Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
I don’t need to fight Mordeus’s shadows to win—not when I can command them for myself.
This time, when I breathe, I invite the shadows into my lungs, into my core, into my very essence. I don’t need to be the Enchanting Lady to face the darkest parts of myself. They’re still there, even when the ring is gone. I am not just a scared child, and I’m not just an avenging girl with a magical ring.
I am anger and vengeance.
I am love and acceptance.
I am power and strength.
I am grace and wrath.
I am fearful and fearsome. And I can command the shadows that I’ve spent years running from.
When I invite the shadows in, they swirl into every corner of my mind, my self, and my soul, and they wait for my command.
The room clears and Mordeus looks around in a panic. “What did you do?” he asks, and now it’s my turn to smile.
“You created me,” I whisper. “Everything you did to use me, to defeat me, made me into who I am today.” Flames flare to life around the edges of the room, licking up the sides of the walls, igniting the wooden beams in the ceiling, crackling all around us.
There’s too much heat. It’s melting my flesh, and I know the scream piercing my ears is my own.
The flames were never something I could wield, but they are something I can endure.
I feel him pulling at his shadows, calling them back. “We’re connected,” I say. The pain slices through me, willing me to surrender, but I tighten my hold on the darkness. “Your power is my power. You did that.”
The flames crawl toward him now, catching on his robe and racing up his back. I feel my own clothes burning. I don’t let myself look.
His scream pierces the air and tears through me. I feel his pain because it’s mine too. There is no his body and my body. There is only this one body we are wrestling over, and the white-hot burn of the flame eats away at flesh and bone, ripping into my soul. It’s destroying him. It’s destroying me.
Instead of hiding from it, I wrap my arms around the torment and invite it closer.
I close my eyes. We’re connected. I cannot destroy him without destroying myself.
Abriella’s gone, a small voice whispers between whimpers of pain. You’re too late. Don’t do this. Surrender and the pain can end.
I open my arms and invite the flames to feast. It doesn’t matter if I’m too late for Brie. I’m not too late for the rest of the court, for the people who would suffer under a wicked king’s rule.
Kendrick is gone. You will have to live with knowing you killed him. That pain will make this look like nothing.
But he can’t be the only reason I endure. Neither can my sister.
The flames race up my arms. I let them engulf me as they fill the room. Let them engulf Mordeus.
His screams fill my ears. They become my screams.
I won’t surrender to the monster, and I don’t hide from the suffering. I let it hurt. I invite in the pain until I am nothing else. I am melting flesh and bubbling skin. I am charred bone and the glowing embers at the root of the flame.
I am the danger in the darkness. I am the scream of the nightmare.
I leave my body long before it turns to ash, but I see it, like I’m watching from a distance.
“And then what happens, Mama?” Abriella asks. Her hand squeezes mine.
I look down. I do have a body. I’m a little girl again, tucked into bed, night stars twinkling through the window.
“Then the little princess knew she’d destroyed the monster,” our mother says, and the sound of her voice, after so many years without it, is like a balm to my aching soul, “but her fight wasn’t over.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Felicity
When morning comes, the sun comes with it. The battle and the storm ended late in the night, leaving nothing but carnage and smoldering fires on the palace lawn.
Misha and I haven’t moved from the tower. We watched the battle from up here, watched as Crissa’s battalion wiped out most of Mordeus’s legions and made the rest run. We waited through the end of the storm and the rising sun, our friends visiting to share updates about Hale’s and the queen’s condition every so often. Maybe I should be down in the infirmary with my brother, but sitting at his bedside holding his hand feels like goodbye, and I refuse to accept any eventuality that doesn’t include another hello.
So I sit in his stead, watching the final flames on the lawn burn down and willing the princess to appear, for the sake of my brother, for the sake of the shadow queen, for the sake of my friends who fought so hard and deserve something to believe in.