Shadowfever by Karen Marie Moning

Author:Karen Marie Moning
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

The icy prison was exactly as I’d dreamed it, with a single significant difference.

It was empty.

In my nightmares, the prison had always been inhabited by countless monstrous Unseelie who had squatted high on cliffs above me, hurling chunks of ice down the ravine as if they were bowlers from hell and I was the pin. Others darted low, taking stabs at me with giant beaks.

The moment I’d stepped through the king’s mighty doors, I braced myself for an attack.

It didn’t come.

The stark arctic terrain was a great empty hull of a prison with rusted-out bars.

Even devoid of those once incarcerated, despair clung to every ridge, blew down from mountainous cliffs, and seeped up from bottomless chasms.

I tilted my head back. There was no sky. Cliffs of black ice stretched up farther than the eye could follow. A blue glow emanated from the cliffs—the only light in the place. Blue-black fog gusted from crevices in the cliffs.

The moon would never rise here, the sun would never set. Seasons would not pass. Color would never splash this landscape.

Death in this place would be a blessing. There was no hope, no expectation that life would ever change. For hundreds of thousands of years, the Unseelie had abided in these chilling, killing, sunless cliffs. Their need, their emptiness, had stained the very stuff from which their prison was fashioned. Once, long ago, it had been a fine if strange world. Now it was radioactive to the core.

I knew that if I remained long on this barren terrain, I would lose all will to leave. I would come to believe that this arctic wasteland, this frozen oubliette of misery, was all that existed, all that had ever existed and, worse—was exactly what I deserved.

Was I too late? Was I supposed to have answered this summons long before the prison walls fell? Was that why I kept seeing all those hourglasses with black sand running out?

But I kept hearing the voice in my dreams—and now, when I was awake. That had to mean there was still time.

For what?

I scanned the many caves cut into the sheer façade of jagged black cliffs, frigid homes the Unseelie had clawed into the unforgiving landscape. Nothing stirred. I knew without even looking I would find no creature comforts within. Those without hope didn’t feather nests. They endured. I was startled by a sudden deep sorrow that they’d been reduced to such straits. What a vindictive act on the queen’s part! They might have been brethren to the Light Court, not forced to shiver for eternity in the cold and dark. On sunny beaches, in tropical climes, perhaps they would have become something less monstrous, evolved as the king had. But, no, the vicious queen hadn’t been satisfied with imprisoning them. She’d wanted them to suffer. And for what crimes? What had they done to deserve it, other than be born without her consent?

I was disturbed by the turn of my thoughts. I was feeling pity for the Unseelie and thinking the king had evolved.

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