Chapter 50
The rhythm of pursuit was a drumbeat in my blood.
My boots struck the stones, and breaths were sharp down my throat. I charged after Constantine’s gown. Her form was misshapen, filling the gown in odd ways—draping where curves once were, and the hem was stretched by enlarging shoulders.
The impersonator looked back midstride, his face disfigured between Constantine and another, but I could not yet discern who the other was—who held the real face beneath the mirage of the Matron of Shadows.
I would know soon. The magic was fleeting from him.
The potion’s use was near its end.
Twisting around the bends of the landscape, he cut another corner towards the castle walls. The gown tangled around his ankles, causing him to stumble in form time and again, but only for a severed second at a time. Enough time for me to lessen a shard of distance.
This man was fast, but in this moment, I was not of man. I was anointed by gods and marked by Shadows—something not intended to dwell with mankind.
My feet tore through soil, and my panting breaths became snarls as the distance closed between us.
A castle entrance shut before me. A bar locked at the other side. In Shadow’s strength, I wailed the door open in two heaves, the seal breaking, and I cursed the door for its reluctance. For its disobedience to the Andraelian crown that was seeded in me.
I charged into the deserted passageway, slipping into the dark.
This man, wearer of masks, led us into a stringing of passageways often forgotten. Empty. Fool.
At the end of the corridor, he struggled around another corner, his body ramming into the wall. Peering over his shoulder, he looked at the beast at his back. The fear in his eyes lent me a sick pleasure.
Blood continued to pour down my arm where his dagger had carved my skin, and my blood was as dark as ink. The same wetness was tears down my face and dark magic on my lips.
I could not entirely say what charged behind him, but I did know it was to be feared.
I was to be feared.
I wanted to be feared.
In the midst of a desperate sprint, the man’s nose burst into shape. His hair thinned. The bodice’s ribbon began to suffer a widening physic, though he remained slender. He was morphing into something familiar, but still, I could not place him.
Another corridor swallowed us whole, the eternal darkness of this age reigning over us. I squinted in the dark, then my eyes swelled. The Shadow seized my vision like a child fetching marbles, and all became clear. The floral tapestries, the unlit torches and candles, the dust swirling in the air, and the matron’s discarded heels that no longer measured the pretender’s size.
Death will find them, Davina, the Shadow uttered, haunting. Your hand will find them.
My lips bent like snapped strings.
I turned the corner. At the end of the corridor, a door yawned open. His gown and plait flourished through the closing gap. I reached for the door. My arm was cloaked in dark blood with fingertips stained in crimson. The door yelped again, but at my touch, it embodied a cry, not a yawn.
“Shit, where is it?” He stood at the quarter’s edge, his hands desperately searching for a secret passageway.
“Shit, shit.”
I prowled at his back. My tongue pressed against my teeth as I hissed. The Shadow hissed. We hissed.
“Stay back!” He yelled and turned to face me, his spine pressing against the wall. He splayed his hands against the wall, searching for the stone. Had he moved his touch three stones higher, he could have opened the secret passage and escaped.
But it was too late for him.
With unnatural speed, my legs flinched, my neck cracked, and I stood before him with my hand strangling his throat. His feet did not touch the ground.
“Who are you?” My voice was not my own. It sounded distant and lost, but I did not care.
“I—” He gagged, his face turning red.
“I—can’t—breath.” He struggled like a rodent in the mouth of a hawk. His fingers clawed at my wrist, uselessly scraping for breath.
My grip held firm. Unyielding.
I clicked my tongue, tsk, tsk, tsk.
“You were so close to making a successful escape,” I said and lifted my other hand, pressing the stone that nestled at his eyeline.
A crack, and the hidden passageway was revealed to us.
My laughter bounded off each stone, meeting my ears with a disturbed note. Low and airy, the Shadow laughed with me.
A tear fell down the pretender’s face, melding into his open flesh where my nails had carved his cheek. He writhed for air. He saw his escape in the corner of his sight, so near but unobtainable. Out of reach.
His skin began to boil, blistering like the diseased. His mask was disintegrating. The scent of sour magic was putrid, but I breathed it in anyway. Breathed in the aroma of his failures. The final shards of Constantine’s charm eroded, shattering as the mask was being dismantled. His face contorted, and sharp lines formed a concrete scowl that I’d known well in the Raven estate.
Jaw fractured, it lodged into place with a sickening snap. Shoulders showed their girth, and the bodice snapped at his back. As though each hair feared me, their hairline receded.
In a final clout of flesh and bones, his face settled from the ruin.
The face that emerged was not the one I would expect. At first. But once recognition steadied, I harbored no surprise.
A man of schemes, mercenaries, and contracts. It all made sense.
As he groveled for life in my chokehold, I saw him for who he was. A coward.
“Lucien Brine.” His name sounded like a curse from my lips.
Rhoswen! The shout, low and trembling, broke past the casing of my mind.
Deceit? My heart shriveled, and my body was knocked backwards. Magic was catapulted into my mind. Dark and light contended.
Lucien fell from my grasp in a fit of coughs.
The Shadow rodded within me, the darkness swelling.
My spine arched in excruciating tension. Deceit stabbed his talons into me. Those ten nails scraped my mind as Deceit was herded to the edges of my skull, the Shadow a shepherd, and dark magic prevailed.
Within the mayhem, the god was cast away.
Lucien pivoted to his side, charging to his escape through the passageway.
The Shadow bound to my bones, compelling my arm forward. It happened in an instant—I seized Lucien’s collar, yanked him back, knocked my elbow against his beak nose, and pinned him against the wall.
Kill him, the Shadow called. Make him suffer.
My eyes patiently followed each of his bleeding wounds, from cheekbone to jaw.
Lifting a finger, I scored over his wound, rekindling what blood flow had lessened. He winced in pain. From my touch, I painted a crimson line to his temples. There, with my nailbed against his temple, I summoned the magic of Deception, splitting open Lucien’s mind, seeking his secrets.
But, it was not only my fingertip that conjoined with Lucien’s mind, but a spillage of black ink. It saturated his skin, pouring into him. The Shadow magnified the god’s magic. It was no longer of the gods, but a dark spell. And together, the Shadow and I tore into Lucien.
It was as though the mist had lifted.
I saw all clearly.
Lucien Brine stood at the edge of the laurel wood months before with Tharen Crest at his back. A group of mercenaries stood with him, selling their souls for coin. One by one, Lucien set potions in their hands with clear instructions.
“When Alistair Raven is in the meadery, you will cut him down. Take his life. And, when I rule as lord over these lands, your lives, your families, will be taken care of until the end of days.” The mercenaries guzzled their drinks—the potion to change faces—but Lucien did not call it the Potion of Disguise. No, he called it the brew. The mercenaries’ ears twisted like elves.
That night, Lucien ensured the final survivor would never arrive at the castle for interrogation. A figure of darkness, Lucien cloaked in the night, posed as a soldier, and slipped his lone mercenary a lethal poison—blue petals. Lucien was gone before anyone knew the man was dead.
“You attempted to kill Alistair in Tharen Crest with mercenaries,” I hushed, my magic still clawing through his mind.
Lucien yelled a single, distraught note.
I scraped further beneath the foundation of his mind.
“What are you doing to me?” Tears were in his throat.
I delved deeper.
Scroll and ink lay upon the table. An elder man stood beside Lucien, signing his name at the bottom of the parchment. Eadric Raven, lord of the western lands. Beside Eadric’s name, Lucien signed his. Gladness boasted in Lucien. Though, as the nights passed, Eadric’s trust in Lucien was fleeting. In a night of hostility between the men, Eadric threatened to end the contracts—Lucien would no longer have claim over the estate, neither by Alistair’s marriage to Freya nor by inheriting the estate upon the Raven’s death. Lucien had made a decision—Eadric’s time had come. Upon a night of gale and schemes, Eadric was served a blue tea. His sleep was swift and binding, never to release him.
“You poisoned Eadric Raven when he threatened to annul the contracts.”
“Get out,” Lucien wailed.
“Get out of my mind!”
Many images came to me. Hidden in the shadows of schemes, Lucien forged alliances with lords. He had spread rumors of Alistair’s weakness with differing signatures staining the parchment. And, when Maisie saw me prying outside Alistair’s study when snow had yet to fall over the lands, it was not me. It was Lucien, seeking contracts while being careless with my name. With my face.
“You took my face,” I growled. My face was no ones to take.
My magic followed a final thought.
My death.
My death, Lucien sought, so his daughter might marry Alistair. Then, once the vows of matrimony were had, once the Brine name was patently mended to the estate, Lucien would cut down the Raven and take his place.
My twisted laughter erupted once more.
I slipped my fingers from Lucien’s temples.
“How insignificant you are, Lucien Brine.” A smile rose my cheeks. Black blood chartered my skin.
“Your desires only scratch the surface of all that I am.” My chokehold broke, and I pinned Lucien by the chest.
His eyes could barely focus.
“What have you done? I feel… I feel—”
“Exposed?” I said with a quirk to my lips.
“As though the protection of your mind has been eradicated? Torn open like a book and studied?”
Lucien’s glare hardened.
“What did you do to me?”
The Shadow and I sang in disharmony.
“I know your secrets.”
Lucien looked at me in horror. I could not hold still. My legs sloshed like water as I teetered back and forth, caught up in fever dance.
“You are truly a fool, Lucien Brine. You think you are strong, because you hide your face behind potions? You think you will live, because your name is sewn to mercenaries, whispers, and wealth? You are weak!” The Shadow cried with me as I galloped where I stood.
I recoiled my reach, Lucien falling to the ground.
My skin began to burn, my body morphing. I twirled in place, my gown grazing the ground.
“You wish to know who you stand before?” The Shadow and I asked.
“You wish to know what we are?”
Before him, my flesh burned, my bones carved new limbs.
Pinching the sides of my dress, I stretched them out and curtsied low.
Surmounted by Shadows, wielding Deception’s magic, I became an elder of sagging skin and tired bones. I became the old woman I’d known in Sariem, deranged in the city streets. But Lucien did not know the deranged woman. He knew her as the woman who trailed him in Tharen Crest the day he purchased poison in the stronghold’s alleyways.
I lifted from my bow, revealing the olden skin I wore.
Lucien’s eyes turned to glass. He gawked at my appearance.
“It is you,” he said with brittle words.
“You are the woman who followed me.” Clarity shifted beneath the gloss in his eyes.
“You… You serve the gods.” His voice fortified, and his gaze followed my veins that bled black. “But the Shadows have marked you.”
Clarity turned to dread. As I stood before him in confession of gods and Shadows, he still did not know what to make of me. To what powers I belonged to.
My smile fell. My feet silenced their skip.
I leaped forward and restrained him at the neck once more.
“I am a thousand masks.” Brows furrowing, my voice was gone, the Shadow consuming my soul. I bartered one face for another, my masks molding and reshaping with each passing second. Bones stretched and shifted beneath pliable flesh.
“Man is weak. You are the weakness of man.”
Vera, Neil, the matron, Freya, Evandor, my skin did not relinquish Deception’s sway in Shadow’s hold as I took one mask and then the other.
My nose then bulged, and my hair burned to grey. Lucien looked into his own eyes as I reflected him. Anger hardened the mask I wore.
“You seek my life so you might take glory, but glory is not owed to you,” I uttered through a clenched jaw.
“And you do not understand whose fate you have tampered with.”
Another tear filled Lucien’s eyes and fell down his cheek.
Tears of a coward.
My face snapped into my own as I twisted my neck. From the depths of my convictions, I cried.
“I am the gods, I am the Shadows, and I will be the power that brings Andrael into eternal darkness!”
I was starved of myself.
I was Shadows.
“You are a monster!” Lucien cried.
I tore him from the wall with a strength he could not match, then slammed him back into it, his skull cracking hard against the stones. He let out a choked gasp, his limbs scrambling for balance.
I lifted my hand, my fingers curling towards his neck in sadistic anticipation. The webbing of black veins stretched over my hands, lacing my fingers. My knuckles bulged with my budding desire for his death. To watch as his last breath drags him to death.
Dammit, Rhoswen! The god cried, approaching from nothing and thrashing into my mind. Break from the Shadows!
Be gone, the Shadow rasped.
Deceit’s talons scored within me, carving my bones. It ached, but the Shadow held me steady.
This soul is not yours to own, damn creature! The God of Deception was sharp scales around my spine, anchoring in me. She belongs to me.
But the Shadow—it was powerful. And it drowned every piece of me.
In a final thrash, the Shadow stretched out, my spine curling backwards, and it exercised the god from me.
My hand lunged for Lucien’s neck. The Shadow’s anger festered, becoming my own. My hand tightened. His skin was turning blue, as blue as the petals that killed Eadric. As blue as the petals that led Ewan to his early grave.
“You are owed sufferings!” I yelled.
“You are owed the sands of Oldurem!”
Lucien’s eyes began to close, and I licked my lips in satisfaction, tasting the dark ink that dripped from my mouth.
A breeze kicked at my back, the door swinging open.
Footsteps hurtled towards me and abruptly stopped.
“By the gods… Rhoswen.” Nothing happened for a moment. Lucien neared the afterlife. Then, the voice shouted.
“Rhoswen!” Slender fingers wrapped around my arm and wrist, Vera tugging my chokehold downward.
The god emerged from the darkness and pelted into my mind again. He grabbed my heart, tearing it from the dark and cradling it in his twisted hands.
Fight, child, the god begged. Fight the Shadows!
I gnashed my teeth at Vera, nearly biting her face.
Before I understood, Vera grabbed my cheeks and kissed my lips.
No, the Shadow cried. Your fate is written in the dark, spelled in blood. You are of Shadows! Its voice began to wither, but the dark magic still lingered.
The cold pulsed in my veins and pooled in my stomach.
At last, I felt the cold, which meant I was nearer to warmth.
Vera’s kiss, the magic from Slumber, did not drive out the Shadow, but it did steal my strength.
Lucien fell from my grasp.
And I fell onto the stone ground.
Lucien’s gasping breath filled my ears, and his blurred figure slipped into the secret passage. Vera tore her eyes from me, reached for him, and pressed her lips against his. Lucien fell to the ground at my feet.
“Sister.” Vera knelt beside me, holding my face.
“Vera.” My voice, my own voice, left my lips. My words were weak.
“The Shadow.”
“I know, I know. Gods, Rhoswen.” Tears swept down her cheeks, falling onto me like holy water.
“Tell me what to do, please. I-I don’t know.”
A frail breath filled my lungs, and I managed one name.
“Alistair,” I said.
“Take me to Alistair.”
My eyes closed.
…
“What has happened?” His voice drifted through the dark, finding me.
“The Shadows… I-I found her like this.” Vera’s words shook.
“Can you help?”
Hands wiped hard hairs from my face and cupped my cheeks.
“Fuck.” He lifted my arm.
“She’s bleeding. How did this happen?”
I traded arms, and my eyelids slit open to see an ivory tunic, stained in black and crimson. Wild curls were the background.
“Gods, I don’t know what fucking happened!” The spiraled hairs whisked into a haze.
“Can you help her?”
A pause lasted an eternity. If Deceit was with me, he dwelled in secret, hidden from the Shadow that prowled in my veins. Darkness pooled in my stomach, leaving me with nausea that turned to searing pain in my blood.
“Yes,” Alistair finally said with searching eyes.
“Rhoswen, can you hear me?”
My head dangled on my neck. I bowed it as best I could and voiced the frailest, “Yes.”
“Stay with me, Rhoswen. You will be all right.” He wrapped his arms around me and guided me beneath his chamber’s doorframe.
Set upon lush velvet, I sat at the edge of Alistair’s bed. He knelt before me.
They were becoming familiar—these foreign words that he spoke. Like a sweet lullaby to bless children with rest. Only, I did not feel the light penetrate past the dark. Not this time.
“You cannot save her,” a voice uttered somewhere within the chamber.
Alistair’s spell continued.
“Gods, it isn’t working,” Vera murmured near.
“Be quiet,” Alistair demanded.
The same spectral tone crept from the silence.
“It is too late. She has been marked by Shadow. Her blood is poison.”
I looked around, the chamber spinning, but I could not see who spoke.
Alistair’s thumb rested on my lips.
“Rhoswen, be silent,” he said, his touch warm and careful.
My lips rasp against his skin.
“Do not forget, young Raven, of the curse you poured over your house the last time you ripped a Shadow from their marked.”
It dawned on me then. I was the unsettling voice.
“Did you know she still lives in this realm, her soul bound to the lands?” I did not know what I spoke of, what the Shadow spoke of. Sorrow festered in the corner of Alistair’s eyes.
“We see your sufferings, we know your name.” I bit my tongue and clung my lips closed, but the Shadow’s words still escaped.
“The dark is with you, Alistair Raven, and you too shall proclaim the Shadow’s baleful reign.”
“Why does she sound like that?” Vera asked, her voice withering away.
“Stop talking,” Alistair growled at Vera, then continued his enchantment.
“You cannot save her.” The heartless tune lifted my ribs and stretched past my throat.
“It is too late.”
The light in Alistair’s eyes was blinding. His magic burned my eyes and flooded my veins like hot water, saturating me. My spine curled. I had to look away, but Alistair grabbed my face and forced me to look at him—to look into those blinding eyes of light.
I tasted the magic from his lips.
And the Shadow—it lessened.
“No!” I chomped at his face, but Alistair held me back.
“This is her fate!” It wailed within me.
And then, there was a god.
Deceit broke from my heart and lunged. A pained moan came from my mouth, and my eyes rolled back.
She is mine. Deceit’s voice slithered into each part of myself. You cannot have her.
“Rhoswen,” Vera cried and took my hand.
“Gods, Alistair, what do we do?”
The lord’s incantation continued. His words were warmth in my blood, breath in my lungs.
Deceit’s talons pierced in the dark, clawing and scraping without relent.
Stay with me, child. The god’s voice was kind, perhaps for the first time in our entanglement. Stay with me.
A holy collision happened within.
The Shadow broke from my bones. It’s tongue stripped from mine.
A hiss rattled my insides.
Amidst the possession, I gravitated towards each word Alistair spoke, like following a guiding rope in the dark. I clung to the sensations of Deceit—his horns, his coiling tail, his sharp nails.
“Come back to me, Rhoswen,” Alistair hushed. His forehead pressed against mine.
“Come back to me.” He said again, softer. Closer.
I reached for his voice. I reached for Alistair, and I held on with all I was.
Come back, Deceit spoke.
Your fate is sealed, the Shadow hushed. It scraped my skull in a final tear. It fled.
Scents of sage filled me. My eyes fluttered open.
“Alistair?” My voice—it was my own.
Silver radiance alit in his eyes.
Alistair’s breath knocked from his lips. Without hesitation, he reached his hands to my cheeks. Tears, relief, crept into his eyes and fell down his face.
He spoke my name so quietly, barely more than a breath.
We were locked in fragile stillness. Blessed, fragile stillness.
In a heartbeat, I was in his arms. He pulled me into him and secured his arms around me, his hand against the back of my head, as though his embrace could mend together each broken piece of me.
I buried my face into his shoulder, into the warmth and solidness of him. Immovable, unbreakable, a man made of stone. And I was safe.
Bedlam was vanquished.
The Shadow was gone.