Fae Exile: A Fantasy Romance (Royals of Embermere Book 3) by Lucia Ashta

Author:Lucia Ashta [Ashta, Lucia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

17. THE WORK OF UTTER DARKNESS AND THE SHIFTING OF TIDES

~ RUSH ~

In my many decades of life, I’d witnessed situations that had made my essence shudder and recoil more often than I cared to recall. Even in Amarantos, as its drake, I hadn’t been able to nullify the queen’s influence. Her reach, like insidious tentacles, slunk all across the mirror world, poisoning everyone and everything it touched.

Once she forced me to live at court, her many horrors were inescapable. Everywhere I looked, her influence tainted her subjects and the land, her putrid touch just beneath the surface of whatever pretty picture she orchestrated—never sufficient to fully conceal the stench of her involvement.

I’d considered myself immune to shock. There was nothing she could do that would surprise me anymore.

How wrong I’d been.

This, this was so much worse than anything I’d ever imagined she’d do. This was worse than death, a cruelty only a person without heart or essence could carry out. This was the work of utter darkness.

Hiroshi, Ryder, and West were as stunned as I was. The four of us stood together, gawping at the myriad cells the dragon’s fire illuminated. When the beast ran out of breath, near darkness settled around us once more, barely interrupted by the power of my lumoon, which was like the light of a single candle compared to the beam of radiance provided by the dragon.

“There are so many of them,” Ryder uttered softly. “How can there be so many of them? How could we not’ve known?”

“There might be more beyond where we could see,” Hiroshi said. “We don’t know how far this pit extends.”

“It could span the entire length of the palace,” West said.

The palace of Embermere was huge. It had begun as an identical match to the one in the Golden Forest, home to the ruling royal elves. Legend told us it had been resplendent and that it opened its doors to all fae to celebrate the coming and going of the seasons. Its interior had been designed to accommodate the aristocracy from all corners of Faerie.

“The underground caverns could be even bigger than topside,” I added. “She could’ve dug deeper, farther.”

Silence descended heavily on our shoulders as we considered the range of implications of what we’d discovered. The dragon of such beautiful burnt orange waited, its stare wrapping around me as if it could make out not only my body in the dim gloom, but also my squeezing, aching heart—the half-dead lump that had endured what I’d done to Elowyn.

“We have to know how far it goes, how many of them there are,” Hiroshi said with an urgency that was also simmering in my own blood, readying to boil.

“We have to get them out of here,” West insisted.

“What happened to all your”—Ryder’s tone turned mocking—“the dragons are killers with a taste for fae? King Erasmus wiped them all out for good reason?”

“Fuck Erasmus, and fuck the queen,” West snarled so bitterly it was easy to understand all he meant by that one statement.

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