Chapter 2 The Wall
The Wall
The Magician card is the next step in the Fool’s journey, a claiming of agency and manifestation. But in its reverse, it represents the loss of autonomy and being tricked by an illusion.
I FORCE THE SMIRK off my face as Prince Draven observes me. It’s not joy that burns beneath my skin but righteous, blinding vengeance. Draven’s gaze lingers a moment longer before he saunters back to his parents, a hand on his young brother’s shoulder.
With the one hundred chosen, the Selection is at its end.
For once, I am among the unlucky few.
The noblemen who were watching me before glare outright now, but I only grin smugly back at them.
I’m sure they hate knowing one of their “untouchable” buddies was laid out by a peasant girl like me, and now they’ll never get their retribution.
I rub my eyebrow with my middle finger and chuckle as they glower, but I’m done kowtowing to them, done minding my tongue.
Guards separate the Selected from the crowd, hands on their swords. This is it. Dread dances with anticipation in my chest as I look up to that Wall. The answers all finally within reach.
I haven’t prayed in years, but I say one now since there’s no one left to do it for me.
Let me find them. And if not, let me live long enough to make these immortal bastards pay.
Druid guards file around us, our group stumbling into a column, organized only by its fear as we begin our walk toward the Wall. Prince Ansel returns to his mother and father’s sides, the former sweeping him into an embrace. Proud of his wickedness.
The king takes note of my glare. He whispers something to his eldest son, and Prince Draven releases a scoff angled in my direction. My eyes narrow.
His mother’s hand rises, and a card follows the movement, floating at her fingertips.
It levitates on its own, darkness branching around it.
I’ve rarely seen magic so closely, outside the few moments when immortals parade their powers at their Selections.
I don’t know its rules, its limitations, or whether it even has any—let alone if it compares to godly might. Surely it must come with some price?
I watch as that darkness seeps out. A billowing shadow grows, obscuring my vision and engulfing the king and small prince. It spreads like a gathering storm, and I throw my arm up, stepping back. My heel catches on something—
A rush of wind flows past me, moving my hair, and a hand grasps me under my arm before I can fall.
Prince Draven looks down at me, righting me on my feet.
Oh great, this asshole. He smells like the expensive colognes of noblemen.
There isn’t a speck of dirt on his finely crafted onyx suit and every inch of him screams of entitlement.
Yet he holds me as if I weigh nothing and helped me when I would’ve let him fall flat on his masked face.
“Thank you,” I grit out. His family is gone, vanished in that casual display of might. The sand shifts at my feet, becoming soft and making it harder to tread through, crimson as clay. We’ve crossed the Red Line.
“You know …” His voice is low as he looks me over, his eyes as dark as forgotten, haunted places. “Most would address me as Your Royal Highness.”
I clench my jaw, annoyed to find him falling into step at my side. His eyes focus on my face with rapt attention, as though I’m a fascinating creature that has not been named or a new toy for him to play with.
“Apologies, Royal Princeling, for not groveling more. I am but a weak human girl being marched to her death, and this is all the humanity I can spare you.”
A dark, low chuckle sounds from him, like a growl caught in his chest. “Wow, well, I was going to offer to spare you the climb.” He looks meaningfully at the Wall looming in front of us. “As a thank-you for helping my brother make an easy choice that I imagine I’ll one day pay for.”
“I don’t need your pity, Princeling.” I’ll be sure they regret choosing me. I side-eye him, but he steps away, where shadows rumble darker than storm clouds, a tarot card curling at his fingers.
“Enjoy the climb, then.” His eyes sweep over me and the heavy darkness swallows him up.
The wind howls as we near the Wall. Druid guards usher us along, growling orders, forcing the Selected into compliance.
The back of my head nearly touches my shoulders as I crane my neck, searching for the top.
It’s unnaturally tall, built and broken into the mountainside, swaths of granite swirling throughout it, smoothed by magic, enforced by curses.
My breaths draw short as a cold breeze wends around me.
I don’t know what awaits me on the other side, only that my family are lost in those lands somewhere.
The uncertainty of what happens next has haunted my every nightmare since I was six.
That was the year the elves took my twin brother, at the first official Selection.
When I’d curl up in our room each night after, I wouldn’t look for monsters hiding beneath my bed, but immortals.
This close, I can see that stairs have been built within the Wall.
The granite whorls confuse the eye, obscuring them until we’re at its first steps.
The switchbacks are tight and narrow, and there’s no time to swallow my fear as I reach the precipice.
The druids will not slow for anyone, shouting and shoving us along.
After the first six flights, my thighs are burning.
As the Wraith, I might be able to scurry up buildings, scrunch myself into the opening of a window as rain pelts my skin, or perch in a tree for hours in the dead of winter, but these steps are not standard or even, and it’s like hiking the face of a mountain.
Magic fills the space between breaths, an intoxicating sweetness coating my senses, my tongue.
A little pulse radiates from the stone as if the Wall holds a heartbeat.
We trudge on, our breaths becoming shallower as an hour passes, then two. The stairwell darkens. A vein of blue light traces a pattern across the rich stone in the walls, as if the night sky skipped scattered stars across its surface.
I wish I’d brought my blades to carve some gouges into it.
Prince Draven is probably at the top of this cursed stairwell laughing his privileged ass off. That annoyance spurs me onward, frustration mounting with each step. I’ll be damned if I show how tired I am when I reach the top.
Vexamire stretches out the higher we climb, beautiful but desolate. I thought I would see bereavement lanterns flickering across the kingdom, but the nearest towns are little specks of light far below, barely closer than the stars above. It looks … small. Insignificant.
I’ve traveled its mountains and valleys, but I can’t say it was ever really home.
I’ve been to the cities of Valhan, the last mortal library in Manu, and even the southern savannas of Zuri.
My parents moved us constantly, hoping to prevent us from being in a territory that would be Selected.
When I was little, we spent a full year on the Isle of Riches off the coast where my father was born, and I can still hear the coqui frogs croaking when I fall asleep each night.
It might’ve been the one place I felt at ease, where my looks didn’t make me stand out but blend in.
The southern part of the continent was like that, too, but the north was harder—the people with it. I glare at the dark lands below. I’d bet everything I own that this diminished vision is an enchantment, reducing our might.
What’s power and magic without someone weaker to trample on?
Crying comes from up ahead, persistent as the noon bell tolls in the clock tower of Westfall.
The child sounds too young. I increase my pace and find him on the next landing.
He’s beautiful, hair as golden as sunflower petals, tear-rimmed eyes round.
Every bit of him is tiny: his limbs, height, and waist. He must be two, at most three.
Those ahead of me walk by him, all looking but doing nothing.
Someone must’ve carried him to this point. Someone must’ve given up on him.
But I won’t.
I scoop him into my arms. His wet face burrows into my nape, pale skin pressed against the bronze tones of mine, cries bleeding my eardrums. I hear a scoff behind me and look over my shoulder. Kasper. He pants, “You should’ve left him. Maybe they’d have returned him to his family.”
The nearest soldier stands resolutely against the sidewalls of the landing, watching the child disparagingly. Bastard. All of them heartless.
“They’re as likely to throw him over the Wall as they are to return him to his parents.”
My pace slows from the extra weight, yet I force myself onward. Through will, sheer spite, pure hatred. The boy’s sopping cries calm as I huff out a melody my mother once sang.
“Sing of the child, both restless and wild, sing of a land without fear.”
He must recognize the tune even through my tired wheezing. After another landing, he stops sobbing, slumping against my neck as he drifts to sleep.
“Shade, you are not. The immortals are lost. Even walls can fall with each year.”
The irony is not lost on me. These steps are sturdy, unnaturally perfect. So long as the seraphs, druids, and elves continue living, this Wall is going nowhere.
All at once, we turn a corner unlike the others, the top of the Wall.
This could be my first look at the Immortal Realms. My heart thrums. But the stairs end, and we’re on an open terrace, a green lawn stretching to an unclimbable section of cliffs, and a tunnel leads into the heart of the mountain, lit by torches, the Wall stretching off into the darkness on either side.
A large, sprawling willow tree, the mightiest I’ve seen, spirals above the tunnel on a little outcrop, fireflies floating between the branches, like fallen stars trapped in its limbs.