♔ 𝔑𝔦𝔯𝔞 ♔
Energy finds me as though I have not been deprived of it this whole time. The slap of my heavy feet on the hard floors does not pain me. The way my heart batters my chest does not distress me. My breathing is so controlled, matching the pace at which I drive my arms beside me, barrelling through the corridors. I am seizing this opportunity with every fibre of my being, with a control that I had thought I had lost.
I'm not sure where I am. My sense of direction is skewered, having spent so long locked away. Each path looks the same, but I do not stop to consider my bearings. Each corner I take, I do not slow, even when my body hurtles into walls or furniture. The adrenaline within me is peaked to a point where nothing is a hindrance. Nothing hurts, and my body takes no beatings. My mind is hard wired to escape, by whatever means necessary.
Even the power within me seems to have settled to allow me the focus. No longer does it yearn for release. It hums, almost thoughtfully, prepared to be used, but content with waiting. It will save me, should I need it. However, in this moment, I wish to rely on nothing but my own two legs. The power is too unpredictable, and I have no desire in this moment to become an accomplice in its wrath. It can wait, with this new patience, until I am free. Until I know how to bend it to my will. I survived without it – now, I am nothing more than Daenira, the human girl who fights for her life.
I hear noise from the direction I wish to run, and my heart stops for a moment. I veer left, down the only available corridor, and I almost laugh at the irony of it all. I was a huntress, once for food, and then for Fae, and now I feel like nothing more than prey. Pushing myself to the absolute limit for survival.
A tangled mess of hair streams behind me, my dress too, catches around my thighs. It doesn't stop me, nothing stops me, and nothing will. Not until I escape this place. Abutilon, Vrodora. Zaire.
He promised me that I would go home, and home is not here. I will cut off my ears, and bury my power forever, if it means returning to where I truly belong.
The first staircase is where recognition finds me. I hurry down then, fingers skimming the banister to keep myself steady, though I stumble over the last two as I take off in a sprint once more. This corridor is the one which my room waited. The eggshell walls and four poster bed. Where Sloan taught me the fundamentals of magic, where she nursed me to health from the toxins of the Umbra Demon bite. I pass by the door without a second glance, turning right, where the row of doors remain closed for privacy.
This corridor, where Zaire first hunted me, when he wished to see my skill. The very direction Cenred or Ezekiel would walk me after a morning of strenuous training.
The path I take is second nature.
Right again, until I am rushing past a door, with the heads of Cerburus protruding from it. The office where Zaire made so many empty promises. Where he displayed me like a prize to be won, where he took me against his desk. Where he stood beside me, as though we were bound to be equals.
I do not pause to see if the guard of his door watches my escape. I will be out of the main doors so soon, I can almost taste freedom.
The next staircase is larger, wider, and it pans to the ground floor, where a few Seelie Fae trudge through their duty. They see me running, stunting their tasks, and two even have to dodge me, for I make no plan to deviate from my path. The kitchen, and my old cell is lives on my left. The dining room to my right. The stretched foyer, and the doors to the grounds, before me.
"Nira!" His bellow echoes the entire Court House. Zaire has followed from his office, there is no doubt about that. I spare only the quickest of glances over my shoulder, to look at where he stands, rigid with fury. He is not the sight of someone I might have loved. He is a monster, and at this moment, he looks nothing short of feral.
Faster.
My feet drill into the ground. He could scere – he could block my path before I have even reached the doors, and at that realisation, the power within me comes alive. It let me try, but I cannot contend with Zaire without matching us on even ground. He is power, so I will have to be. Darkness erupts from my fingertips, braced for defence, but not quite soon enough.
The foyer erupts with light. A blinding white, stealing me of my vision. He wishes to stall me, and it works. I slow and throw my arms over my face to keep my retinas from burning. He wants me within reach, without harming me, or the heart of his which I possess.
My power lashes out uncontrollably. Darkness slices through the white, extinguishes the sconces, throws itself against the rays of sun which leak through the windows. It wraps around me too, and I almost feel it urge me forward. For every wisp of light I extinguish, he expels a flare of hot illumination to carve through a limb of darkness. We are tied, our power a devastating opposite, attacking each other with enough force that it explodes, sending furniture askew, and drives the Seelie Fae into a flee of panic. He will win though. His power is controlled, and practiced, where mine is a display of panic and despair.
My speed picks up again, the warmth of my adrenaline only half that of what I expel. The heat in the foyer becomes suffocating, enough to make the ornaments of metal warp, liquid running down their surfaces like slow shed tears. I think I am crying too, desperate, battling for just a few more seconds. The doors are there – closed – and I am not sure what possesses me to do it, but I throw my palms before me, and a gust of bitter, cold wind turrets from my hands, swinging the grandiose doors from their hinges. They land on the outer steps with a crash, but I do not care. Nothing separates me now.
My back flares in agony, enough to ripple a scream from my lungs, and have me doubling over from the force. I fall to my knees, writhing at the burn that crawls up my spine. He hit me with whatever glowing orbs he threw, an intentional attack, to render me immobile. I have been burned before, but this is unfathomable, and the searing of injured flesh never lessens.
"Enough!" He calls out, and his slow, calm steps moving towards me are nothing but a paradox to the erratic thumping of my heart.
Get up.
I try, with gritted teeth and tears in my eyes. This cannot be it. I will never get a chance like this again. I strain against my wound, finding my knees, and then my feet. "Stop, Daenira!" I know he plans to attack me again. It is not only me who is behaving on the whim of desperation. Zaire is too.
"Do NOT!" My body shunts from the force of something I cannot see, rolling forward until I am splayed out on my side. Sloan pants before me, grounded on her feet – ones spread in a stance I know to recognise to be offensive. Her arms are extended at her sides, fingers taut with her palms facing the floor. Wisps of colour crackle from them. "Don't you dare raise your power to her again." Her voice is a deathly warning. Cold, and threatening. Everything she intends to be.
Her silver hair hovers as though electrified, the ground she stands on reverberates, the skin of her back, exposed to me, glows a vibrant pale blue. Not at all it, just the four markings that are ingrained into her along the length of her spine. She is a witch, a complete one, since I returned the power to Vrodora.
"Move from my path Sloan." Zaire demands. Light pulses from his own hands, and his dark eyes glow a horrifying amber, completely glazed over without an ounce of remorse breaking through.
Sloan does not listen, instead swinging her arm before her with the mutter of foreign incantation. "You do not touch her." An order of her own. I heave myself from the floor, settling on one foot, and one knee. I need to catch my breath. Sloan does not. Her tongue wraps around the words of a dead language, her fingers contorting into shapes are she splays them outwards. Zaire is battered, from the left and right, by a force just as invisible as that what trapped me in the room. The floor erupts, dirt lifting from the foundations below our feet, and grow like vines, striking at Zaire. They incapacitate him. They strap his limbs to his side, curls his fingers into fists, and squeezes his jaw shut.
She doesn't stop, not until he is kneeling, entirely at the mercy of her uninhibited power. She is beautifully lethal, a side of her I had never imagined could exist.
I find my feet, taking a single step backwards, and she senses such. Her expression is sombre, harsh as carved stone, as she looks at me. "Go. Run, Nira." My breathes are heavy. This is pain. She manages a soft, sad smile, that matches the flood of tears in her eyes. "I love you, very much, my dearest friend."
She doesn't allow herself the luxury of watching me leave. She turns back to Zaire, who is fighting against these elemental restraints, and twists her hands to the charms of her primordial heritage.
I do not want to leave her, not now, after everything she is risking for me, but she told me to run. I never listened to Sloan before, not once, and so I will propitiate her request now. On my feet once more, deafened by the sound of struggle and magic, roars and shouts, I limp forwards, the tears that fall born from a pain within my heart.
The hedges are split today, a path carved straight down the middle. A blessing, in some ways, but something of a curse too. An escape displayed, but nowhere to run should everything go wrong. Still, my options are scarce, and so my legs carry me between them. I try to focus, to avoid glancing over my shoulder at the Court House, to try and fathom what occurs inside. There are no signs, not even a murmur of unravelling chaos and I abhor it. All that assures me of the battle between the two is the crashing of noise that fades the further I run. I sprint a few more paces, willing myself to remain facing forward, until a sound fractures the air, icy enough to drop my heart into the pit of my stomach.
A scream, so agonising that it likely tore the victims throat open and ravaged their vocal cords. A blood curdling noise, with a high, feminine pitch, one I wish I didn't recognise. A chaste look over my shoulder shows the fading of a flood of light from the windows, then nothing. No light, no noise, and the silence is almost twice as deafening.
I force myself to look forward. I do not pause to consider what has happened, for if I begin to panic, my escape will surely fold. Keep running. Just a short while longer. Then I will rest, and fret, and worry for what has occurred in the foyer of Abutilon Court House. My lungs now, are burning, as are the muscles in my straining legs. My vision is swimming, and my mind is light, as though the adrenaline can no longer fuel me.
Keep running.
There is no end to these hedges. I need to keep going. I beg my muscles to endure and not spasm, as they seem to threaten. I urge breaths into my lungs, despite the way they seem tight with exhaustion. Just a little further, and then I will rest. To the end of the hedges, and then I can stop.
A strange sensation tears through me. A tingling of sorts, like my entire body has fallen asleep, and then it clashes with a sharp prickling pain. My vision blots for the shaving of a second, my head swarmed with a temporary agony, until I am back, released of the unusual clutches of this feeling, blinking to refocus my surroundings. The hedges are no longer beside me. They are behind me, by a few feet at most, but still not where they should have been, even if I hard sprinted for those short few moments.
"No," I breathe, and I slow, perplexed. When I travelled with Riyan, when she took me into the shield of the first task, it had been excruciating. This had hurt, for only a second, but now I feel nothing. Nothing but nausea.
I do not try to stop the spilling of my stomach into the grass at my feet.
Tears stream down my cheeks, and my breathes are ragged, distilling the silence. A voice too, crashes through the serenity.
"Come back Nira." Zaire calls. He is far away, but I do not let myself relish in that fact. He will not be for long. "Sloan cannot save you." He edges his voice with a sympathy, but I do not buy its authenticity. My blood runs cold. No. No, no, no.
I have to clap my hands over my mouth to stop the sob that threatens to spill. "Do you not see what sacrifices I am having to make for you?" He continues on, projecting his voice into the openness. "They will not see that I am doing this for you, Nira. You do not see that." My teeth grate against one another. The anger burns alongside my anguish. I will not go back. I will not let him and his twisted logic on love keep me a prisoner and risk the lives of those around me.
I fall to my knees, tearing at the scabs on the sides of my hands with my teeth until blood gushes free from them. The sketch is poorly done, the grass not an adequate canvas, nor the blood a suitable ink. It is haphazard, and smaller than I would have hoped, but I do not have time to perfect it.
I speak her name on my knees from outside the summoning mark.
She is before me in seconds, appearing through a tornado of wind. Blonde hair lashes around her face, her body clad in full leather that sticks to her skin. Her expression is hard at first, impatient with this calling of her, but when she sees me at her feet, dressed in blood and sweat and vomit, with tears in my eyes and a stoic insistence to my tone, she looks stunned.
"I am cashing in your debt to me."
———
A milestone A/N - how are you guys finding it so far? Differing opinions on characters compared to where we left book 1? (Sorry about that betrayal, by the way🫣)
This is really where the drama is about to kick off. I've really had to establish the scene these previous chapters, set up the plot by lifting the veil, which is why chapters have been somewhat shorter than usual and a little slower.
I hope you're all rooting for Nira - I am! What are you prediction for our main girl?
As always, comment your thoughts and feelings - I read every single comment you guys leave. Interaction truly is a boost for me to keep up with writing.
Much love to you all,
Aimee x