Chapter 62

Cold. I named the sensation which pressed to my palm as I trailed it along the jade green wall of my father's castle, wandering without thought, uncertain where to go next.

I rounded a corner and a pair of guards snapped to attention, the scent of their fear ripe in the air, a drip of perspiration rolling down the side of one's brow.

They were afraid of me.

I sighed, moving between them into the deeper layers of the castle. Everyone was afraid of me. None of them understood what I was and so they feared it. But none understood less than me.

Sharp. I glanced at the piece of stone which stuck out from the wall jaggedly, pressing the pad of my thumb down on it until that spike of sensation rushed through me, blood welling to stain the wall. Pain.

From here, I could hear the clamour of the army beyond the frosted windows of the castle. Distantly, I could hear my father's voice too, bellowing some command which would no doubt send everyone scurrying.

My mother stepped into the room, stalling abruptly as she found me lurking there, her eyes moving to the thrones which sat on the dais, drawing my focus to them and making me realise that I had wandered into the throne room.

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion and her bare feet clapped against the stone floor as she strode towards me.

"My boy," she said, the words dancing over my senses then falling away. Her voice seemed harsher since her hold on the shadows within me had fallen away, no longer the lull of something to yearn for but a scrape of command which I instinctively balked at.

I looked into her face, the sharp cheekbones, the skin which seemed thinner than was right, or at least thinner than that of other Nymphs and Fae, her veins slightly visible beneath her flesh, dark with shadows in some places.

"Mother," I replied in turn, wondering why that word fell flat on my tongue.

I had heard many Fae screaming for their mothers in those camps Father had shown me, the ones he said were full of lesser Fae, and yet they had seemed the same as all others to me. More than that, they had held that gleam in their eyes, that…something which I was missing.

"What are you up to?" she asked suspiciously, and I frowned.

"There is nothing," I said because that was how I had been feeling recently. Well, in some ways all I had was recent. There was before and then…this.

She pursed her lips, taking my hand and coaxing my shadows closer while the dark stain of her own coiled between her fingers. But they were no longer one and the same, no longer melded but separate and as I took hold of my own shadows, they gently but firmly pushed hers back.

I felt my power rising at her call as she pressed harder, but since that star had shattered, since its light had washed across the world, the weight of my shadows hadn't been so thick. Their colour was no longer stained so darkly either and I was fairly certain I preferred them as such. I didn't want her taint on them.

I snatched my hand back, stepping away from her and moving to the thrones in the centre of the room.

Mother surveyed me silently before walking up to stand at my back.

"It will be yours one day," she breathed, her words silken. "One day soon, perhaps."

"The chair?" I asked, uncertain why I would care about such a thing.

"The throne," she corrected sharply. "And the crown which goes alongside it."

I stepped forward abruptly, dropping into my father's seat and leaning against the carved back, the Dragon scales which adorned it digging into my spine.

"I don't think it fits," I decided, rising again just as swiftly.

"That's because you are still growing into it. It will fit perfectly when your time comes," she assured me.

I thought on that, wondering if perhaps that was what I was looking for, but then I remembered my brothers laughing together on that mountaintop and something in my chest twisted sharply.

"No," I said simply because I knew that no chair or headwear would offer what I sought.

She was speaking again, her words harsh and clipped, but I strode away from her, her voice merely a noise that I chose not to listen to. A choice I found so much easier now, her words no longer slipping into my thoughts once I made it away from her company.

Father's voice came from the chamber ahead of me, but I took a turn, not wanting to taste the wrath I could hear coiling in his tone, not wishing to face whatever lesson in obedience and subservience he had for me today. His hand had not been returned to him and his rage over the fact was released upon me regularly. No, I found I no longer wished to fall prey to the lashes of his belt. For a time, I had endured his violence, the sensation of such pain strange and new to me. But the loyalty he demanded from me, forcing me to agree to whatever he wished no longer seemed so important.

I took a narrow flight of stairs downwards, outpacing my mother who prowled behind me, turning into another narrow passage, this one intended for servants to use.

Once I made it halfway down the stairs, the sound of her footsteps faded away and I continued through the passageway then took another set of stairs down, lower and lower, past Vard's laboratories, into the bowels of the castle where the walls no longer shone green.

I headed into the darkness beneath the mountain, no real direction in mind, but as my foot struck a puddle, I jerked to a halt. A sensation like fingertips crawling along my spine froze me in place.

A hand lunged from the puddle at my feet, making me cry out in surprise as it grasped my ankle and wrenched me off balance, sending me sprawling to the floor. I rolled onto my hands and knees, panting as I came face to face with the murky water and a rotten skull peering out at me from within the folds of a tattered hood.

The skeletal hands jerked for me again, breaking free of the puddle and yanking me down by the throat, forcing my face beneath the filthy water.

A new sensation struck me, my pulse racing, adrenaline spiking through my limbs which trembled at the shock of it. Fear.

"You are in possession of items which belong to me, Shadowborn," the skull sneered, its rancid breath washing over my face even through the water surrounding me. "I have come to claim them."