The Dark Between Dreams | ✔️

Chapter 33 🔻 Burn Scars

"I am finishing what I should have done long ago!" Crow screamed over the storm. He threw himself at the king, hurling them both into the abyss below.

I lunged for the pit's edge, but all I saw was a blackness that was even blacker than the Dark that spread across my entire vision. And in that darkness, I heard Crow vow, "What a shame...I will not see you and your whole damned city burn, Nymandus!"

A ringing deafened my ears. For a few moments, the only sensation I could perceive was a scorching, burning, utterly agonizing pain that ate at my hand and lower arm. Was my flesh being seared from bone? Was my arm just empty space now—just dust? Was I fading? All I knew for certain was that I could now recount for absolute fact what Hell was like.

But eventually, the heat ebbed away, its place taken by a biting cold. I heard people shouting my name.

I opened my eyes. I was no longer trapped beneath the sand in the lair of shadows. Instead, I lay once again beneath the tremendous black sky. The crystalline half-sphere of lux blazed above me, bobbing weakly in the void. Every few seconds, a chain of white lightning shot forth from it. It was close, far closer than Earth's yellow sun had been. I felt like, if I really tried, I could reach out an arm and pluck the glowing crystal from the sky.

Its light was weak, for most of my surroundings were still defined by pulsating purple shadows. In the red haze that outlined the ruined city, rolling sand dunes, and distant mountains that I hadn't known existed, Vale and Webb crouched over where I lay in the sand. Both of them were completely healed and intact. I was the one in pieces now.

The ziggurat was gone, blown to pieces that surrounded us. "Wha—" I had to swallow to wet my dry throat. "What happened?" I asked them.

"I think we roused the kusarikku," Vale breathed as she watched the half-sun spin.

When I struggled to sit up, she laid a hand on my back and helped me up. We'd gathered in the center of a blown-out crater. Vale had brought her bike over to rest beside us. Even in the dimness, it was clear that the den of shadows was no more. Pieces of columns and crumbling remnants of walls, the only remnants of Aḫ-ḫur's annihilated temple, spiked through the sand like weathered tombstones. Or like the fingers of a partially buried corpse.

The wind swept through the ruins, filling the air with an eerie, mournful howling. I shivered, practically spasming from the cold that stung me. An incessant pins-and-needles sensation bit at the arm I'd used to wake the crystal. I didn't dare look at myself or my wounds, letting my imagination fill the gaps just as I'd done when I'd first arrived. Even Webb and Vale shivered from the icy air that left my body.

I clapped a hand to my aching head. "I saw another memory, but it wasn't mine," I told the other hollows.

A crow squawked beside me. Nannāru puffed up her jet-black plumage and hissed at my pocket. "What the...?" I said as I searched my pocket. I gasped when I felt something that hadn't been in there before. I shivered even more when I raised Blackburne's vial to my face. The thing inside throbbed. The crow hissed again and took wing, as if fleeing from whatever was inside. And deep inside my brain, some instinct compelled me to run when I noticed the crack in the glass. Some of the fluid dribbled free from the vial.

"Crow had this," I said to my shocked friends. "He must've given this back before Reynard took him away." Another bead of black slime oozed from the crack. Run, run, run! my heart screamed. "But why?"

"Skye." Vale's hand brushed against the skin of my arm. "Your...Your arm," she stammered. "Look at your arm."

Finally, I surrendered to my nagging morbid curiosity. I looked away from the vial to the hand that held it and held my tingling arm up to my face, expecting to see the usual gaping black voids cut into my flesh. Instead, puckered white skin marred my formerly pale skin, like branching electricity scars. No cold seeped from the mark, but the wounds wouldn't heal. It shimmered in the dim light, like my skin was made of stars. Like Crow's blind eyes. Looking at myself, all I could see was Blackburne's disfigured face.