Light of Stars [2]

Chapter Eighteen

♕ Red Snow ♕

She tore through the halls and stairs, blue fire blowing away as she ran past the chimneys and chandeliers, her eyes picturing his fragile weakling body underneath her hands. Nerezza ignored the deafening silence echoing in around her, ignored that the only sound that could be perceived was the heavy sounds of her breath and the pounding of her heart equal to the rhythm of her heels against the floor.

There was no grace or elegance to her moves, she was a wolf moving towards its prey, mercilessly. The halls all shifted to the tallest wing of the castle where red blood carpets hanged from both sides of the walls. Nerezza's eyes flashed to match the dark.

Her steps halted. Her blessing, her marking responding accordingly to the flash of rage that poured to every inch of her body.

The door. His door. Her door. Broken, open, a cold breeze of air moving it from side to side.

Nerezza fell to the floor and screamed until her ears bled.

Around her the darkness seemed to respond to her.

The two of them had believed her a fool, the two of them had played her. The prince had taken her one act of kindness and thrown it at her face. She had left him alive, believed him capable of more, had left him alive for a marking, but alive whatsoever, and he had freed her prisoner, had left her castle.

And there would be no kindness left when she her hands laid on him again. No mercy to the usurpers son. No mercy to the general that ran with him.

"Majesty!" A guard screamed, running towards her. Panic and fear all over his voice. Nerezza did not bother to look up from the floor before wrapping her shadows around his throat, slamming him into the nearest wall. His skin turning different shades of blue.

"Were are the rest?" She asked. The guard coughed in response. Nerezza tightened her grip on him, lifting from the floor and taking one step at a time. "Where is he?" She asked once more. But in his eyes she saw no answers. He coughed, black blood pouring out of his mouth. Nerezza tossed him to the floor, his spine cracking in two, she smirked at the sound, and poured her shadows around her own body, feeling as they ripped through her skin and stitched it back together. She felt smoke in her throat, flooding her lungs, and air and life lifting from around her, spitting her somewhere else.

She had done it so many times now, surround herself in an embrace of darkness, that she no longer feared the lack of air in her lungs as she portaled through one place of the world to the other. If she could even call it that. She envied Aubrette's ability, envied the lack of energy it took for her, how effortless it'd been for her to learn. Nerezza might've as well ripped her body in half before she understood that each jump meant risking loosing herself inside her own darkness. The darkness she'd stolen from others.

Nerezza appeared in the base of Exilium surrounded by the familiar cloud of smoke and dust. Guards falling to their knees, jumping away, running from her darkness as they saw the fire inside her eyes, the blood staining her hands, her dress, blood that was her own, blood that other had taken from her, blood that reminded her how weak she was, how much of a fool she could still be.

She did not hesitate to cut their throats as excuses poured out of their lips. It felt like cutting air. No longer a pulse waiting beneath their glass stained skin. She could not see any of their deaths, could not feel them. All she saw was Asher, out of her grasp, and the idiotic stone buried into the skin of her neck. She would deal with that later.

Nez felt as if she were flying, the world no longer endless, no longer infinite as she went through the streets and left the world behind her. A snow road appearing in her path. She would find him, and would not make the mistake of leaving him alive again. Any of them.