He’s coming.
Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.
The darkness is coming.
The darkness is coming.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I stared at the books piled on the floor next to my bed, the ones Emrys and Dris helped carry down to my chamber after fleeing the princess’s quarters. All three of us were silent in a mixture of confusion and fear. We were missing something but where to begin?
Nothing in the stories I’d heard mentioned the princess was mad like her mother. Her mother only went crazy after using up her powers to help put her daughter in the onyx tomb, right?
My mind hurt from all these new revelations. Dris told me she would come into my room this morning to help me search through the princess’s notes. As confused as I was, another emotion rattled me more. Nyx was frightened and unhinged in the days before being locked in her tomb. Nothing on the sleeping princess’s face showed fear or the madness of a woman who wrote such scary words on the back of the wardrobe. She looked at peace in the onyx. Maybe she split and hid what she wanted to or knew she was safe from the darkness in there.
The only thing I could associate the darkness with was whatever Verin released into the world. I remembered the story of when mankind fell. There was a flash of black across the sky and people died where they stood. It couldn’t be a coincidence. There was a common denominator here—Verin, the evil king.
I yawned widely and loudly as I answered the quiet knock on my door. Dris wore comfortable clothes instead of the cute dresses she usually wore.
“Did you get any sleep?” I asked, seeing the dark circles under her eyes. I had tossed and turned, thinking about an unhinged Nyx until the early sun rose.
“Nope. Who could sleep after being in that room? It’s scarier than the dungeons.” I’d have to take her word for it since I had no interest in going down to where the dungeons were.
“It’s small, but come on in. I was about to start reading.” She sat on the edge of my bed, while I closed the door.
“I don’t even know where to start.” She looked at the pile of six books, all different in sizes and leather covers binding them. I agreed with a grimace at the difficult task before us. This wasn’t going to be fun, but there had to be a reason Nyx was looking at these books before she laid down to accept her fate.
“You do those three, and I do the others?”
I separated them and set three randomly in front of her, then curled on my bed with the others. The task before us seemed vast and intimidating. I hadn’t even opened a book and I grew overwhelmed.
“One page at a time, right?’ I mustered up a pep talk for the two of us. Dris grinned and opened a book she hadn’t touched in twenty years. To her, this was a great adventure.
The woman I’d heard about from Rune and Tor made the princess appear levelheaded, strong, and a badass. My fingers trembled slightly as I lifted the cover to the first page of the core anatomy book.
Dris and I silently read through Nyx’s notes and flipped the pages with interest. I took in the information she wrote, as well as what was on the page itself. I now understood more about how the cores worked.
The Fae had the power of their nature’s core, and the Fae had the ability with absolute mental control of their essence to solidify it. According to the book, since the queen’s core was a diamond, she could take all of her essence and turn it into one diamond stone, probably a large one . . . like taking tiny particles and combining them to make them into a bigger substance.
“Look at this.” Dris pointed to handwriting next to a painting of a dissected person.
“What the hell is that?” It was grotesque and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the princess thought of it.
“This is the book by Gregory Debaru. It’s his experiment on Fae to test how much of their essence could be taken away before they died. It’s odd, but the princess found it interesting. She wrote here, in beautiful handwriting might I add, that she wondered which tools he used, or if it was his gifts that he used on the experiment, since it wasn’t in his description.”
Gross! Why they hell did she think she needed to know this information? We continued to read and think about the meaning of her notes. It wasn’t adding up. As always, something vital was missing from the puzzle.
A knock on my door had both of us lift our heads. It wasn’t loud like Rune’s booming against my chambers, so it must be someone else. I gently placed the book I was reading on the bed and walked to the door. Dris resumed reading.
“Human Sapphira.” A guard wearing armor stood in the hall, his face completely void of any emotion while he waited for me to fully open the door.
“Just Sapphira. Is everything OK?” It was odd having a guard here, then all the blood drained from my face. They must know we broke into the princess’s chambers last night.
I took a small step back, ready to close the door if he tried to grab me, but he didn’t say anything else as his hand lifted with a folded and sealed letter in his grasp. I wasn’t in trouble. Relieved, I wanted to collapse against the stone tiles. My hand reached out to take the letter and as soon as I held the elegant parchment, the guard left.
“What’s that?” Dris’s attention was solely on my hand as I turned to shut the door behind me.
“A letter of sorts.”
