Beneath my saddle, Lavante churns at the ground with his hooves as if he’s looking for permission to bolt.
“We must keep going,” Merc says grimly.
And I agree, but I find myself hypnotized by the slowly turning mystery—
“Sorrel? What ails you?”
“Nothing. I just—” A tickle in my throat prevents me from going any further.
Putting my hand to my mouth, I taste grit and spit out black grains of sand—and that’s when it happens. The nightmare that’s been haunting me finally reveals itself.
Just as before, a face comes forward, pushing out of the Fulcrum’s swirling sand, the features at once completely foreign—and terrifyingly familiar: They’re not only what I know I have seen in my tortured sleep… they’re something I have stood in front of.
It’s the statue.
From outside the ruins. The man whose face was turned to the beautiful woman. The man who looked at her with possession.
“What is it, Sorrel?”
“Do you see that,” I moan helplessly.
“See what?”
And that’s when my inner village wall, the one that’s protected me all these years, the one that’s been crumbling and disintegrating with increasing decay, falls to the ground. Except instead of keeping things from getting at my mind and my marrow, it releases everything it’s been holding in.
I knowthisman. In my soul, I recognize who he is, and who he is to me. Though my conscious thoughts reject the shattering conclusion, my soul cannot deny it—
Hide.
The step-by-step journey from who I thought I was to who I have always truly been is suddenly completed. It started with the story of my birth, the one that I repeated as if it was programmed into me, the lie that I told others and believed myself… and continued with my ability to know and dance with death… and kept going with Mr. Lewis’s revelation… and then kindledfurther and further with the compass, the crown, my first sexual experience with Merc, and finally with the fire and the trees parting…
As well as the way I wanted the cook dead and how I killed that officer.
With my vengeance.
It was in the visions that I saw with such clarity as I looked down the lane of the ruins.
It was especially in the nightmares that have stalked my sleep.
It has been with me all along, driving my urgent need to keep my face covered… so that those around me, who were born and matured and died in the normal course, wouldn’t notice that there was an immortal in their midst, stashed in the pub of their little village, overseen by generations of the same family until the night came when fate was a tide that could be dammed up no longer.
And here and now, the beast of truth within me is released, no more mental wall to hold it in. With horror, I realize that I’ve had it wrong all along.
Hide.
That voice, which I have always minded, to the point where for years and years I have covered my face and kept to myself in spite of my loneliness, wasn’t warning me about other people.
It was keeping me away fromhim, from this face that emerges out of the black sand, the contamination.
That voice is not mine. It is my mother, the Savior, who has spoken to me.
And she’s commanding me to stay away from he who she imprisoned within the Fulcrum she created… from the other half of me, the half that has always simmered below my surface, powerful, vengeful, and angry.
The Dark King.
The source of all evil, the commander of demons, the scourge who seeks to be free, once again.
Who we must battle to survive.
