Light of Stars [2]

Chapter Seventy-Three

♕ The Unmarked One ♕

Her eyes opened to a world she could not recognize. The sky was right over her, so pitch dark than she could have sworn her eyes were still closed.

There was something stuck in her throat and she could feel it. Her hands reached up to touch the small stone, and found it dangling from her skin, breaking apart as she took it between her hands.

Nerezza stared at it, watched the darkness of its color fade away into a soft toned blue, so bright it made her eyes want to close at the sight. She closed her fist around it, holding to it as she tried to gather her breath. As she tried to find her balance.

There was something fueling her blood, there was something heavy around her head holding her down, and her hands... her eyes dropped to watch her hands, at the blood stained blood in them. She cringed at the sigh of her skin torn apart and let the small stone inside her pocket to avoid staining it.

Underneath her, the ground was nothing more than dirt and broken pieces of rock and glass.

Without the wall she could look far beyond the wilderness that surrounded the city, could see the small dimmed outline of Westbrook mountains. Nerezza slowly sat upwards, feeling her muscles burn as she stretched, as she searched for any others that could tell her what had happened.

There was nothing but the sound of the wind, the beating of her heart, the pounding of her head.

Nerezza pushed herself upwards as far as she could and crawled until she found her legs steady enough to stand.

The city seemed a burial ground even from afar. She could see smoke coming from inside houses, traveling up into the sky. She could feel the heats of the fire, the lack of breathing that made silence much more hard to digest.

There were more corpses than she thought there would be, more lives gone than she thought possible. The city had been deserted she had thought, emptied out, at least that's what it looked like as she had walked inside. But now she understood it had not been, all of them had just been hiding, thinking the inside of their homes would be safer than the reality of the world outside.

It would not be long till they woke again, become a part of it themselves.

The thought made her head spin.

Deirdre had left, she remembered as she walked past the outsides of Goldcrest into the center of the city. Deirdre had left and now it would be her mission to find her, that is if the queen even let her get the words out before cutting her throat.

The wind stopped as she stepped inside the square before the castle's entrance. She held her breath, felt her eyes watering at the smell of rottenness.

When she stepped inside she saw most of the inside untouched, and knew the queen had remained inside as she'd made the earth tremble.

Nerezza made her way into the small quarter room, did not bother to clean the dirt and blood off her skin, there would be plenty more on her soon enough, and opened the door without knocking.

Aleena waited for her with a gleaming smile on her lips, her eyes twinkling in dark purple light. Her hair was perfectly placed a top her hair, and for the first time, she saw a spark of something more than anger inside her, the sight made her take a step back.

"Nerezza, glad you've found your way back" She said, moving a chair for her to sit in. Nerezza walked towards it, sitting down and gasping as she felt her body flood her in more pain. "Everything went on as planned I expect?" She said smiling. "Where's Deirdre?"