Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
Enzo gave her a reluctant glance but turned. ‘I’ll be right outside,’ he promised.
She wanted to embrace him, to show what words couldn’t: the gratitude she felt for what he had given up for her. Her hands twitched uselessly by her sides.
Clari waited until the door was shut once more before continuing. ‘Will you come into the water with me, Elara?’
Elara nodded, pushing herself from the lip into the pool, dress and all. It was comfortably warm as she stood, the water up to her waist.
‘Now would you mind lying back?’
Elara shook her head, though nerves were now pulsing through her as she tipped herself back, so the water buoyed her up. She could feel a thrum radiating from the crystal at the centre of the pool, large sweeping vibrations that began to relax her body.
Gentle hands embraced her, one holding her head, the other the base of her spine as they kept Elara afloat.
‘Close your eyes,’ Clari said.
Elara obliged.
‘You may start to feel my magick now,’ Clari added.
Elara saw a deep-blue light behind her eyelids, and felt a magick, calm as a stream, run through her body, growing from the single teardrop that she had swallowed.
‘Now, why don’t you tell me more about your shadow malady?’
Elara was loath to relive it, but she knew she would have to be honest.
‘It began when I was in Castor, searching for a way to wake Enzo. King Lorenzo,’ she amended. ‘He had been cast into a realm between the living and the dead. The Dreamlands.’
‘I believe every kingdom in Celestia has heard of Lord Ariete’s wrath,’ Clari said.
Elara tried to focus on the hush of the water, the tranquil buzz of the quartz.
‘Whenever I used my shadows, my vision would black out. Little snippets of reality were stolen from me. I began to hallucinate, to see figures and spectres. And then, I was in the Castorian fighting dens when…they overpowered me completely. It was as though I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke…’ She shook her head as tears spilled over.
‘There was a sea of bodies in my wake. I’ve been haunted ever since, in dreams and in the waking world.
I’ve dared not touch my magick since. But even worse, when I was finally reunited with Enzo, the moment I touched him, my shadows attacked completely of their own volition. ’
Clari made a sympathetic noise. ‘Some of this correlates with experiences other shadowmancers have had. But tell me, Elara: when you haven’t been using your shadows, when you’ve been lucid, have you felt a darkness within you? A want to be cruel, or kill?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’ She thought of Lukas, of how much he had changed—his personality, the headaches. Elara hadn’t experienced any of that.
‘What other magick do you possess?’ Clari asked.
‘Well, I possess the Three. So I can also conjure illusions and dreamwalk. And…’
‘Yes?’
‘I have my silver light.’
‘Your moonlight,’ Clari affirmed. ‘Has it made an appearance since you awoke as the Moon?’
She shook her head, feeling her hair flowing in the water. ‘Sometimes I feel it in me, but no.’
Clari let out a long breath. ‘I think, Elara, that the wound runs deeper than a mere loss of control of magick. This is not the common madness.’
Elara nodded. ‘And what’s your conclusion?’
‘Well, I’d like to ask you first: how have you felt emotionally these last months?’
‘Well…’ Elara paused as Clari’s magick continued to gently lull and calm her. She breathed into the softness around her, the silence. ‘I feel like I don’t know who I am any more.’
‘Go on,’ the healer urged.
‘I suppose I’m so very far from home.’ She swallowed. ‘And that home is…well…destroyed.’ She squeezed her eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ Clari soothed.
‘I know I need to get back there. It weighs on me, always at the back of my mind. That I need to return to my people, my land. For a year, it was all I tried to do. First I fled, then was kidnapped. And the whole point was for me to become strong enough to—’ She bit her lip, knowing it was sacrilege—pure starsin—to say the next words.
‘To kill Ariete?’ Clari asked quietly.
Elara nodded. It seemed word had spread far and wide since her battle with him upon the palace rooftops.
‘The Stars have wrought so much damage on my life—Ariete specifically. And I thought that if I could be trained, if I could access my shadows, then I could defeat him and return to rule my kingdom in peace. But so much has unravelled since then. And I am unrecognizable to myself.’
‘Because you feel untethered from your home, your foundations?’
‘Partly,’ Elara said. ‘But also because, for so long, I knew exactly who I was. I was a princess. A sheltered one, who had an abhorrence of the Light. I was a daughter. A sister of sorts. Every single part of that identity has been stripped from me.’
The lump in Elara’s throat dissolved. ‘I am no longer a daughter, for my parents are dead. I am no longer a sister, because the closest person I had to one had her throat slit in front of me. I am no longer a sheltered princess, but a queen, one who has been thrust out into the world, into the light, and expected to know what to do. How to save my land. How to bring down the Stars.’
As she spoke, she felt something loosen in the base of her spine.
‘It is unfathomable, the kind of power I am meant to wield. How can I command the entire damned skies when I do not even know who I am?’
‘There it is,’ Clari encouraged. ‘I believe, Elara, that to heal, in part, you must find your path back to who you are, though much has changed and it may feel like you can’t quite catch your breath.
You must ask yourself: what makes you Elara?
Not your land, nor family, nor responsibility.
Not your heavenly body. Not who others tell you that you are.
If this world was turned to dust, your body with it, who would you be?
What would your soul look like? What legacy would you leave behind? ’
Elara shook her head. ‘I do not know.’
‘Then this is what you must explore. Or I fear you may never step into who you are or be able to wield a magick as powerful as what now resides within you.’ Clari’s voice drifted, and her magick took on a different quality, resonant and bright.
Elara felt it prickle in her veins. ‘Now, usually, when I have healed shadowmancers, they have had a shadow. And it is when they integrate it or overpower it, when it begins to take on a shape of its own, that the dissonance stops.’
Elara nodded as Clari’s magick continued to gently probe. ‘I met mine. She did nothing but try to protect me. So I don’t understand why, all of a sudden, I’ve become so ill.’
‘Let’s try to speak to her, shall we?’ There was a faint humming as Clari sang a sweet melody, one that made Elara’s nerves stand to attention.
She could feel something being pulled from her, drawn to the song, a sort of twisting within her gut.
Shadows began to stream out of her, and she let out a scared shout of alarm.
She didn’t want them to hurt anyone else.
But Clari was wrapped in a kind of protection—a white light spiked with black shards, just like the crystal behind her.
She continued to sing as she drew the magick out, trying to find the shadow, the very root of it.
Her eyes blazed blue, so bright and searching that Elara couldn’t look at them for too long. Finally, she stopped.
‘Well?’ Elara asked, panting a little, though she felt no different. The shadows slowly drifted back to Elara, clearing the grotto once more.
‘Elara, you have no shadow.’
Elara sat up in the pool, water rushing off her. ‘What?’
‘I saw…I saw a forest.’ Clari was pale. ‘With hills cast in dusk and a circle of trees. Something lay in the centre, and it was a corpse.’
Elara stilled.
‘The corpse of your shadow, ravaged and left there—mere tatters.’
‘It can’t be,’ Elara croaked.
‘Something seems to have eaten away at your shadow self. And whatever that something is, that is what is controlling your shadows.’
It was just as she had feared. ‘Oh gods,’ she whispered. ‘Is it a person?’ She thought of the Dark.
The mermaid shook her head. ‘I can see no one possessing your body right now. But there is an imprint, as though something has been and lingered. I cannot heal it, for it is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
It’s rot, Elara. Something blackened and decayed at the very root of your magick.
The forest was dying—the trees were seeping black blood. ’
Elara’s stomach sank, fear—now a familiar foe—coursing through her. Adrian had described something similar with the water.
‘There was a dragun,’ Clari continued. ‘I saw it trapped in a well behind the corpse, bound by ropes and snares. It was silver, and livid and so very wounded as it tried to break free of its prison.’
A sickly feeling coated Elara.
‘And so how do I cure this?’
‘I can help. But it seems, Elara, that the darkness you once sought such comfort in is no longer safe. In fact, it is smothering the moonlight within you that tries to break forth. I fear to say that only light can drive out this darkness, Your Majesty. And with it, you will have to kill your shadows.’