Night Blessed (Shades of Blood Book 2) by Megan Blackwood

Author:Megan Blackwood [Blackwood, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Eighteen: Celestial Bodies

Darkness was my world. Above and below, nothing but void—not shadow, for there was no light with which to cast one. Only emptiness, never-ending and all-encompassing. There was no 'up' in this place, no direction that could be mapped to any compass that worked on the back of the earth. There was only me, the void, and Lucien.

His arms wrapped around me, the only reminder that I had a body at all, and through his sheer force of will I understood that we were moving—to where I knew not. We had fallen into a crack between the worlds and all my being should scream with terror, for this was so much more than the plane with my marble plinth. Here there was no cause to see the black web of the night coursing through my veins, for here endless darkness was a foregone conclusion. The battle of my mind was lost before I ever entered this place, and somehow I knew this place would always be here. Waiting for me.

I screamed, I think. Or at least a part of me was screaming—body, soul—the aspects of what I was breaking down, the edges of myself blurring into endless nothing. Lucien's grip tightened, as if the strength of his arms alone could hold the parts of me that were flying away together. I didn't think so. This place was my end. Now, or later, I would be devoured here.

My back struck stone. Lucien's arms cushioned me from the full force of impact. Just knowing there was something there—something solid—snapped me back into myself. I fitted back together, the seams of my body re-knitting to accommodate themselves in this plane where mortal lives were more valuable than all the magic the other planes could ever birth and why—why did I know that?

I stretched my thoughts out, spiraled in all directions, trying to grasp the tail end of some arcane knowledge that, in the place of the void, had been a simple truth so self-evident I hadn't bothered to consider it at all. But now that the knowledge was leaving me, the understanding of what this world was, of why it was so important to protect—images of a cradle, of a flame...

No. The knowledge was gone, lost as the void, but waiting. Always waiting.

Light—the low flickering of oil lamps—illuminated the space I was in now. Lucien lay on top of me, the full length of him—so much taller than I was, so much broader—pressing me against the stone floor. His hair, dark and curly, washed across my face in a gentle fan, and though he stank of nightwalker he carried with him that warm, musky scent of hay that forever and always would wrench my thoughts back to that first night I'd seen him, climbing a mountain with his fellow acolytes to commit himself to the monkhood. And, even though he was young among them, how he'd been the most serene of them all.

There was a core in Lucien. A stability that, in my warmest dreams, I imagined mirrored the whole of the world.

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