AVA-MARIE
I knew what had happened before anyone told me otherwise.
I shot upright in bed, breathing hard. It was just after daybreak on the first day of February. I’d only been sleeping for a few hours, gone to bed after I’d threatened Cameron, but I hadn’t been able to sleep. My back had been aching all night, signaling some harsh arrival of a new reality. The sun still shone, and I heard birds chirping, but I knew this beautiful day was for nothing. There was a decaying rot in my gut that made me feel so sick I could barely stand to sit up straight. My intuition told me the truth before a single person had to say a word.
The Elven Gate was gone. My friends had lost. I sensed it somewhere deep within my soul that everything we’d worked for had been destroyed.
Did that mean they were all dead?
I pulled myself into my chair and got dressed in a hurry, throwing on a loose sundress before racing out of my suite. The Ladies’ Court was deserted. I entered the main halls of the palace, and everything appeared calm. Guards did their morning patrols and Elvish nobles greeted me, which I ignored. No one had gotten any bad news yet, but I knew it was coming.
“Ava.” I heard Ez’s voice and stiffened. He had the same stark, dreadful look that I bore.
“What do you know?” I demanded.
“Nothing, but something’s not right. I woke up about ten minutes ago, and I never get up this early. It was like I was shocked out of bed,” Ez replied. “The world just… doesn’t feel right today. Something’s way off.”
“I feel it, too.” Whatever had happened was big. He joined me as we searched the palace together, looking for someone, anybody?—
We found them in the gardens. Marcus, Danny and Charlie— thank the ancestors, Charlie— were near the giant fountain, covered in a variety of mud and bile. The swollen bruises and blood coating Charlie’s face confirmed that something terrible had happened. Marcus was tearing at his hair, and Danny was on his hands and knees, vomiting up the remnants of his last meal of blood. Oberi had his tail tucked between his legs, ears flattened in defeat.
Charlie shook. He barely looked able to stand as he wrapped his arms around his torso, lip trembling. Everyone was sobbing. That’s how I knew it was bad. Charlie never cried unless things were as terrible as they could get, and he was bawling now.
My eyes searched everywhere for my best friend, but she wasn’t around.
“Fuck you, Charlie!” I’d never heard Marcus sound so broken. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, his hands balled tightly into shaking fists. “I need to find her!”
“There’s nothing we can do for her, Marcus,” Charlie whispered, his tone signaling we were at an end. “She took off on her own. Locating her now would be impossible.”
“How dare you drag me back here. You had no right!” Marcus fell to his knees, covering up his face.
“This is the first place she’ll come back to. There’s nothing else we can do,” Charlie pleaded.
Panic strangled my heart to the point it couldn’t beat. “Where the fuck is Kallie?”
“She portaled off,” Marcus whimpered. “She’s in Malovia right now, looking for Kaz, and Charlie wouldn’t let me go after her! He just had to portal us back here.”
“You’re damn lucky I could,” Charlie shouted back. “Do you know how hard it is for my Elf powers to work against the ocean’s surface? Be grateful I could get us off that damn island at all!”
“We never should’ve left!” Marcus growled. “We should’ve stayed and waited for Kallie to return!”
“We don’t know where she went, Marcus! Malovia is an entire country, and she could be anywhere!” Charlie insisted. “We need to stick together right now!”
If Kallie was in Malovia, that was better than her being hurt. She could take care of herself, but I was terrified that she wasn’t with us now. Something awful must’ve happened to make her run off to look for her brother. “What’s going on?”
“We lost, Ava,” Charlie moaned. “The Warden opened the Elven Gate.”
A cold chill knotted inside of me, wrapping around my waist and dragging me down to a place where I couldn’t fight back and there was no escape.
I knew deep down it had happened. But I didn’t want to believe it. “No. You… you’re lying. You’re still here— he didn’t kill you.”
“I’m certain he let us live so we could tell you what happened… how we lost. The Warden hates you more than any of us, and he wouldn’t be satisfied with merely wiping us out. He’s got to play his mind games with you, because that’s the kind of sick fuck he is.” Charlie gasped between his tears. “We’re basically insects to him now. Too weak and insignificant to bother dealing with.”
The Warden wouldn’t have left my friends behind if I was there. He cared if I lived— the queen cockroach, in his eyes. He’d have blown us all up if I had been there, but since I was absent, he’d rushed off to the afterlife without bothering to care about what happened to my friends.
Maybe it was a good thing I hadn’t gone after all. It was probably the only reason my friends were still here.
“He took the keys from us and went through the Gate to the afterlife. It was destroyed once he crossed through, so the Gate is useless to us now,” Charlie moaned. “There’s no way for us to mend the broken boundary. Souls can’t get into the afterlife now, ever. He ascended to godhood. He’s unstoppable.”
