The exertion made the rocks spin around her. Corin knelt over to heave, but nothing came out of her parched throat. She hadn’t eaten or drank in the several hours she wandered through these tunnels. Or had it been days? She couldn’t remember. Time slipped through her fingers. The walls were shrinking. The stench of death became suffocating. Bodies grew from soil, sprouting from the seeds of her mind. She saw Harlow’s cracked skull, the pale sheet of Maggie’s cheek, Rowan’s twisted limbs. Her friends buried in the dirt with the rest of their forgotten dreams. Then there were the other corpses, strewn around the passages, time eroding their skin until they were nothing but bone. How many people had died in these tunnels, searching for the princess?
Corin stopped as she saw one of them.
The girl’s body was small and sunken in, like hunger had overtaken her body and hollowed her whole. Maggots buried themselves in the flesh of her back. Her dark skin had turned pale gray, like a withered flower that never saw the sun. Her lips were blue, and her hair was cut in such a way where it curled behind her ears, just as Corin had recalled.
“No,” Corin whispered. “This is a dream. This isn’t real.”
But she remembered everything about her sister. The shape of her body, the jut of her bones, the fabric of her clothes. She remembered looking for Elly in the tunnels. She remembered finding bodies in a winding path. She remembered a smaller body left behind, one of a girl who had died alone.
Corin screamed, because this wasn’t a nightmare.
This was the truth.
CHAPTER 26
101 YEARS AGO
THE TRUTH WAS that Malicine wasn’t terrified of being alone. They were terrified of having no choice but to be.
Either way, it didn’t matter. They couldn’t contemplate this for long with Talon pecking their face.
“Get up. We’re here.”
They swatted his beak away. Dull pain settled in their bones, a memory of crashing into an unfamiliar shore. They looked around and pieced the scenery together. The limestone pavement was a muddy ooze, while coral fossils speckled the area like whiteflies. They were the closest thing to color. Everything else on the island was gray melted together: the sky, the water, the rocks.
The smoke dissipated, so that when Malicine stood up, they could see the dented boat they fell from. Amelia’s glass body had strewn over the rocks a few feet away, motionless. Fractures cracked her skin like spiderwebs, but there was no blood, only shards that had been chipped away from her joints. Her chest moved up and down in shallow breaths. She was so weak, Malicine thought, that anylittle hardship could easily break her. This was the kind of girl who could not survive anything.
“She is still breathing. I checked.”Talon stepped on the small groove of her back.“If she does not wake up, I will eat her eyes.”
Malicine could still taste the bitterness from the words they threw to Amelia before the boat crashed. Hatred had boiled in their belly during the princess’s self-pitying charade. Even sadness dressed itself as a beautiful gown upon her, with sparkling tears and downturned doe eyes. She would never understand how wretched misery could be, a pain so inconsolably ugly it would never experience sympathy. She only reminded Malicine how different they were.
“Leave her,” they said. “We have better things to do.”
Malicine’s wings splayed open as they leapt into flight. With the smoke gone, they surveyed the land with new clarity. Among the black sand were enormous columns of basalt, the rocks separated by joints like a broken skeleton. They stretched into cliffs hundreds of feet into the air, so tall the demon would have missed the tower looping at the top. Their heart thudded against their chest, an instinctual knowledge of that somewhere, up there, could be the Demon King. Their father.
This was what they needed to focus on: answers to a lineage they finally belonged to, rather than the woes of humans who alienated them further from the world. The truth of why Malicine born, and maybe, why they mattered.
Talon’s croaks rippled across the black sky as the raven followed Malicine’s flight. They drew closer to the tower in the distance, where columns of rock draped like a waterfall, twisting like gnarled fingers that pointed to a bloodred moon. The fortress drifted through the air like a massive, floating rock. Thearchitecture was physically impossible: crown spires barely balanced atop needles, pointed arches spiked in different directions. Yet as they approached the entrance and watched its double doors open on their own, they knew this place had been calling for them.
Footsteps on cold marble. Cold air grazing their cheek. Their raven on their shoulder. A deep breath. Every sensation they savored, culminating to this moment.
They stormed the entrance, letting the cold envelop their body like a well-worn cloak. Grand-vaulted ceilings sharpened their corners, their ribs cascading down the roof. Clustered columns led them across the short hall, where stone bars divided a row of windows. They marched and marched until—
An empty throne sat at the end of the room.
Malicine stared at it, struck by the hollowness. The tower suddenly seemed too small. They had already reached the end, and the four walls began closing in.
“You said he’d be here,” they snapped to Talon. The massive chair contained the Demon King’s absence, boasting a deep hard-carved back and legs, chalky white to contrast with the deep blackness of the walls. A piece of work only a carver with centuries of time could afford to assemble. The sight of it irritated Malicine. He was here, yet he wasn’t. So close, and still impossible to reach.
And not once had he reached out for Malicine.
They swiftly kicked a foot through the chair. The throne slumped forward. They gawked at the chair’s crooked legs, noticing that the nubs at the bottom curved in different directions. Their foot was now covered with a grainy texture, like dust. The subtle hue of gold that covered the surface wasn’t old ceramic like they assumed. Instead, it was—
“Bones are much more fragile than you think. Then again, most people do not visit to break my furniture.”
The baritone of his voice reverberated through the room. Malicine spun around. The hallway was empty, but his voice had been too solid to be a figment of their imagination. Their eyes spiraled around the room before turning to one of the vaulted ceilings. A light swirled from a hole inside the stone arch. The portal widened for someone to emerge. First his horns, then his wings, and then the rest of him.
The hairs at the back of Malicine’s neck stood up. His skin was green, just like theirs.
