Kingdom's Vice Series: A Voyage of Vengeance ( #2 2015)

Chapter Thirty-Three *BONUS*

A/N: This chapter is a super long one (in comparison to the others!), so BONUS! Enjoy and please COMMENT, VOTE and ADD IT TO YOUR READING LIST if you haven't already! :)

I thought death would look something like this: abandoned, forsaken and hollow-a cold sticking the edges of everything: of sight, of touch, of smell. It reeks of death and the images of madness slide past us in fragments as Duhamas and I wash ashore.

He takes my hand and pulls me up onto the sand bank, dusting the sand from his hair. "Are you hurt?" he asks me, his eyes examining me for a wound. He doesn't find one.

I wave his hand away, "No, no I'm fine." I tell him quickly, running my eyes over him. "And you?"

He shakes his head, "Nothing. Not a scratch."

With a sigh, my eyes fall on the roaring waves in the distance, the horizon stretching further away from home. "I wish I could say the same for him. What do you think happened to him?"

He rests a hand on my shoulder, "The wind knows what we do not, Skaya. He made his own choice-destiny had its plans for him. It is something we could have forseen."

We both share a glance after the words leave his mouth. We both know someone who could have forseen it. But, we say nothing.

"Do you miss her?" is all I ask him, a stupid question I'm sure.

His eyes meet mine, "Do you miss Alec?"

I nod, my eyes falling to the sand and staying there in fear of what I might see in Duhamas'. "I worry about him," I confess shyly, draining the water from my braids as I find a spot on the shore to sit. I pull my knees up to my chest and breathe.

"As do I," he replies, throwing himself down beside me with a thump and an exhausted sigh. "He is strong enough to handle is own," he assures me, "as the Captain of the Guard, I would expect nothing less from him."

Muffled cries echo in the distance, across the island, like a roar of the dying. My head whips in the direction of the wails.

"What was that noise?" I gasp as Duhamas is quickly on his feet, armed with the first thing he could find in proximity: a large stick, a branch of oak it seems.

"Stay behind me," he commands me in a firm, yet gentle voice, "and stay silent. You don't want to awaken anything unwanted here."

I cling to his arm and with my thoughts, I push my words towards him.

What is it? What do you sense, Duhamas?

"I do not know," he replies in a hollow, ghostly whisper.

The wolves, I suddenly jerk, why don't you summon the wolves to go before us?

He stops short and shoots me a look, "I can't summon a wolf at every turn, whenever a foe approaches. That would be unethical," he chastises me like a child. "And not to mention wholly lazy. We would have no need for silver to forge swords if we could just use our powers to save us whenever the tides turned to darkness."

Darkness. The word lingers in my mind as I remember what Wayland had said to us on The Envy: "I hear what is left of Kennah resides there-until The Darkness takes them."

Away from The Light, everything seems doomed to that darkness, the darkness yet to be seen, yet to haunt the figures of warriors and kings, and dearest kin. I fear it, the days when there will be no light to guide us, when all that is left is shadow. I confess that I fear it, now and past and future.