dirt, which was so dry and hard that it initially resisted the presence of moisture.
Pathetically, I wailed again, flipping onto my back so fast that my head slammed into a rock I didn’t see behind me.
My eyes slammed shut, and I saw stars murdering each other—
“Get off me!” I yelled. Through the roaring in my head, I could hear my voice becoming weaker and rougher as I wore my voice box down to gravel and dust. “Get it off me! Stop it! Let me go! Please, please, God, let me go…”
I felt hands on my face. Soft hands, small fingers. Warmth. “Aura.”
My body jerked away from the touch—a reflex reaction, defending itself. “It’s not me,” I cried, my voice shattering on the final word. “They don’t want me! It’s not me. It’s not me…”
“Aura!” A hand touched my eyelids, soft fingers tipped with something hard and pointy.
Morgoya.
My eyes cracked open, stinging and hindered by tears. Mouth watering and throat tight, I pressed a hand to my heart and tried to regulate something—my breathing, my heartbeat, my emotions. Anything.
“I…” The sound of my voice was beyond croaky. It was barely there, barely recognisable.
“Shh,” the blurry-faced High Lady crooned. I recoiled, highly suspicious. “It’s okay. You’re with us. You’re out.”
I noticed that she didn’t tell me I was safe.