“I only mean to say that he’s alone out here.”
Mirquios squeezed her hand. “We will all leave the Court Below in one piece, Lu. I promise.”
She nodded, stepping through the heaps of dead logs and overgrown, brittle grass.
“I’m taking the northern edge,” Luxuros called over his shoulder, breaking into a jog across the clearing.
Mirquios hopped over a particularly large fallen tree and glanced through the dim forest.
“I don’t suppose you have some sort of magical intuition that tells us how to find our Shadows?”
Lunelle’s ears heated. “I… I might,” she confessed. She turned toward him. “Something strange happened with Arcas the other night.”
“You do not have to tell me, Lu?—”
“I know, I know. But something…. I cannot explain it, something happened to a darker piece of us… it was not like a Tether, but notunlikeit in some ways. I can feel the space it left behind, it's like my blood calls out for it.”
Mirquios stared at her for a moment, taking in what she could possibly mean. His eyes swept over her chest as if he might see the shift she spoke of.
“It sings,” she whispered. She closed her eyes, blocking out the dull haze of the Court Below, letting her mind drop to that pit in her stomach, that space between bone and blood that waited for him—that swirled with smoke dark as night, but glittered with brilliant sapphire threads.
The tug was there. It was quiet, only a whisper, but she could feel it brush against her ear.
“East,” she mumbled, striking forward over the dense decaying flora.
Her king followed without hesitation.
Lunelle followed the ghost of the Shadow within her, seeking the darkness she’d loaned to the sorrowful forest, stretching and yearning to absorb more of itself and feel whole once again. They tore through the macabre woods, branches leaving shallow holds across their cheeks and hands, the silence of phantoms running beside them amplifying the thud of each rock against boot, theshhhhof crumbling leaves breaking along their shoulders.
The skin on the back of her neck burst with gooseflesh as something cut into their path—something too fast to identify with her eyes, but she felt it in her Soul.
“Was that—” Mirquios’s question cut short as another onyx apparition raced by them.
“That one is yours,” she sighed, recognizing the glossy pride of it—the way its shoulders still stood tall even as an amorphous slip of space.
“The other one?” Mirquios barked as he broke into a sprint after the smoke and spirit of him.
Lunelle swallowed, turning in a tight circle as she waited for it to rush through the trees again. A lithe black streak curled at the base of a gnarled tree, springing forward when it sensed her stare. It blew over her like a storm, smelling of desperation and fear.
Her tongue reared back as a bitter note spread through her mouth, slinking down her throat.
“Not mine,” she said. But notfarfrom hers, she wanted to add.
The same weight on its shoulders, the same stubborn rattle at its core as it refused to accept sacrifice. The same glittering spine of shame, torn between desire and duty, doing what is right and doing what the blood that runs through its missing flesh begs. The same craving to be seen as what it knows it could be, what it might be if only it shed a few deeper hues.
Mirquios dove from a small boulder as he attempted to wrestle his Shadow into place, missing it by just a breath. “Godsdammit,” he muttered as he tumbled to the forest floor.
The king sprinted after it, as Lunelle shook her head, attempting to clear the weight of Arcas’s Shadow from her chest as it disappeared into the treeline.
She was certain it whispered her name as it went.
“Lu!”
She darted away, casting one more stare behind her before she wove through wicked roots toward the sound of Mirquios’s scream, the Tether in her chest lighting up with pain.
He slumped over his leg at the bottom of a shallow ditch, hissing as he cradled his leg. He brought his fingers to his face in the dim of the eternal twilight, stained with a bright crimson.
“I swear to the gods, the damned thing slashed at me!” Mirquios leaned his head back, pulling in a harsh breath as he hauled himself to his feet, reaching out for Lunelle as she leaned over the edge of the rocky ravine.
