Another cruel irony, that I should be executed because they think I stole gold-touch fromhim.
“Raise!”
The guards lift their swords. All six blades notched between the poles, their sharp tips pointed at me with lethal intent.
This enclosure is so small that the moment they stick these blades in, I’ll be stabbed through on all sides. There is no escaping this.
There is no way out.
Tears stream down my face, futile drips that barely reveal the panicked terror I’m flooded with.
I spin around, trying to jostle the barred door, but it doesn’t budge at all.
“Please!”
After all I did to be free, I’m going to die trapped behind bars anyway, locked in a cage I can’t escape.That’show cruel life is.
It’s almost as if I can feel Midas laughing over my shoulder.
I surge inside of myself, trying to pull out my fae beast, trying to break past the runes at my feet, to shove apart the poles that surround me.
Nothing works.
My beast is curled up, feathers withering with exhaustion. My gold can do nothing but drain out of my skin. The structure that surrounds me feels like it’s closing in.
I’m trapped.
King Merewen meets my eyes from over the guards’ heads. “Lady Auren, I now sentence you to die.”
The blades close in.
And so do my eyes.
I feel the first piercings of the swords like a fingertip getting pricked by a wayward sewing needle. Sharp. Small. Just the very tip biting through my skin.
So I breathe. A single phrase caught in the exhale, joined with the sorrow of my heart.
Find me in another life.
Find me in them all.
And then there is no room for words. None for coherent thought, because the first of those swords sinks in deeper, and pain erases everything else.
My body braces. My mind empties.
But then…the worlderupts.
I don’t understand for a moment. When the ground shakes. When the screams sound. I can’t grasp that the blades pressed into my body are no longer firm or sharp. My numbed mind only registers something is off when they fall away from me.
My eyes snap open to see dust as thick as fog crowding in the air. Looking down, I see that the swords are no longer gleaming and silver, but mottled with rust the color of amber stones and tangerines, and then they suddenly disintegrate completely. I can feel them burst into powder where they’ve sunk into my body.
And the guards...
I watch the man in front of me as his body morphs. Terrified eyes go opaque, sinking down into their sockets. His jaw hangs open like his muscles can no longer hold it. His lips peel, exposing a row of browning teeth. His veins fester and burst, lesions peeling back up and down his neck. He tries to grab hold of the pole, but his hands shrivel down to the bone.
When he falls, his body swells and twitches, bloating up unfathomably large, before everything then seems to suck inward, shrinking and shriveling until he’s just a husk of bones and dust.
I spin around at the thump and clang that surrounds me, seeing that all of the guards have met the same fate.
