Page 132 of Devoured

A black mark stains the field where Lyra and I sat all those months ago, right where lightning once struck between us. The grass is now charred to grim obsidian—the only proof that Lyra and I ever spoke before she died. I have been avoiding it, trying to forget that night entirely, but brutal honesty rolls through me now. I’m sick of avoiding it.

Lyra is dead.

Just like everyone else.

The winds howl, tearing at my hair and robe, but the chill has fallen from the air. Florida humidity mixes with the Realm of Superiority’s breeze as the sky battles between mortal gray and faerie blue. The realm is closing around Castle Severi, and Cora doesn’t care. She doesn’t need the magic of the land when she has me.

Lyra, Nettie, Katerina, Eric, Evie’s parents, Oona, Shepherd, Celeste, Officer Warren, the bishop, Dalla… Names coil like snakes around my bones, tethering me to the ground, to the horrors, to the scent and feel and taste of blood. Hallucinations flicker in my periphery. Every corpse. Every death. Every mistake I’ve ever made haunts me. I’m suffocating in the past. I can’t—I can’t breathe.

With a wild, guttural scream, I collapse on my knees, and a sob shudders through me.

I don’t move for hours.

A wicked rainstorm drenches me, but I don’t flinch. I don’t run for cover. Water pools in crystalline puddles around me, soaks my hair until I’m shivering and my teeth are chattering, but what is the point in getting up?

I am numb.

I am a failure, and I am useless, and I am so, so tired.

My lashes try their best to combat the rain with every forced blink, but it sluices over my face, my eyes, and clings to my bones. Cora has won. This is what she wanted, after all. She wanted me broken. She wanted me beaten into submission. And now I can’t even bring myself to stand up.

Lazily, my gaze flicks to my hand. To my fingers. My palm splays wide on the grass, and I don’t even have the energy to close it. I want to be sick. I want to loathe myself. I want to scream and scream—but I am numb. My reflection shines in a puddle beside my face, purple gaze dim and hollow. Eyes sunken. Bloodstains on my cheeks, my lips.

I should have killed Cora, and I can’t understand why Evander pulled me off her after he helped me. Why didn’t Evander let me rip out her heart when I had the chance?

I stare at myself, but the girl who stares back is a stranger. An empty, miserable stranger.

Everyone in this castle discusses destiny and fate and the stars as if they matter. As if they’re real. But if they are… is this really my fate? Is my current existence somehow worth all the pain and loss of the last six months? Are my heinous powers enough to warrant all of this?

My chest caves in. Weak breaths sputter from my lips.

I stare at that puddle, at my own sorry reflection staring back at me, until—

Until—

Purple.

The purple of sorrow, of tears, suddenly drowns me. Violet washes through my core, through the very center of my being, as memories and truths and lies flood my mind. Distantly, pain throbs in my head. Distantly, an ache builds low in my gut. But I hardly notice.

In the purple, there is a girl. She has a smile like summer sunshine, and a laugh like wind chimes, and I could trace both in the stars. They live inside me. They are part of that purple now, woven into the current in rippling blue waves. I try to grasp them, to clutch them close to my chest, but they slip through my fingers and out of my grasp.

They crash against a violet shore.

They change into the purple screams of death. The purple horror of murder and blood and graves. So many graves. So much purple that it floods my nose now, my lungs, and chokes me.

I am a failure.

A truth.

The violet of standing still, of watching a massacre splatter an already ruined canvas.

I am useless.

A truth.

The violet of broken promises. The violet of nightmares and lies and a forest at dawn. Panic surges through me. I crest the wave of another memory only to smack into the purple of another horror. I need to do something. I need to change it somehow. I hold my breath against the onslaught of purple pain, diving deeper into the memories until I reach the trenches of the misery. The beginning of it all.

A midnight party on a beach.