20. Rosalina
Rosalina
Iwake with a start, body heavy, my vision swimming in and out of focus.
The dining hall is in ruins—plates shattered, goblets overturned, the remnants of food strewn across the floor like the aftermath of a storm.
The air is thick with the scent of spilled nectar and something fouler, acrid.
My dress is torn, the hem now in frayed strands. My head throbs with a dull pulse.
A whimpering noise reaches me.
Heidigog.
She cowers in the corner, her yellow eyes wide, but she’s not looking at me. Her gaze is fixed on something behind me.
I do not turn. I know who it is.
Instead, I swallow my fear and keep my expression vacant as Sira steps toward me. “What is your purpose?” the Queen of the Below snarls.
I blink, feigning confusion. It’s not hard with my head still ringing. “To serve the Prince of Thorns. I belong to him.”
Sira tsks, tapping a finger against her lips. “Even as his thrall, you are disobedient. And disobedience cannot go unpunished.”
She turns as footsteps echo through the hall. The presence that enters is unnatural. A cold weight settles in my gut. The air grows thick with magic that shouldn’t exist in this world anymore, like dust and rot and things buried beneath the earth for too long.
“This is Vespera, the Abyssal Sorceress,” Sira purrs, gesturing toward the figure that steps into the dim light. “She has a unique power. One you’ll get to experience.”
I try not to shrink back, though every fiber of my being screams at me to run.
Vespera’s skin is a strange shade of pale blue. Her dark hair coils and shifts as if caught in a breeze no one else can feel. And her teeth…rows of razor-sharp fangs, her gums slick with black, oozing blood.
She tilts her head, voice curling around me like smoke. “The hood or the mirror?”
I inhale.
I do not know what the hood entails, but I do not want to lose my sight, to be trapped in darkness. My words are barely a whisper. “The mirror.”
A smile unfurls across Vespera’s face, slow and knowing. From within the folds of her dark cloak, she draws a tarnished mirror. The handle and rim are engraved with butterflies, their delicate wings warped into something twisted.
She steps closer, holding it up before me. “Stare into the mirror, and do not look away. For if you do, you will write what you see into truth.”
Stare into a mirror. I can do that. I take it in my hand.
The edges of the mirror glow red. Jagged light crackles from the glass.
I scream.
The pain is immediate and searing, like something burrowing deep beneath my skin. Don’t look away, I remind myself. Don’t look away.
I force myself to stare into the mirror’s glass surface. Farron appears in the reflection. My heart races. He’s running across a battlefield as a troll’s spear impales him through the chest. Then beside him is Day, his eyes glowing sickly green, plunging his blade into Ezryn’s back.
Pain blossoms through my body as if I too have been struck. I cry out, my breath ragged, my hands trembling.
“Look away at any time, Rosalina,” Sira croons. “Vespera stole this mirror from Philiris, Fate of the future. Now the power of destiny is in your hands.”
No.
It can’t be true. I control my own destiny.
And still, the visions come.
Keldarion, my husband, stands alone in Frostfang. Thousands of Winter soldiers lie dead around him. Dark creatures swarm him, an unending tide of the Below.
A scream tears from my throat, echoing through the chamber. My knees buckle against the cold floor. The rest of me follows, shaking and splintering.
Then I see her.
My mother, strung atop great green crystals, her body lifeless. Caspian holds out his hand and forms a glowing portal. A giant of a man with flowing white hair steps through, ears too long to be a fae of the Vale. Who is that?
I can’t watch this anymore. I am breaking. Shattering. Another vision slams into me like a dagger to the heart—
My father, falling into a chasm of great briars and bark.
My breath hitches. The mirror nearly slips out of my trembling hands. Pain surges, too much to bear, as the visions keep coming, relentless. A spasm jolts through my fingers, and I clench hard around the handle. Surely it must be almost over…
The visions start again. The same ones, over and over and over again. Every few rounds, new horrors get added to the rotations. Astrid and Marigold crushed beneath the falling rubble of Castletree. My sister speared by shadows.
I want to look away. No one controls my fate but me, and yet… I cannot risk them. Not my mates, my friends, my family. I will exist forever in this nightmare.
I don’t know when I started screaming, only that my throat is raw from it, eyes blurred with tears of sadness and pain. I feel every death that flashes in this mirror as if it were my own. Over and over and over and—
The glass shatters.
A briar spears through the mirror, splintering it into shards of light and darkness.
I fall to the floor, gasping. Silence crashes over the room, thick and heavy. A storm waiting to break.
And then I hear it.
The slow, deliberate step of boots against stone.
A part of me thinks I’m still trapped in the nightmare because the figure in the doorway is too terrible to exist.
Shadow and fire coil at his feet, writhing and snapping like caged beasts. The air around him crackles with power, wrath barely restrained. His eyes burn, twin coals of fury, bright green against the abyss of his face.
A monster of night made real.
The Prince of Thorns has returned.