Chapter 35
The Shadow Bringer and I stumbled back to Evernight.
“Hurry,” he murmured, grabbing my hand and leading us through a hall lit by floating candlesticks. “We need to reach my chambers before the Weavers interfere.”
Outside the corridor, the sounds of battle pressed in. Demons screamed as Weavers and their legions rose to meet them, the ringing of metal as it met claw and bone punctuated by a great, roaring wind and the crash of booming thunder.
It didn’t take long before I was thoroughly lost. Evernight was a maze teeming with hidden hallways and opulent rooms. It was magic in its purest form, beauty summoned by the wildest and most eccentric of imaginations—yet somehow also convoluted and strange.
We turned a corner and began to ascend a glass staircase, narrowly avoiding dreamers and scholars as they raced around us.
We pressed on, looping around a window-lined hall and up a smaller, cruder staircase cut from stone. Unlike the rest of Evernight, this section felt private and secluded. There were no people, no sounds other than our own. Even the ruckus of battle had dampened to a dull rumble.
And then we were alone.
It was a dark, elegant room, furnished in blue silk, marble tile, and several sprawling rugs.
There was a bed on one end, tucked into a corner by three large windows; a balcony; a plush seating area; and several candelabras emitting soft, blue-hued light.
On the other side of the room were several bookshelves lined with ancient-looking texts.
A fireplace was centered inside the longest bookshelf; it was cavernous and carved with figureheads of a dragon, a wolf, and a stag.
“Is this your room?”
A fine mist of shadow spread from his fingertips, sinking into the walls and settling underneath every stone, tile, and rug. A ward, I thought. Something to protect us—and to keep others out.
“It was.” He stood just inside the entryway, as if unsure of where to go next. “Though I was rarely here to enjoy it.”
I tried not to think about what, exactly, he did—or didn’t do—to enjoy the room.
“It’s still strange to see beds in the Dream Realm.”
“It is strange, isn’t it?” the Bringer mused.
“Like the food and drink we consume, sleeping in the Realm is a functional comfort. At Evernight, sleeping slows the mind and allows the dreamer to easily transition back into reality. In Noctis. More talented dreamers can force themselves awake without sleeping, but that takes practice. Many scholars can’t do it with regularity. ”
I recalled my early dreams in the Shadow Bringer’s castle. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t wake up on command. The demons in the woods had cornered me, so close that I could see the saliva dripping from their cracked lips, and still I couldn’t wake.
He looked to the windows, almost as if he expected a demon to be peering in. “Sleep is a formality as much as it is a comfort. A reminder of what is… and what was.”
What is and what was.
And also a way to return to the Shadow Bringer’s castle. A way to discover our fates.
For a long while, the Bringer and I fought it.
The raw, instinctual desire to sleep. To fall into a soft mattress, curl up in a blanket, and burrow deep into a pillow.
To forget the day and begin anew. But slowly, our conversation faded.
In the low candlelight, the Shadow Bringer’s eyes became dark, pooling shadows.
He dragged his palms to his brow. Sat there for another moment, shoulders tight.
Waiting. Then he slammed his fists into his knees and stood.
“We can’t keep this up, Bringer. If sleeping will help us travel back to the present, then we need to—”
The Bringer spun around, wild-eyed. “This is the third and final dream. What if we wake and this was all for nothing?” He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself, but his chest continued to heave.
“If we wake up in my castle, unable to walk free after everything—” He cut himself off.
As though he had admitted something he didn’t want.
The pain in his eyes was too much.
“Perhaps it would help if you took off your armor,” I suggested. “You need to relax.”
The Bringer sighed, releasing some of his tension.
The shadows in his eyes swam deep and thick.
Like syrup, I thought. And then he conceded.
His armor melted off his skin, replaced by a dark blue robe.
My eye snagged on his chest. Followed it until his skin disappeared under a swath of silk.
I wasn’t sure if he wore anything else underneath.
“If I’m to wear this, you must wear something more suitable, too, then.”
He tilted his head. Slowly, my Revel dress, still wet from the Nocturne and half-torn from our flight, shifted into a soft, flowing robe that mirrored his.
His eyes melted as they beheld me. Turned raw and depthless—a testament to some unnamed emotion roiling underneath. Something primal, instinctive.
Something that spoke loudest in the shadows of the night.
I touched his hands, desperate to finally study them. His fingers, strong yet slender, curled around mine, tracing my wrists and brushing across my palms. His touch felt so unbelievably real.
“Why do you insist on doing that?” he asked, staring at my explorative fingers.
I dropped my hands, embarrassed, only to find him pulling them back.
“I simply asked why. I never asked you to stop,” he said, voice lowering to a rasp.
Because I want to lower your shields. Ease the pain from your eyes.
My face flushed as I looked at our intertwined hands.
At his stern, hungry expression. The way his body seemed to curve around mine, craving closeness.
How his lips parted slightly as he searched my face.
All my logic—every critical, careful instinct I had—became buried underneath something else. Something I wasn’t familiar with.
“I haven’t held someone like this before,” he murmured, restraint still apparent in his shadowed gaze. “I don’t know how.”
“I don’t know, either,” I breathed. “But I want to.”
“Why?” There was that question again.
Why, indeed.
I grazed his neck with my fingertips, raven hair sweeping over my skin. “You don’t deserve to be alone any longer.”
“So it is because you pity me?” he asked, voice scarcely above a whisper.
I shook my head, irritated that he wasn’t understanding.
How could I simply pity him after all we’d been through?
“No, not at all.” I paused, my lip caught between my teeth.
“It is because I want you—and I want to keep being with you, even after we wake up. I am yours, if you’ll have me. Wherever our dreams take us.”
We stared at each other for a few breathless, quiet moments.
All that could be heard was the deep, hypnotic thrum of the Nocturne in the distance.
And he still looked so damnably uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure he even deserved my touch.
He was so broken, so deprived of sincerity.
I wanted to tear those thoughts from his mind.
“Then that makes you a fool,” he said finally, shaking his head. “A complete and utter fool. You do not want this. This is nothing you should want—”
I grabbed his face and pulled it to mine, kissing him directly on his mocking, irritatingly beautiful mouth.
He pushed away, eyes wide. Shadows still, for once.
Weighing. Measuring.
Then he crashed his lips back to mine. He kissed me thoroughly—darkly.
Exactly how I imagined he would prefer it.
His lips were cool to the touch, tasting of starlight and velvet shadows.
Of a cold breath of night air. I would drown in the taste if I could, every bit as starved for him as he was for me.
He curled one hand in my hair while the other was at my spine, drawing me closer.
After a moment, he leaned back. The shadows in his eyes simmered, taunting.
“I’m a monster,” he rasped.
“You’re anything but,” I shot back, shaking my head.
“You saw what I am capable of,” he insisted. “What I did. I summoned those demons, Esmer. They crawled from the Nocturne as if I were a god bent on destroying the world.”
“The man I met at the Revel didn’t want to destroy the world.
He wanted to heal it.” I kissed him again, if only to rip that look of sorrow and dread from his eyes.
He could mock, twist, and taunt all he wanted, but his eyes betrayed him.
I went on: “You need to surrender. Let go of your guilt, your resentment, your doubt—everything.” I shook my head, shuddering.
“If anyone is a monster, it’s me. Everything I’ve done, everyone I’ve hurt—” I cut myself off, a sob threatening to burst from my chest.
Slowly, his eyes softened.
“If I’m not a monster, then neither are you,” he said seriously, searching my face. “You are not responsible for your family’s deaths, nor are you at fault for leaving Elliot behind. You have done everything you could. You are strong, and you are brave. We both did what we could. What we knew.”
“I don’t want to call you ‘Shadow Bringer’ any longer,” I said in a rush, cupping his face.
I was so close to breaking, but I held firm.
I needed him to understand how I felt. I did not see him as a monster now, but as a man, and I had felt that way for longer than I’d even realized.
“It’s not who you are. You have a name, an entire life lived.
Friends, family. Years of service to a Realm that once respected you.
You aren’t a monster to me, and I want to honor that… Erebus.”
He pulled back, lips a breath from my own. I waited, but he did not correct me.
“Erebus,” I said again, twining a hand through his hair as he shivered. My face burned, knowing I could affect him like that. It was intoxicating. “Can I call you that?”
A pause as we both looked at each other, chests heaving.
“Yes,” he finally breathed. “Yes, you can call me by my name.”
“Good.” I traced a hand across the shadows forming patterns over his exposed chest. His skin was cool to the touch; smooth, flawless, and a pale contrast to his raven hair.
“If our shadows can somehow right some of our kingdom’s darkness, then I want to walk with you.
Wherever you go, I will go, too. I’m not afraid anymore. ”
“Then I will gladly welcome you,” he murmured, lips warming as he brushed them against my temple. “And I won’t be afraid, either.”
He didn’t hesitate after that.
Erebus brought his mouth to mine, tangling his fist in my hair and pulling me close.
Pressed against him this tightly, and with nothing between us but the thin fabric of our robes, I could feel every smooth, hard plane of him.
Every lean muscle. The power in his arms as he held me.
The shifting of his thighs as he brought me closer still.
We made it to the bed, somehow—he stumbled backward, sitting on the edge, and I moved to his lap, all too aware of how our robes had spilled open.
His had slipped off a shoulder; mine had fallen open at the chest. He gently tugged my hair back, exposing my throat, and I felt both shadow and teeth graze my neck, tantalizingly slow, before he returned his attention to my mouth.
I burned to do the same. To kiss him there, as he had done to me.
He groaned, completely unbound, the moment my lips met his neck.
I dragged my mouth leisurely down his skin, pausing at the curve of his shoulder and the hollow of his throat.
When I next looked at him, his eyes were clear—bright and filled with wonder.
And when we finally settled into his bed, curling into each other as if we could shield ourselves from the encroaching dark, we didn’t just feel anger, fear, or helplessness.
We felt, for perhaps the first time, a wild, reckless hope.