My eyes snap open when his fingers loosen, and I watch blood gurgle from his mouth as I fall to the ground. The noctis before me paws at his chest, a sharp, wooden stake jutting from the place where his heart should be.
The woman behind him jerks on the weapon, drawing him nearer as she says into his ear, "Go ahead and squirm. I like knowing the monsters fear me."
Agnes withdraws the stake with a sickening squelch and the noctis falls.
She keeps a wary eye on him as she steps over his limp, bloody body, and crouches down beside me. "Are you all right?" When I don't reply, she looks up, spies my mother a short distance away, and sighs. "I tried warning you, child. There is nothing left for you here. Hulbeck has fallen. We can’t stay—"
Hooves thunder through the streets.
As fluid and swift as a coursing river, Agnes wraps her arm around my torso and hoists me onto her hip. "Where is it? Where did she tell you to hide if the noctis ever came?"
My finger lifts without my doing. To the naked eye, there's nothing where I’m pointing, just my mother's loom and a few dozen spools of thread that she'd been spinning. But Agnes knows better. Hulbeck was the town she’d called home before the Shadowthorn overrun it, and when the darkness was finally cleansed from it, the people rebuilt every home inside this village with a safe haven in mind, just in case evil ever returned. They were right.
Agnes leaps across the room and sets me on the ground. As she shoves the loom away, clearing the floor, I make the mistake of peering out the window and I see him for the first time. A noctis male with hair as silken as spiderwebs and just as pale as the dead that litter the ground around him.
The king of the noctis.
The king of devastation.
King Tor Devonshire.
"Did you find him?" the king asks the rugged man on the horse behind him.
The other noctis shakes his bearded head. "No, sir. No sign of him yet. But we'll find him."
Agnes glances over her shoulder out the window every few seconds asshe taps on the wooden planks, searching for the hollow beneath the floor. When her knuckles finally strike it, it only takes her a few seconds before she has the floor opened wide, revealing the hiding hole beneath the house that I never thought I'd have to use, no matter how many times my mother reminded me of it.
Agnes ushers me inside.
It's not until the door closes that I realize she's left me alone.
It's not until I hear weapons slicing through air and flesh that I realize she's fighting the noctis because she has no choice. Because I've given her no choice. Because she told me to flee with her and instead…I brought her back here.
Her guttural cry as she meets her end buries me where I lay, this hole feeling a lot like a tomb I will never climb out of.
For days I remain there, petrified and lost. The noctis enter my home and finish off what they began, draining the rest of my mother dry and lapping up the spill on the floor. They even bring in other humans to feast upon, and for hours I listen to their screams, wondering why I can't go up there and fight, why I'm so useless that I'm just stuck down here, waiting out a death that everyone else has already met.
I'm not sure how long I stay. Day gives way to night, and night to day. It’s only once I’m sure the noctis have left Hulbeck, only once the town has been silent for days and all those who had been left near death and in agony have at long last perished that I muster the courage to crack open the floorboards and escape. When I finally crawl out of from the hole beneath my home, I force myself to look at every dead body I pass, to gaze upon all those who were too weak to survive so that I will always remember what the noctis are capable of.
Laying my eyes on the carnage, I finally understand why Rowland wanted us to train. Why Agnes agreed to it.
Hulbeck had become weak.
The people here stopped worrying about the noctis because they believed we were safe by the sea. They believed that because our village was so large and populated, that the noctis wouldn't dare fight us. But they were wrong. That’s exactly why they came. We painted a target on our backs. A thriving community of fresh blood just waiting for a bloodthirsty army to come and drink their fill.
We weren't safer behind these walls, allied together. It drew the noctis to us like moths drawn to flame.
I grab the crossbow and quiver that hangs beside our front door, and as I race down the streets of Hulbeck, headed for the shoreline that my mother always instructed me to follow in case of an emergency, not once do I look back at the town or the life I'm leaving behind.
2
TEN YEARS LATER
Every now and again, I catch myself staring into the blackened shadowood of my mother’s crossbow, mesmerized by the lethal beauty hiding beneath its iridescent shine. Sable, I’ve come to call her, courtesy of her dark and captivating allure. There’s always been something eerily magical about her, but today I feel it more profoundly than usual.
Unease skitters down my spine and I force myself to look away from her before I can fall too far into her black void. It’s just superstition, I remind myself. Just the paranoid ramblings of commonfolk to distrust weapons made from shadowood. Nearly two decades ago, when the Shadowthorn fell, it wasn’t uncommon for blacksmiths to forge weapons from the dead wood that had grown inside the cursed forest. It was believed that perhaps the trees of the Shadowthorn had protective properties that could fend off against the evils of the new era, just as the shadowsteel weapons had been designed to protect them from the demons they eventually eradicated.
Of course, they soon discovered that shadowood was no more effective against the monsters of our time as any other weapons were. No magical qualities. No noctis-killing power. Our predecessors were fortunate in that regard. They had an advantage that we do not.
