Chapter Four #2
‘I’ll go back to bed in a moment,’ Elara said. ‘Both of you get some sleep.’
Merissa gave her a look filled with sympathy as she returned to bed. Leo nodded reassuringly before turning to the door.
Elara stepped to the edge of the balcony.
The wood was damp and rotted, a staircase that twisted down to the street completely rusted. One wrong step would send her careening into the alley below. There was a small, wrought-iron chair, and she sat on it as she breathed in the smog of the city, trying to calm the fear roiling inside her.
As she gazed upon the moon, Elara could feel the itching in her bones to be closer to it.
Her silver light had not appeared since she’d used it in Helios, and she hadn’t even felt its presence within her.
But her shadows…Her shadows had never been more powerful, as though feeding off the darkness she’d conjured.
Bathing in the moon’s rays as though it would somehow awaken that beast within her once more, she noticed that it wasn’t as full in the sky. She frowned. Rather than the full orb, there was now shadow that curved around its edge. Elara thought back to the raver’s words and shuddered.
The Dark was just a story. In Asteria, they worshipped the element.
Elara had never been particularly scared of it.
Like the Light, it was simply there. But the way the raver had spoken about it was as though it was a living thing.
There were doomspeakers in every realm, promising the fall of Celestia, but they were all insane, half of them sent to the Kaosian madhouses.
She needed to stop paying mind to the woman’s words.
‘Gods, I need to sleep,’ she sighed, passing a hand over her face. These incessant thoughts and fears were just a result of not enough rest.
Her eyes ran over the streets of Castor and its gothic, grey turrets, dimly lit by lamps. There was the distant sound of a carriage rumbling down the narrow, uneven streets, a single drunkard below staggering on his way home.
It was so dark. So empty.
She missed Enzo, so much that it was a visceral ache that had now formed a home in her chest. She felt as though half of her had been cut away; all of her light, all of her joy.
Elara pressed a hand to her chest before delving beneath the neckline of her dress and plucking out a flower.
It was a pressed forget-me-not, the same one that Enzo’s Light had grown for her all those months ago. She wore it next to her heart every day, a reminder, a promise—that she would not stop until he was in the waking realm with her once more.
She hadn’t quite realized, until he’d gone, how much Enzo filled a room. The world was so dim without him in it. She rubbed at the soft, fragile petals, swallowing down her grief. It would do her no good now. Her task was to wake him. She wouldn’t accept any other outcome.
She scanned the city once more for good measure: the rusted staircase, the alley below…making absolutely sure that the priest was nowhere to be seen. As she watched, a shadow prowled down the quiet street.
Something began to slow in her, to hum, as she leaned forwards and made out a wolf.
It sat directly in the middle of the street and raised its head to the moon. And then it howled.
Elara’s breath quickened at the eerie sound. Soon, other howls joined it. They were deafening, and Elara looked back into the room, expecting Merissa to wake. But her friend slept. She heard no stirring from Leo’s room either.
Her eyes flitted across the street as wolf after wolf appeared, until a whole pack had convened right below her balcony. She didn’t move—she couldn’t have, even if she’d tried.
And then all the beasts looked at her in unison, their eyes shining like lamps in the darkness.
It starts with the wolves.
The raver’s wail sounded through her head, again and again, as the wolves continued to stare.
A carriage came trundling down the street, breaking Elara out of her trance, and the wolves too—for they began to run, chased down the cobbles.
Though the carriage did not continue barrelling after them. In fact, it came to a standstill exactly where the wolves had. It was a black, ornate thing, pulled by two horses the colour of midnight with grey manes.
Elara could only feel the breath passing through her, could only hear that, as every single part of her zoned in on the carriage. The curtains in its windows were drawn, though she could have sworn she felt the prickle of someone observing her.
Finally, after an age, it pulled away.
She tracked it all the way to the end of the road, until it turned, the street once more quiet, empty.
But still, she felt eyes watching her.
Elara awoke with a gasp. She was still in the chair, her nightgown damp with rain and chill. What a strange, terrible dream. She hadn’t dreamwalked; that much she knew, though her bones still ached. She looked to her feet, frowning as she saw a small cut on one of her soles.
‘Elara?’ said Merissa. Elara turned, and Merissa’s face was one of shock. ‘Don’t tell me you slept out there all night.’
‘I must have—I was so tired.’
‘Come in and I’ll draw you a hot bath. You’ll catch your death of cold.’
Elara let herself be pulled inside to mollify Merissa as the remnants of the nightmare clung to her. The priest, the carriage, the wolves.
She sat in the bath and tried to scrub away the strange images.
Soon after, there was a rap on the door, three loud knocks interspersed with two small ones—Leo’s code. Merissa went to open it, and Elara heard Leo call from outside the door to the adjoining bathing chamber, ‘Feel like buying poison to put a god to sleep?’
Elara launched herself out of the bath, drying herself quickly. ‘To the docks we go.’