Chapter 24 - Elle
Elle
I came to with my face pressed against something that might have been leather and definitely smelled like death warmed over and left in the sun for a week.
My head pounded in rhythm with hoofbeats—or what should have been hoofbeats but sounded more like breaking glass on stone, like ceramics shattering in slow motion.
Every part of me hurt in new and creative ways, from my hair follicles to my toenails, with special attention paid to my spine, which felt like someone had replaced it with a string of hot coals.
“She wakes,” a voice said above me, cultured and cold as winter moonlight, with an accent that wasn’t quite British, wasn’t quite anything from Earth.
I tried to sit up and immediately regretted every life choice that had led to this moment.
My wrists were bound by restraints that felt alive, aware, and deeply offended by my existence.
Root-forged restraints, my scattered mind supplied helpfully, as if naming the thing hurting me would somehow make it hurt less.
“I’m going to be sick,” I managed, and I wasn’t lying. My stomach was doing gymnastics that would have won Olympic gold.
“If you vomit on my mount, I’ll drag you behind it instead.” The threat was delivered so casually it took a moment to register. Like someone mentioning they’d forgotten to buy milk.
I forced my eyes open. The light was strange—dim and gray, making everything look faded. The air felt heavy in my lungs, harder to breathe than it should be.
The rider looming over me was tall and armored in dark metal etched with silver. Frost clung to the edges of their armor despite no cold in the air. Their helmet had no openings except for the eyes, which burned with a dull red glow.
“Where are you taking me?” My voice came out rough, like I’d been gargling gravel.
“Where you were always meant to go.”
Helpful. Super specific. I loved cryptic non-answers when I was bound and being kidnapped by supernatural beings. Really added to the ambiance of the whole situation.
I turned my head—slowly, carefully, trying not to trigger another wave of nausea—to take in our surroundings. What I saw made my stomach drop through the floor and possibly through several sub-basements of reality.
The landscape was dying.
Not dead—dying. Present tense. Active tense.
Very much currently in the process of dying.
I watched grass blacken and curl in real-time, like watching those time-lapse videos of fruit rotting, but at normal speed.
Trees withered to husks as we passed, their leaves falling as ash that disappeared before it touched the ground.
The very air tasted of decay, sweet and cloying and wrong, like flowers left too long in a funeral home.
This wasn’t natural corruption like Kaelren’s—his darkness had a purpose, a logic to it. This was systematic destruction, deliberate and thorough and absolutely certain. The kind of death that didn’t allow for resurrection.
“The realm,” I whispered, horror making my voice small. “You’re killing it.”
“We’re cleansing it,” another rider said, pulling alongside us.
This one’s voice was feminine, but I couldn’t make out their form clearly—they kept blurring at the edges, shifting slightly whenever I tried to focus.
“The rot was already here, spreading from the Heartspire outward. We merely… accelerate the process.”
“That makes no sense—”
“Doesn’t it?” The first rider adjusted their grip on me as one of their horrific mounts navigated a fallen tree.
“The Crown Prince has been spreading corruption for years, trying to force a bond with power that won’t have him.
You’ve been warping reality just by existing.
The realm recognizes the threat you both pose. ”
“So you’re what—antibodies?” The scientific metaphor felt absurd in this context, but my brain was grasping for familiar concepts.
“We are servants of the cycle,” they said, and I could hear the capital letters in their voice. “We ensure the wheel turns as it must. That patterns hold. That stories end as they’re meant to end.”
I just blinked at them like I knew whatever the fuck that meant.
Through the bond—muffled but still there, like hearing music from another room—I felt Kaelren’s rage like a distant wildfire.
He was coming. Of course he was coming. The idiot was probably destroying everything in his path to reach me, leaving a trail of corruption a mile wide, which was exactly what these things wanted.
“You’re using me as bait.”
“You’re using yourself as bait,” the rider corrected with what might have been amusement.
“Every choice you’ve made has led here. Every moment of defiance, every refusal to accept your role—it all ends the same way.
The lake, the capture, the convergence. Sixteen times before, and now the seventeenth begins. ”
“Are you on drugs? Do you even hear yourself?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
I was too exhausted to even try and unravel whatever nonsense riddle they were spitting my way.
The Heartspire rose before us like a cancer made of diamonds and light, and my first thought was that someone had fucked up spectacularly in the architecture department.
It should have been beautiful—a palace of living glass that caught and refracted sunlight into rainbow cascades that danced across every surface.
Instead, it hurt to look at, its perfection somehow wrong, like a smile with too many teeth or a laugh that goes on too long.
Every angle was precise but felt off, like someone had built it according to mathematics that didn’t quite match reality.
The rot was worse here, so much worse. The gardens that should have been paradise were nightmares of decay, flowers blooming and dying in accelerated cycles—bud to bloom to empty husk in seconds.
Trees growing and withering in moments, their entire lifecycle compressed into seconds.
The fountains ran with something that wasn’t quite water—too thick, too dark, with an oily sheen that made my stomach turn.
The very air felt sick, heavy with the scent of corrupted magic that made my marks burn like someone had traced them with acid.
“The Crown Prince’s work,” the rider said, noting my horror with what might have been satisfaction.
“He’s been trying to force the realm to accept him for years.
This is the result—a kingdom dying from the inside out because its would-be ruler carved false marks into his skin.
Because he couldn’t accept rejection. Because he had to have what wasn’t his. ”
“Kaelren didn’t cause this.” The defense came automatically, even though I wasn’t entirely sure it was true.
“No? Look closer.”
And I did, though I wished I hadn’t. The patterns in the rot, the way it spread in veins and fractals—it matched the corruption I’d seen in Kaelren’s marks. But reversed, somehow. Like a photo negative. Like an echo bouncing back wrong. Like—
“A rejection,” I breathed, understanding hitting like cold water. “The realm is rejecting him.”
“The realm is rejecting both of you. But Auradelle believes he can change that. Fix you. Use you. Shape you into what the realm needs rather than what you are.”
We passed through gates that opened without touch, into a courtyard where fountains ran aqua-blue water. Guards in thorned armor watched us pass, their faces hidden behind mirrors that reflected nothing—not us, not the world, just empty silver that suggested voids where people should be.
The throne room was worse than the gardens, worse than my worst expectations.
Beautiful and terrible in equal measure, every surface reflecting and refracting light until reality became a kaleidoscope of possibility.
Standing there was like being inside a prism, broken into component parts and scattered.
My reflection appeared on every surface, but each one was different—some younger, some older, some corrupted like Kaelren, some glowing with power I didn’t possess. Yet.
And there, at its heart, stood Auradelle.
He looked exactly as I remembered from our first encounter—that sharp, cold beauty that made you want to look away and stare at the same time.
His platinum hair caught the fractured light, and his winter honey eyes held that same frozen core I’d noticed before.
But something was different now. He seemed more tired, more desperate, though he hid it well behind that practiced royal composure.
His robes had changed—they seemed to shift between white and gold, more elaborate than when I’d first met him. Like he was trying harder to project power, to convince himself as much as anyone else that he was in control.
And his smile—his smile was the worst thing about him. Warm and welcoming and absolutely sincere, like he was genuinely delighted to see me. Like we were old friends reuniting after too long apart.
“Miss Hawthorne,” he said, and my name in his mouth sounded like a prayer and a curse all at once. “Welcome back. I’ve been waiting for this moment since you slipped through my fingers.”
The Hunt released me, and I stumbled, catching myself before I could fall because I’d be damned if I was going to collapse at this asshole’s feet. The restraints on my wrists dissolved, but I could still feel their echo, burning under my skin like phantom pain.
“Usually people just send a nice invitation.” I managed, proud that my voice didn’t shake. “Not supernatural bounty hunters. But then again, you’ve never been one for normal social conventions.”
His laugh was genuine, delighted, which somehow made it worse. “Still that wonderful defiance. Even better than when we first met. That fire—you’re so much like her.”
“Like who?”
“Your grandmother, of course. Josephine.” He stepped closer, and I saw his gaze catch on my throat. “And wearing Jo’s locket. How wonderfully sentimental.”
Everything in me went cold, then hot, then cold again. “You know about Jo?”