AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I peered through the bars where she held up a sharp piece of the clay cup. She pressed it into her wrist and sliced into her skin, all the time whispering indecipherable words.
“No. Don’t,” I argued, though my protest was faint and weak, my body exhausted and my mind listless.
She dragged the jagged piece of clay up her arm, still speaking in that foreign language, then slipped both her arms through the bars. While holding my hair back with a gentle but firm press to the top of my head, she dipped her fingers in her own blood and began tracing something on my forehead.
Dark fae often cast charms over someone with demon runes, spelling them with magick and demon sign.
Perhaps it was the fact that they’d taken everything from me and killed whatever will I had left to live, but I couldn’t fight her while she whispered in the dark and cast her spell with her own blood.
“Ora est kel ohira. Ora est kel näkt los. Ora est meheem.”
Then I felt it. Her magick. It vibrated and pulsed through my blood, giving me new vigor. It was powerful and jarring, pulling a whimper from my throat. Her hands shook as she continued going over and over the signs on my forehead with trembling fingers.
“Ora est kel ohira. Ora est kel näkt los. Ora est meheem.”
She gasped and collapsed to the dungeon floor. I lifted up onto my elbow and crawled closer. “Old one?”
She didn’t answer. I looked around for the bucket of water she’d fed me from.
“Let me help you.”
Shaky fingers touched my chin, guiding my face to look at her. The dim flicker of torch-flame darkened the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Even though life had been unkind to her, especially now near the end, I could see she’d once been lovely, her dark purple eyes glittering with goodness.
“I’m sorry,” I added, holding her hand with one of mine, feeling utterly useless without my own healing magick. “I wish I could help.”
Her mouth tipped up in a feeble smile before she spoke in my language. “You are the destiny. You are the dark lady.” Her dialect was perfect Issosian. “You are for him.”
As her eyes grew glassy and her spirit left her body, I knew those were the words she’d been repeating over and over in demon tongue.
“No.” I closed my eyes and gripped her lifeless hand, tears pouring yet again. But for once, they weren’t for me or what I’d lost, but for this poor, sweet fae of my homeland who’d died in the dark, whispering nonsense and trying to care for a stranger.
Then my gut clenched. The sound of bootsteps drew near as the cell grew brighter.
They are coming.
GOLL
The wights were hungry tonight. Desperate groans rumbled louder than their normal low murmur and hissing. Their skeletal fingers clawed at the stone wall of their pit, making that gratingclick-clicksound.
Sometimes, it felt like the sound actually penetrated my skull and scraped me on the inside, driving me slowly insane.
I looked away from the pit, wishing my vision wasn’t so clear, even in the near pitch-black of the dungeon beneath Näkt Mir. Pushing to my feet, I then wandered to the left of my cage. The chain attached to my right ankle clattered as I dragged the heavy links across the stone floor.
The chain served no purpose but to add a layer of humiliation to my imprisonment. The warded iron bars were the true barrier holding me within this confined space in the heart of my father’s guarded keep.
My father, the Demon King of Northgall, held court a few stories above this wasteland of death and bones. His courtiers, the most appalling sycophants adorned in leather, lace, and malevolence danced to his every tune somewhere above me in his throne room of obsidian and glass.
He kept me, his only son, as his prized prisoner in the deepest, darkest pit of his realm. No one cared. No one would come for me.
My mother would have had my father not beheaded her then cut out her heart for committing adultery when I was ten.
Mother was the only one who would’ve faced my father’s wrath to try to free me from this cage. She was the only one who could keep his paranoia in check. Before he so brutally murdered her, of course.
Ever since Father’s treasured oracle Vayla envisioned that I would one day usurp him and take his crown, I have been kept in this filthy, maddening hell. The only reason he let me live is because Vayla warned that if he killed me, or even gave the order, then he’d pay with his life.
I wondered what he’d done to Vayla for her prophetic vision of his demise. He’d have not taken kindly to such news.
So here I was. Living. Breathing. Counting the agonizing days.
