8. Elorie
Elorie
The first step is cold.
Like a bare foot in the sea. Except I’m not on the beach. I plummet when my foot finds nothing but an icy wash of fear that swallows me.
I’m standing, but floating. Each movement weightless. Until a tingle starts at my toes and climbs. The fluttering of a hundred caged butterflies rattles in my bones. They fill my chest, and my heart races as if I’m suffering the Beating. On the verge of bursting.
So fast.
So hard.
Each pump of my heart springs tears to my eyes.
I clutch my chest, nearly burning my hand on the searing rune that glows white in the darkness.
Wilder.
Is this how it feels as his heart hammers against his ribs? As he hangs at the door of death, suspended where I left him when I woke him in this prison?
I drop to my knees. Bone meets obsidian, and my kneecaps sing.
“No,” I choke out, pressing my hands to the stone and pushing myself to standing.
I’ve barely just entered, and already the prison is testing me in a way it didn’t before.
Weaving terror through my Fae blood and learning what might break me.
I clutch the necklace Callum gave me and ground myself, refusing to succumb to the darkness the prison threads through my mind to test me. To terrorize me.
I am Fae, but I am also human. Half my blood cannot be manipulated by these walls.
I push back.
The second step is lighter.
Or have I been walking for hours?
Around me, all the walls have changed from black to purple. A deep plum that is somehow familiar. I’ve seen these flecks before. Felt these chilling tendrils. I stare so long into nothing that my memories shine back. But it is not me in the vision; it’s Hazel.
Hands outstretched.
Raven-black hair waving in the breeze.
Violet sparkles in her eyes as her shadows consume me.
“There you are.” It whispers as it did back then. “I’ve been looking for you.”
I stop walking and close my eyes, sinking into myself while the memories of Hazel’s shadows crawl through me. There is no fighting them, so I don’t. I pause and breathe, refusing to look them in the eyes as they whisper. Until they drift away with a sense of something strange.
Boredom?
As if her magic has thoughts of its own and decided it’s done.
The shadows leave me alone, drifting away and relieving me of their torture.
Until I open my eyes and find myself at the foot of a familiar cell. The circle of runes is no longer dark as it was when I stepped over them. This time, they glow. And at the center is my mate, just as he was the first time I saw him in this place.
“Wilder?” His name is a gasp.
A cry.
I rush forward, but an invisible force grabs me. Preventing me from breaching the runes like I did before.
Wilder chuckles, but it doesn’t sound like him. There’s an echo to his laugh and grit to his voice.
“The prison doesn’t create new memories. It tortures you with what you walk in with,” Wilder speaks with a hollowness in his voice.
The words are the same warning he shared with me in Solace, but it’s not him saying them now. It’s this illusion crafted by the prison, peeking into the recesses of my mind and seeking out my secrets.
I didn’t fully understand what Wilder meant when he said those words. Not until this vision of him stands at the center of the cell and freezes.
Dread pools in my core.
“Look at me.” My heart starts racing. “Wilder—”
A blade drives straight through his chest. The crunch of metal slicing through his spine makes me jump. A thread tears inside me; the pain is unlike any physical wound. Like a part of my soul is carved out.
“No.” I reach, getting nowhere.
Suspended where I stand and not allowed to run to him.
Tears run in hot rivers down my cheeks as Wilder drops to the ground in a pool of blood. The blade speared him, but I’m the one who felt it. Who feels it now, widening a hole inside my chest.
I blink and the scene resets.
Wilder is kneeling on the other side of the runes again, refusing me his gaze. The longer his eyes avoid mine, the more desperate I become.
This time, when he stands, an arrow meets his throat. Then another.
Another.
A gurgled scream tears from his lungs. Covering my ears does nothing. I hear it all.
I see it all.
Wilder dies again and again, and even if I know it’s not real, the loss is unbearable.
My mate, who I’ve struggled to forgive for his lies these past few months with this distance between us, is still a part of me.
The prison forces me to watch him die over and over, denying me his face the entire time.
All I get is that blood-drenched sword slicing through body in a hundred different ways, cutting into the deepest parts of my soul as he falls to the ground again and again.
The sword slices through his throat this time, and I slam my eyes shut before his head falls. But I hear it. Even as I cover my ears and try not to. The prison makes sure I hear it.
The harder I resist, the stronger the prison holds me in place. A bug trapped in a spider’s web.
What was I thinking coming here? That I was strong enough to survive this?
I wasn’t even strong enough to survive the Rite. Physically, I’m left standing, but my heart is still in ashes at the palace. My will is not strong enough to withstand this.
Not in this place.
I can’t do this.
See through the stars. The haunting echo of Wilder’s words rings in my thoughts, but it isn’t him.
It’s simply another way this prison is trying to break me. Hanging him on a thread so fate can slice a blade through it. No matter how many times I save him, it’s never enough. I’m never enough.
I’m half of too many things, spliced together. Human and Fae. Strong and weak. Tired and lonely.
My shoulders sink. A sob shudders through my body. Only then, when I open my eyes, is Wilder gone. And I can’t decide if that’s better or worse because at least when he was in front of me, I hadn’t lost him. There wasn’t a sea between us.
It takes me a long time to move forward again. Long after the prison’s web releases my arms and legs.
The next step, I’m numb, wondering if this is why Wilder’s eyes were so cold the first time I saw him. A century in the prison would melt my sanity. How did he survive?
A tunnel widens, and I wait for more visions—more nightmares. But there are none. This time, as I walk forward, the prison lets me.
“Why are you here, daughter of the stars?” A whisper sounds in my ear like the ones that hide in the shadows of magic.
“I’m here for my mother,” I answer.
There is no response. The walls do not change. The tunnels do not end.
One staircase leads to another. It might have been minutes or days or weeks. I wonder if Callum and Greer found the rings and opened the Gate. If they’re already long gone. If the island will be whole when I finally leave this place.
If I leave at all.
I continue forward, refusing to let the prison win until I’ve completed my task.
At the bottom of another stairwell, I’m dropped into a chamber with three doors. Each has a rune carved into the surface. There are no windows or sense of what might be on the other side, but I know I have to choose one.
Taking a deep breath, I turn to the door on my right. The moment I pull, the door fades away, and I fall into a vision so bright it takes me a moment to adjust to what’s before me.
I’m outside, deep in Alyssium’s forest. Except I’m not really here; I’m in a memory. My body is much smaller. I’m barely ten.
My father hunts beside me. His bow pulled taut as he takes aim at the deer ahead. For a moment, I consider tossing a stone to scare it away. There’s no time before Father’s arrow drives through the deer’s heart.
Its body thumps to the ground, and while I’m not the one hit, my heart aches.
Death is one with life, Father always told me. For without death, there is no urgency or purpose. There is no reason to move forward if the path ahead is endless.
“Over here.” Father waves his arms to the two hunters nearby.
Since Father’s aim is better, they collect the deer to take it back to the village so he can continue to hunt. While I don’t have a bow, I stop at his side, learning the forest. Learning what needs to be done to survive.
“Will you teach me to hunt like you?” I brush my fingers through the leaves of a waist-high bush as we move deeper into the trees.
“I thought you wanted to teach. Not enough of the children read anymore. A mind like yours would be better guiding others.” He rustles the hair at the top of my head.
“I want to be useful.” I tilt my chin up. “I want to provide like you do. To help our village survive regardless of what the Fae bring to help us.”
Father pauses, turning to face me. “Knowledge is useful, Elorie. And more powerful than any arrow. Any blade. Any weapon. There is great power in understanding.”
“What kind of power?” My eyebrows scrunch.
“The power to make change.”
As Father continues walking, the forest grows darker. The sun sets faster than it did that day, and the trees vanish into nothing.
The walls of the prison return me to my limbs, and I’m standing in the chamber again, facing the next door. All it takes is a skim of my fingertips for it to open. I’m thrust into a different memory. One I never wished to revisit.
“You’re a beautiful abomination.” The guard towers over me.
His fingers brush the edge of the obsidian belt around my waist, trailing over my stomach and along my thigh as more tears begin to fall. At first, I tried to hold it in, but I can’t anymore. They spill in a hot betrayal down my temples, matting my hair to the sides of my head.
The male unapologetically explores the goose bumps prickling my skin.
His hand climbs my leg, and I rattle the chains, kicking with what little give they allow, but all it does is scrape my bare thighs and back against the stone beneath me, cutting into my skin.
Blood makes the shackles at my wrists and ankles slick, but not enough to pull my hands or feet free.
Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll freeze to death.
“What are you?” the Fae asks, sick interest flaring in his eyes.
“Human.” Another tear rolls down my temple when his fingers grip high on my thigh.
“You’re a liar.” He reaches for my hair, wrapping the blue ends around his fist and tugging. “Humans do not look like this.”
“I told you, it’s blue because of a tonic my mother took when she was pregnant.”
He tugs harder, and my scalp stings. “There is no such thing.”
“I promise.” It comes out in a sob.
The male tosses the strands in my face, brushing my arm with the backs of his knuckles. “The king will reward me greatly for you. He promised wealth to anyone who uncovered a gem on Alyssium.”
A gem on Alyssium? There’s nothing here but snow and death. What could the king possibly want from this horrible island?
“I’m just a girl.”
A wicked gleam shines in the male’s eyes. “Just a girl?”
His friend has been gone for a while now. The light in the cave has changed. We’re nearing sunset. The male circles me slowly, openly viewing me stretched by the obsidian chains on the stone. He pauses at my feet, caressing my ankles.
“We’ll see about that.”
A scream rips from my throat, piercing the bubble that is my memory and shattering it like glass around me. The cave falls in shards at my feet until I’m back in the prison.
Back in the chamber of doors. Two open. One closed.
I’m back in this hellscape that is far from done with me.
My fingers shake as I reach for the final handle, knowing there is no turning back now.
Tears burn a hot path down my cheeks, and I don’t know what I’m about to face.
But when the door swings open, I’m not pulled somewhere else.
Unlike the last two rooms, this is not a memory. It’s not a vision at all.
It’s a cell.
There are three circles of runes. The first, closest to me, is like Wilder’s. But then there’s another, overlapping it in waves. The third circle is sharp, like a star with a hundred points.
And at the center is a woman no older than me in appearance. Her silver eyes are like peering into a mirror. Her long white hair is stick straight and perfectly still at her shoulders, as pale as her porcelain skin. And on her cheeks are flecks of sparkling freckles.
The corner of her mouth lifts as her gaze sets on me. “My daughter. You’ve finally returned for me.”