“Come back to keep me company?” I murmured. I held out my arm, and Meryn swooped down to perch on my wrist, her talons digging into the soft leather of my glove.
I stroked her smooth feathers with my free hand, the contrast between her purity and the darkness around us always jarring. She blinked slowly, tilting her head to the side, a silent acknowledgment of my words.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t use magic like the familiars of old, but she didn’t need to. We understood each other. Meryn had been with me for years—longer than most of the fleeting creatures that had crossed my path during my cursed existence.
There was something steadying about her presence, something that made the years of solitude feel less crushing.
Meryn hooted softly.
“They’re coming again, aren’t they?” I asked softly, knowing the answer before I spoke. Meryn blinked once, her sharp talons flexing slightly on my arm.
The Sun Paladins. Always the Sun Paladins. Their presence was like a storm at the edge of my senses, a heat that simmered on the horizon, always threatening to spill over and burn me. They hunted me relentlessly, zealots who refused to understand that the light was not welcome here. Not in my forest. Not in my world.
“They never learn,” I muttered, more to myself than to Meryn. The words tasted bitter on my tongue, a familiar bitterness that had settled into my bones long ago.
I lifted Meryn gently to my shoulder, and she hopped onto it, her talons pressing through the layers of my black cloak.
The cloak itself was a thing of shadows—flowing and formless, just like me. It was all I could wear now. Gone were the fine silks and gold-embroidered robes of my past life.
Now, I was clothed in nothing but darkness.
I moved deeper into the forest, letting my shadows part the thick underbrush before me. The trees loomed closer, their branches hanging low like they wanted to reach out and touch me.
The air grew colder the further I went, the darkness thickening around me. I curled my shadows around me like a cloak, forcing some of my power through them as I always did, solidifying their shape until they protected me from the cold. The shadows were my only comfort now.
The clearing appeared suddenly, as it always did, a circle of bare earth surrounded by trees so tightly packed together that not even the faintest sliver of moonlight could pierce their canopy. This place was mine—one of the few places where the darkness was absolute, where the light couldn’t even try to touch me.
Kneeling down, I pressed my hand to the damp earth, feeling the pulse of the forest beneath my palm. My fingers flexed, and shadows rippled out from beneath me, spreading like tendrils of smoke across the clearing. They wove between the trees, curling around the roots and stones, forming an intricate web of magic.
My traps were laid, waiting for the Sun Paladins to stumble into them, as they always did.
I smiled faintly, though the I still felt cold and hollow inside. “Let them come,” I whispered to the shadows, my voice barely audible in the stillness. “Let them see what the darkness can do.”
Standing, I wiped my hand against my cloak, watching as the shadows settled back into the earth, lying in wait. The Paladinswere still distant, but I could feel them getting closer. Five, maybe six of them. It was always the same.
They came in small groups, thinking their numbers would protect them from me. Fools. They had no idea what waited for them here.
And yet… among them,shewas there.
I could feel her presence before I even sensed her magic. The High Priestess. She always came, whether she entered the forest or not. Her presence was like a splinter in my mind, a constant, nagging ache that refused to fade. She stayed at the edge of my senses, her light pushing against the darkness, though she never stepped fully into it.
I clenched my fist, trying to push the thought of her from my mind, but it was futile. No matter how hard I tried, she always lingered there, like a bright, burning wound that refused to heal.
The memory of her face flashed in my mind—her sharp, golden eyes, her hair catching the light of the sun like a flame. Over the hundred years that I had made the forest my home, I had faced the priestess whenever she had come to ‘cleanse’ the forest.
I should have killed her. I’d had the chance more than once. But every time, something stopped me.
Some part of me—some wretched, pathetic part of me—hesitated. I had let her go, again and again, and now she haunted me, her presence always just out of reach, always threatening to pierce through my darkness.
“Fool,” I muttered to myself, my voice harsher now.She’s just another Paladin. Another mindless zealot serving the light.
But that wasn’t true, was it? She wasn’tjust anotherPaladin. She was more than that, and I knew it. I could feel it in the way the darkness recoiled at the thought of her, the way the shadows themselves seemed to shrink back when I thought too hard about her light. It was maddening.
And shecalledto me. Her light called to my darkness.
Just as I had been warned. Would the priestess’s light prove to be undoing, after all?
Would I throw myself against her light like a maddened moth drawn to a deadly flame, and burn myself out?
