Queens & Liars-Sequel to Three Broken Kingdoms (Completed)

Chapter Fifty: The Wolf

It was cold in here. Cold and dark.                     

She was afraid. She'd always been brave before. She'd marched to war without flinching all for the mountain queendom she loved. Fought for years and years in a desperate, hopeless attempt to save it. Stared death in the eye a thousand times. She'd always been brave before.                        

Now she was afraid. Terrified. She'd escaped death so many times she started to think she was immortal. Nothing could kill her. She would keep escaping by the skin of her teeth, keep dodging doom. She'd become fearless. Rose had forgotten that she could die.                                    

But everyone could die. She realised that now. Soon she would be dead too. She knew this because in the feverish hallucinations of the dark she saw Mia—her long-dead best friend who had died in the first war with Kallias. Just the barest wisps of her. She heard her too-soft, far-away whispering.                                        
And she was afraid. Afraid of the deep, fathomless darkness. The void that awaited her. For the first time she started to understand Jasper Merson. She had always quietly wondered how he had done it. How he could turn his back on everything—his family, his cause. She was beginning to understand now. Fear of the void consumed them all.

It was coming closer, she knew. The void. It was in the corners of the cell. The silence of the dungeons. The creeping, distorted memories of Mia. Soon it would swallow her whole. While she waited for it to come, she tried to think of happy things. Her mother, her best friend. Myra. The glory of her coronation. The pride of the name Isidore. The glint of sun on dewdrops. Light sifting through windows. But the memories slipped away from her, like dreams she could never quite remember, and all that was left was the deep, fathomless void.                         
It was cold  in here. Cold and dark.

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Rose

There had been light. A sliver of it, but real. Not some fever delusion or dream. Real light, a glimpse of it caught as they dragged her out of the dungeons. Then all the light had been snuffed out as the pommel of a sword connected with her head. She woke up hours later, dazed and with a severe headache, in a prison wagon.

It had been dark then. Not cold though, but boiling hot. She had wondered if they were trying to burn her alive at first, but then she realised it was simply the heat of the desert. Given she was born in icy Miras, it had been unbearable. She was getting used to it, though—slowly. At least it wasn't true desert. Dorgon was in the Northern State, which was still hot but nothing compared to the Midlands.

Minutes or days or weeks or eternities later, they had shipped her off in a boat. She had caught another glimpse of it then—the sun, just the barest sliver.
It had been cooler on the boat, and she could tell by the gentle bobbing of water that she was in the Asrieli Strait.

At first she had wondered if they were heading to Miras, if the rebels had paid a ransom to have her back. But then her thoughts turned darker. Had the Empress taken back Miras  and was finally putting her on parade? Was she to be a puppet, a sliver in her head, spreading lies? Or was she going to be executed at last?

The gentle bob of the waves eventually faded and she was shoved back into a prison wagon. A third sliver of the sun escaped—and Rose had a terrible premonition that the third would be the last.

When they took the blindfold off her eyes, all there was was darkness. No more glimpses of light. No more slivers of sun. Instead, only heavy chains. Rose suddenly remembered the last moments of her freedom—fighting to the end, struggling against guards and manacles, fighting with a broken blade until they at last surrounded her. She had gone down with fury blazing in her eyes, gone down swinging and fighting and never giving in, Mia's memory burning in her, her oath to the valkyries screaming in her head, telling her to never give in.