We were both sick.
“I hate leaving her,” John whispered as we stood over Aran’s sleeping form. He pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead and traced his fingertip over her scar.
I whispered, “Same.” Nauseousness made my stomach roll. Separation was unacceptable, even if it was temporary.
The chasm in my chest continued to radiate pain.
We had no choice.
I ripped my gaze away from Aran and forced my feet to walk toward the door. If I let myself get closer to her, then I’d never leave. I’d curl myself around her like a cat and breathe in her wintry scent. I’d close my eyes and pretend everything was fine as I clung to her like an addict with his fix.
Sunlight reflected across the small room in streaks of unnatural gray.
I made a harsh gesture toward the door, and John sighed loudly, the noise desperate and broken. He tangled a blue curl around his finger and gave it a soft kiss. He released her slowly.
Incorporeal clouds of regret and unease hung around us as together we slipped out of the warm, enchanted room, and into the snowy forest.
The air was freezing.
I barely noticed.
I was too busy drowning in cool tones. The world was shades of bland. The once vibrant green needles of the conifers was now a sickly gray, and what was once a rich brown bark was now a sullen, bleached white.
Even the snowflakes were muted.
They no longer glinted as they fell and reflected sparkles from the sky in prisms of colors. They swallowed the sunlight.
Consumed it.
John stared at me with intensity. His dark-brown eyes now appeared black. He asked, “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m not sure of anything anymore,” I said honestly, and John grimaced in agreement.
He gave me a curt nod, and I didn’t wait for him to change his mind.
I released the darkness I always held in check.
Gray snowflakes disappeared into the void and the forest grew quieter as if it sensed the disturbance.
Shimmering black expanded before me as I let my power flow. The dark coalesced into something wider.
Taller.
The fabric of reality trembled, as it always did when it was introduced to a new form of matter. Our power wasn’t solid, gaseous, or liquid, and it didn’t buzz like enchanted technology.
It was silent.
The absence of matter within the presence of a realm’s force.
I tipped my head back and let it flow. It was like taking a deep breath after drowning. Using my mind’s eye, I shaped the darkness into a floating rectangle that was about the dimensions of a door.
It hovered over the steaming ground in front of us, glittering and black. It was a state of high energy.
Cold air filled my lungs, and snowflakes gathered on my lashes, reminding me of the woman we were leaving behind.
We had to do this.
For her.
For all of us.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Hopefully we can get answers before anyone realizes we’re gone.”
John dragged his hands over his eyes tiredly as he half stumbled, half threw himself into the darkness.
He disappeared.
Branches scraped together, as the storm picked up. My hair whipped around my head as frost burned my cheeks.
It was blizzard conditions.
For a second, I hallucinated that the realm was sentient. The storm was alive.
I threw myself through the doorway—I walked across realms.
RJE was our preferred form of travel, but this was an emergency, and we needed an audience with the king immediately. Entering directly into his domain was the best way to get his attention. He would recognize our presence immediately.
John was waiting for me on the other side. He brushed snow off his shoulders as I pulled the darkness back inside.
The door disappeared like it had never existed.
“Let’s go, I don’t want to linger,” John grumbled as he stalked down the cavernous path that we were both intimately familiar with.
Monsters roared, rocks vibrated, and pebbles fell as the cavern shook. We both ignored the noise.
We were used to it.
My eyes adjusted to the new dim lighting. Hellfire glinted off the silver bars that lined both sides of the path.
I followed my twin deeper into the most dangerous prison in all the realms. I smirked as another monster roared.
Its existence was widely believed to be a myth. People were stupid.
The boogeyman was real, and so was the prison that housed him.
The king ran the prison, and in some ways, he was the prison because his powers were inexplicably tied to it.
Since we were his heirs, our powers were also tied to it.
John ran his fingers along the stalactite that hung from the ceiling like he was greeting an old friend, and the rocks vibrated with pleasure.