The Last Volari by Gary Kloster

Author:Gary Kloster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-03-06T09:11:57+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Another small death.

I opened my eyes to my rooms, dark with night, and that small death felt enormous. How long had I been out? Long enough for Arvan, Rill and Erant to find me in that hole and bring me back to the Grey Palace. Days probably. Such a small death when measured against eternity. An eternity when measured against my problems.

I pulled myself up. From the floor beside my couch, Rend lifted his head, but I wrapped silence around us both. I went to the curtains and pulled them back. I could see the stars and the little moon, Evigaine, glowing in the black sky, could see their light fracturing off the boiling waters below. Light enough to show me my room and myself. My skin had gone grey with the hunger that gnawed at me, and my hair… It tumbled around my shoulders, loose but untangled. Whoever had tended me had got the filth off my feet, the blood off my face, replaced my linen underclothes with a clean set and brushed out my hair. Probably Erant. He was better at that sort of thing than Rill.

There were strands of silver in my hair, glinting like the Irewater in the moon and starlight. A lot of them. They probably matched the grey in my eyes, but I couldn’t tell, since I’d shattered the mirror in here. I separated a strand out and pulled, ignoring the little pain of tearing it from my scalp. How long would it be before those strands came out on their own, falling free from my head in great clumps like my father’s had done? How long before the grey pallor in my skin took over and I turned the colour of ash; before my eyes sank and my lips pulled back, my flesh melted away beneath my skin and I became a corpse like him? How long before my small death wasn’t small any more?

How long?

I walked into my parlour. It was the same as before, yet so different. There was Arvan, frowning at a map, Rill fletching arrows, Erant making another pile of shavings as he carved a wolf. Shadas sat reading a book in the corner, his back to everyone else, the low beat of his mortal heart a nervous rhythm. They all stopped and looked at me when I came out, and that was what was so different. They looked at me with all their concern and instead of anger I just felt dead.

But you’re not.

I stopped in the door of my room. I hadn’t bothered putting on my armour or my swords, hadn’t bothered to even pull back my hair. I hadn’t bothered to reach out to see if she was there. I think I was afraid to. What if she wasn’t? But now, hearing her voice, just as calm and clear as ever in my head, I did finally feel something. Relief, mixed with rage.

‘No, I’m not dead. Otherwise you couldn’t haunt me.’ I stepped into the parlour, slamming the door shut behind me, almost catching the tip of Rend’s tail.

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