Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
Aleksander
The Abyss had always been my least favorite punishment.
That was what the Light Keepers had called it—that small, circular room deep in the belly of Duskhaven. One we didn’t even subject most of our prisoners to, because it was considered far too cruel. We didn’t want the outside world thinking we were barbarians, after all. No; the Kingdom of Elarith was a place of light. Of learning. Of perfect order.
They’d thrown me into the Abyss more often than I liked to think about, for the slightest transgressions, and they had always acted as though they were doing me a favor by choosing this particular punishment—giving me another chance to prove my worth, they would usually claim. To see how long I could keep producing Light magic while in such a dismal, dark setting.
It had been…effective. In a sense. Because when my light went out in that place, the darkness and the cold became absolute, and so the fear of being swallowed up by those things was usually enough to keep me summoning magic far past what I thought was my limit.
Far past the point of being safe, or rational.
Sometimes, I managed to stay conscious until they came back to let me out.
Other times, I failed, and the only thing that saved me from madness was giving into unconsciousness, slipping away into a protected corner of my mind where the warmth and the light never faded.
But there was nothing quite like the horror of collapsing to try and escape the dark, only to wake up and find yourself still in it.
This was not the Abyss.
I kept reminding myself of that.
And yet.
And yet .
Several times since I’d been thrown into this prison, I had woken up to find myself still in the dark. My powers waned a little more each time I shifted in and out of consciousness, keeping the encroaching void at bay for less and less time. The silence here was stark, but the memory of the Light Keepers’ voices rang through my skull, loud and unceasing. Cold, cruel, mocking voices.
The darkness only wins if you fail to conquer it.
Don’t fail us, Aleksander.
I’d lost track of the minutes, the hours, the days.
I’d lost track of the number of times I’d failed and slipped out of awareness, only to resurface in an even weaker state than before.
I was getting close to slipping again, now. No more light came to my hands, no matter how hard I tried to summon it. The room was fading around me, its shadows deepening, consuming everything in their path.
Maybe I can just stay unconscious, this time , I thought—no, I hoped .
Then a door opened somewhere in the distance, the groan of metal dragging over stone pulling me back into awareness. I blinked, and I saw a figure approaching me.
Nova.
For a moment, I thought I’d already fainted again; that she had taken up residence in that quiet, safe corner of my mind that I escaped to. It was a comforting thought, being able to meet her there.
Except, I wasn’t… there.
I was awake. The stone beneath me was solid. Cold. And Nova’s face was clear, her features sharp—not like the hazy, drifting details of my unconscious mind.
She carried a small lantern, dispelling the darkness as she came. Without any hesitation, she dropped to my side and started examining me, pushing the hair from my face, cupping my jaw, trying to get my eyes to meet hers. I didn’t realize how cold I truly was until I felt her warm hands upon my skin.
Setting the lantern down, she frantically searched the space around us. She seemed to be trying to figure out what to do next. Her lips quivered. Her eyes were bright in the grimness, the anxiety in them clear.
I’m fine , I said—at least in my head. I don’t think the words actually made it past my dry, cracked lips.
She fixed her gaze on a metal cup near my boot, grabbing it and bringing it carefully to my mouth.
I managed a single sip before turning my head away. It was water—some repressed, rational part of me knew that—but it burned like poison as it slid down my throat.
She reached for the plate of bread, next. A stale loaf sliced into rough, but relatively even pieces. I didn’t remember breaking it into those pieces, but I suspected I’d been the one to do it. My bleary eyes scanned the plate. My fingers twitched as I fought the compulsion to continue scraping at that crusty bread, to create more even lines. I should have been neater to begin with. More precise. More controlled.
“You haven’t been eating, have you?”
I’m fine .
“Here,” she said, pushing a piece gently into my hands.
I caught it tightly between my fingers—panicked at the thought of letting it hit the ground, for some reason—but I didn’t lift it to my mouth.
“Please,” she whispered.
I’m fine.
“I know it probably feels like you need to control this, like you might not have another chance to eat anything else, but they aren’t going to starve you like the Keepers did. I won’t let them.”
She pressed her hand to my jaw once more.
The warmth of her palm was…overwhelming.
I attempted to focus on it. But her face was rapidly becoming a distant, blurred canvas of shadow and light. Her words grew more and more muddled—as if I was underwater, sinking away from her. I tried to swim back. But my body was too tired, too heavy. The water pulled, wrapping me up, dragging me deeper and deeper, down into the depths, where I was met with voices. Familiar voices rebuking me with familiar lines.
You’ve failed.
Then my own voice joined them, repeating the line, as if it was a lesson I had to recite over and over until I got it right—
I’ve failed.
I’ve failed.
I’ve failed.
Hours passed.
I kept expecting Nova to leave me alone.
They had always left me alone when I failed them.
We’ll come back when you’ve learned to be stronger than the dark.
The light will come back when you find a way to bring it back, and not before. Endure. Outlast. Prove yourself to us…
I still had not summoned even the faintest spark of anything resembling light.
But for some reason, Nova was still there, sitting in the darkness with me.
My head rested in her lap. Her hands combed through my hair, gentle and soothing. Her scent was clean; soft powder and the delicate sweetness of wild rose. A stark contrast to the stench of this damp, dirty prison and my own filthy self.
And I had a thought, like I so often had these past weeks, of a flower blooming in Hell, its roots somehow taking hold in a dead land. Taking hold in me .
What a foolish , reckless flower, I thought, to plant herself here in the dark.
But another thought struck me almost as quickly—a memory. That fateful night, seven years ago, when I’d found her on the grounds of Rose Point, clutching a glowing flower between her dirt-stained fingers. Her words whispered through my mind, as soft and certain as the scent enveloping me now.
Some things bloom brighter in the dark...
She was shivering. A particularly violent tremble went through her, and I found myself moving automatically, reaching to take her hand in mine. Light flowed from my fingertips, leaving warmth in its wake as it traveled along her arms. The effort left me breathless, even more tired and sick feeling than before, but I didn’t care; I would have given my last breath to keep her warm.
Her shaking eased. I started to curl toward her, to drift away again, until I felt a tear drop onto my cheek.
“Chaos,” I mumbled. “Why are you crying?”
She took a long time answering. Or maybe it was only seconds. Time had lost all meaning in this place.
Quietly, she said, “Everything is all wrong.”
“Everything?”
“Your cousin is gone.”
“I heard.”
“And he’s not who he seemed to be.”
“Yes; I gathered as much.”
“It’s worse than anything you could imagine.”
The fear in her voice woke up some primal instinct in me, giving me the strength to drag myself upright. I leaned against the wall beside her. Fighting the urge to close my eyes, I tilted my face toward hers, swallowed away the lump in my throat, and said, “Tell me everything.”
Her hands were trembling again, but not from the cold this time, I suspected. She tried to hide their twitching by keeping them busy, clumsily gathering up the cup of water and the plate of bread in front of us.
“Drink,” she insisted, lifting them before me, “and eat. And then I’ll talk.”
There was no negotiating with that tone. And my need to listen to her fears proved greater than my need to ration and control the meager nourishment I’d been given, so the bargain was struck—I placed the cup aside but lifted a scrap of bread to my mouth. It felt like swallowing glass, forcing it down my throat. But I pushed through it, as she inhaled deeply before launching into a breathless recap of the things that had befallen this palace over the past several days.
So many impossible, dangerous things.
As she spoke, I was overcome by a storm of emotions. Shock. Anger. Doubt. But also a strange sense of relief, as questions that had been gnawing at me finally began to make sense. There was something to be said for having a clearer target to hit, I supposed.
“Five days since he fled,” Nova said, bowing her head and covering her face with a hand. “Through the Nerithys Gate, we assume. But we aren’t certain.”
Five days.
She’d been suffering for five days, while I’d been down here, useless and rotting in this godsforsaken prison.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have trusted you. I could have seen the truth about Zayn, long before now, if only I hadn’t been afraid of my magic, and I just…I…”
“They made you afraid.” The words slipped out in between my attempts to choke down sips of water.
She lifted her head away from her hand, slowly looking back at me.
My gaze fixed on her bracelets. “They put those shackles around your wrists, and they treated you as if you were something to fear. So of course you learned to be afraid.”
She didn’t argue.
A humorless laugh almost escaped me at this; we were clearly past the point of broken, if she no longer had the fire to disagree with me.
She shifted, leaning more fully into the wall and stretching her feet out before her, bracing her boots into the dust-coated ground. “I wish I could say I wasn’t afraid now, but…” Her eyes stared straight ahead at nothing. She started to reach for her face again, but seemed to lose her nerve halfway through, dropping her hand and wrapping her arms around herself instead. “But it would be a lie.”
I gathered my strength and summoned a small orb of glowing gold, so that I could better see her, and see for myself what Zayn—no, Lorien —had done to her.
Rage burned through me as the first flickers of light landed upon her newly scarred skin. I swallowed it down, forcing myself to keep inspecting the damage. Carefully, I reached toward the branching marks along her jaw.
She flinched.
I drew my hand back into a fist, magic and fury twisting in a violent dance in my gut. So much godsdamned magic and fury that, had I unleashed it in that moment, it likely would have ripped apart the entire palace and everyone in it. And I wouldn’t have fucking cared. I would have destroyed it all in my next breath—
If not for her.
Somehow, I found her gaze and I held it.
Somehow, I calmly said, “He did this to you.”
She nodded, anxiously tucking a few loose strands of hair behind her ear, only to immediately untuck them, allowing them to fall over her face and partially hide the scars. “I don’t really know how much magic he was able to steal, what I gave up, I…”
I caught her unscarred cheek as she tried to turn away. “You gave up nothing,” I said, firmly. It seemed like the most important thing in the world right then, making certain she heard me clearly. That she was meeting my eyes as I said, “This wasn’t your fault.”
She stared at me. No—through me. Her eyes were glassy, her thoughts traveling down some path I couldn’t follow, no matter how desperately I wanted to. Her lips parted several times before she finally managed to blink, to truly look at me again as she said, “I just want to fix all of this.”
“We will,” I replied, the words coming so fiercely, so violently that they surprised even me.
For so long, I had kept up my role of the stoic, unbreakable ruler. Lesson after lesson, punishment after punishment, mission after mission. Anger served no purpose, I’d been taught. Fury was for fools. Kings endured in silence and did what was expected of them without question.
But now, I’d found something worth being furious for.
And whatever Lorien had taken from her, I was going to take it back—and then some.