Page 15 of The Crown the Fae Forgot
Dark shapes began to loom like great, uneven pillars encircling me on all sides. The sky had turned red again, but this time it was not the color of the sun on the horizon, it was the color of blood.
Once more, that tang of iron flooded through me, so strong this time that my eyes began to burn.
It was only then, as the scent of rot and death overwhelmed me,
And there, standing at the top of the pile, was a single fae—a fae that wore not one crown, but four. Behind this fae the sun rose once more, as it had the day the fae arrived.
But this time, instead of banishing the brine of war, it only illuminated a new war’s horrors.
Fear began to well up in the pit of my stomach. This was supposed to be a children’s book, wasn’t it? Why then was it such a nightmare? Was it just the tea, or was this really what finch had brought for me to read…to bring me…comfort?
I tried to shake my head, to force the vision to shrink back into the book where it belonged. It didn’t work. All around me, those pillars of bodies grew higher and higher as the whispers began again. Those grew louder too, louder and louder until they all joined in unison again in one, all-too-familiar voice. A voice I’d tried to drown out for far too long, a voice I’d been avoiding since the moment it poured forth from the Oracle’s mouth.
A deal once made is now completed,
All the royal thrones unseated.
What was stolen soon forgotten,
At the very core is rotten.
Avarath has turned its eye,
Heed the cost or you will die.
All us now our own Creators,
In this court of thieves and traitors.
These words I knew. The sound of them had been burned into the back of my mind, seared into my memory as surely as the damning truth she’d told me about my mother.
But the Oracle’s words didn’t stop there, this time. This time, they continued on, the sound as haunting now as it was the first time.
The other half of the prophesy.
All of a sudden, I was no longer in a dream. This wasn’t a hallucination, it was no construct of a mind now opened. It was real. Very, veryreal.
And it was tearing me apart.
The stacks of bodies had grown so high now that they blocked out the rays of the rising sun. What I could make out of the red sky overhead grew smaller and smaller as it was blocked out by the impossible numbers being added to the dead.
I reached out for something,anythingto hold onto, anything that could drag me out of this living hell that was suffocating me.
So close was I to drowning that when I found something, it didn’t matter what it was, I took hold. I felt the bond, felt the call in the darkness, and I responded to it.
But when Zev didn’t come, when he didn’t heed the beating of my heart, I called on the only other thing I could find. I was delirious, drowning, but still, somehow, I knew how to reach him.
“Icarus. Come to me. Save me.”
And he did.
The dark fae arrived, in true fashion, cloaked in smoke and shadow.
His appearance grounded me, pulling me from one vision into the next.
No amount of smoke and shadow, however, could hide the way his face twisted in pain the moment his eyes met mine. Not for my own pained fear, either, though I knew it must have been plain on my face, but from his own.
Because this Icarus, this vision conjured to replace the one before it, was a shell of the fae I’d grown all too close to.
