Zodiac Academy 8: Sorrow and Starlight

My mind was hollow and dark, all good thoughts lost to a river of blackness that washed them away to an even blacker sea. I was a man adrift, searching for something I couldn’t find in this colourless land of desolation.

If only I could find it, I knew I would see the sun again, it would break through the impenetrable clouds above and I’d remember what I was seeking at last.

I blinked, half here, half not here.

The shadows were calling, and they played with my soul, tossing it between them and taking bites out of it. If only I could remember why I should fight to reclaim it from these demons…

A hand was on my cheek and someone spoke a name, my name perhaps, though it didn’t seem to fit me.

Orion was a hunter, but that couldn’t be me. I was a fallen creature, destroyed by the dark. Hunters didn’t die in the dark, they thrived in it. So, who were they talking to?

She moved into view, a beautiful girl with shadow-filled hair that moved as if caught in a wind. Her skin was deepest bronze, like the sun had left its warmth inside it, and my fingers twitched with the urge to touch her and find out if she could steal away this cold in me. I was made of ice, built of it vein by vein, a statue of frost coming to life, or perhaps it was the other way around. A man turning to stone.

“Lance Orion,” the girl said in a tone full of fire. She was as warm as I’d hoped, her fingers brushing my temple next and sparking a small flame within the frozen wasteland of my chest.

“Come back to me,” she commanded, her eyes full of tears she didn’t let fall, and I could have sworn silver glinted out at me from within two pools of green. “You’re stronger than the darkness she put in you. Come back and stay with me. This is where you’re meant to be.”

She leaned closer still, blinking so that those tears fell, and her eyes weren’t green or silver or any colour at all. They were as black as the vast emptiness in me.

My eyes slipped closed, and I was lost once more, falling, falling, falling, on and on into an abyss that had no end. It was feasting on me, tearing great chunks off with its teeth and I had no mind to stop it. For what was there here except something I had forgotten to seek?

Lost… I was lost. And all the parts of me were scattering to a violent breeze. My name had been the first to go, but there was something more important than my name holding a few pieces of me together.

The girl.

Yes, that was it. The girl was important. She was the centre of the universe, a goddess who ruled me, and I gladly submitted to that rule. She was fury and light and a taste so sweet I would never forget it.

“Blue,” I whispered, or maybe I only said it in my mind. I remembered now. It was her I sought, always her. We had promised never to part, and I couldn’t break that promise. Even if I did turn to stone, I would find a way to walk, to follow her wherever she may go.

“Yes,” she croaked, somewhere close and far away.

I felt her crawling into my lap, and my heavy eyelids found a way to open once more. She curled against me, kissing me softly, her tears making my heart heavy.

“Don’t cry,” I breathed, her pain the worst kind of curse to bear. “Don’t shed tears for a man made of stone.”

“You’re not made of stone,” she said, kissing me again. “You have a beating heart, and it loves me, remember?” She lifted my palm, pressing it to my chest, and sure enough, I found a heart there, beating slow but hard.

“Of course it loves you,” I said. “How could it not?”

“If you love me then you’ll snap out of this. You’ll fight the shadows off,” she demanded.

I nodded, because there was no option but to fight. I would always do so for her. But then my chin hit my chest and my eyes fell closed, the darkness rolling in once more.

It was deeper now, thicker, tainted by the memories of what had placed these shadows here. Weapons designed to drive them deep under my flesh, blades that cut through sinew and muscle, all those sharp edges wet with my blood.

Failure closed in on me, though I couldn’t remember the rhyme or reason for it. I’d made a promise once, and this was where it had come to die, cast to ruin in this prison of my own destruction.

I knew I was letting her down, but then again, I couldn’t quite remember who ‘she’ was. The cracks were forming, splintering through me like a lightning bolt had struck me in the centre. I’d fracture first, then I’d fall, all the pieces lost and impossible to put back together. If only I could find her one more time before I was lost forever…

A hand, warm and familiar, latched tightly around mine. It was pulling on something deep within me, yanking on those shadows which danced around inside me like gremlins. Magic was passing between this person and I, dragging out that darkness, siphoning it from me as a low chant brushed my ears.

It took and took, all the shards of my shattered self somehow finding their way back together, and my first coherent thought was of her. The girl I was here for. But beyond her and all the love I held in my being for that creature of fire and light, there was a cold, bitter reality awaiting me. A world where a curse gripped my mate, where I had made a vow with a monster, and where my best friend lay dead. It was an unbearable world in so many ways, but so long as she remained in it, it was where I would stay too.

I found her in my arms, her face buried against my neck and her sweet strawberry scent making it easier for my lungs to work.

I pulled my hand from the grip of the woman who had brought me back to her, ignoring Stella and hugging Darcy tight.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I won’t leave again.”

“You said that last time,” she croaked.

“I’ll do better.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “I wish I could protect you.”

Darcy clung to me like she was afraid I’d vanish again, and guilt split my heart open.

I looked to Stella, finding her hurriedly wiping tears from under her eyes as she sat just beyond the cage.

“Why?” I murmured, not understanding why she kept trying to offer me anything. Out of guilt perhaps. But not love. She wasn’t capable of an emotion that pure.

“Because you are my son,” she said thickly, then she rose to her feet and walked away, leaving us here alone, tangled in each other’s arms.

Darcy peeked up at me through reddened eyes and I kissed her forehead, my love for her blazing through me. How had the shadows almost stolen her from me?

What would have become of me if Stella hadn’t brought me back from the dark once again? Would I really forget my mate? Would I be lost within this body, my soul taken by the shadows and turned to dust?

If the shadows consumed the parts of me that made me who I was, then I would never return to her in this life or the next. I’d have no soul that could pass beyond the Veil. I’d be nothing, no one. Lost.

I held Darcy tighter, the terror of that reality more horrifying than any death that could be bestowed on me. Was this going to ultimately be the price for breaking Darcy’s curse?

Lavinia was still working within the boundaries of our deal, so it wasn’t like she would die so long as I remained breathing when the three moon cycles were up. But my soul…I’d never bargained for my soul.

I didn’t voice any of this to Darcy, knowing it would only scare her, but it did put me in a predicament. I needed Stella to keep coming to me after Lavinia’s torture, because if she didn’t, I was fucked. I’d barely come back this time even with her help, and if another few hours had passed, perhaps I would have succumbed to the dark, my soul ravaged beyond repair.

I breathed in the scent of my girl, holding her and praying to the stars that they’d let us get through this intact.

A scratching noise came beyond the wall at my back and Darcy shifted out of my lap while I scooted aside to let her open the secret door. The wall parted at her touch and the white rat she’d rescued peered out at us as it sat up on its hind legs. It had two tiny magic blocking cuffs on its wrists, the things enchanted to shift to whatever size a Fae took in their Order form.

“Hello,” Darcy whispered. “Are you alright?”

The rat nodded, then scurried back a little and shifted into his Fae form. A slim, incredibly pale man sat before us with a shock of white hair spilling into his bright eyes, and I recognised him as one of Gabriel’s friends from Aurora Academy. The last time we’d seen him, he’d been working underground at the Library of the Lost.

“Eugene,” Darcy gasped.

“H-hi,” he stammered, pulling his knees to his chest in some attempt to cover his nudity. “Thank you for what you did.”

He gazed at Darcy with a gleam in his eyes.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m just sorry I couldn’t help any of the others. Were they your friends?”

“I didn’t know them,” he said sadly, hanging his head. “I was caught last week meeting with some Sphinxes in Tucana to collect some rare books from them for the library. An FIB unit rounded us all up and brought us here. I was forced to shift into my Rat form and put in a tiny cage alongside all the other Rats down in Vard’s awful, awful laboratory. They kept us injected with some serum that made us unable to shift back to our Fae form.”

“How did you get out?” I asked.

“There was a big kafuffle down there earlier tonight; a Pegasus got free, and when he shifted, he kicked our cages and a bunch of them broke open. We got out through the pipes, but then, then…” He swallowed thickly. “Lionel came after us.”

“Did you manage to see what Vard is doing down there?” I asked.

“He…” Eugene blanched, somehow turning even paler as he glanced around the empty throne room beyond us then lowered his voice as he went on. “We weren’t kept close enough to see much. But I heard the screams, so many screams. He’s experimenting on the Fae who are being kept down there.”

“Experimenting how?” I asked, my gut twisting at the thought of our people enduring Vard’s fucked up experiments somewhere close by.

“I may not have been able to see much, but I paid attention to them talking, listening to every word, every scream.” Eugene swallowed thickly but went on. “He has been doing multiple experiments on Order shifting – both extracting the essence of a Fae’s inherent Order form and then transplanting that intrinsic part of their being into another.”

“You mean he’s trying to change people’s Orders?” Darcy asked, her face crumpled with horror at the idea. “But how can he do that? How could he possibly take something so vital from someone and shift it from body to body like it’s nothing more than an interchangeable kidney?”

“There is a magical well deep within the chest of all Fae which resides right beside our hearts,” I murmured, old biology lessons playing through my mind as I thought back on them. “You can feel it sometimes; when your Order form is dormant within you, and when you sense it awakening and yearning to get free.”

“You mean the urge to shift?” she breathed, and I nodded.

“That chamber exists inside each of us, but it isn’t some organ that can simply be transplanted, its woven into the very fabric of our beings. It’s a vital part of us, linked to our souls themselves, and when we die, it fades away as our Order form goes with us, following us beyond the Veil.”

“Which is why Vard cuts it out of Fae while they are still living,” Eugene said darkly. “While their Order form is held within that chamber with the use of Order suppressant and their Fae bodies are bound to the table he dissects them on. So far as I have heard, no one has survived more than a few minutes with their Order form removed, nor after having a foreign Order form inserted into them. But he is voracious in his determination to make it work. He won’t stop. And the false king has visited to inspect his progress enough times to let me know that he’s keen for the experiments to succeed too.”

I shuddered at the thought of that. “No doubt he plans to force all Fae to become the Orders he’s deemed most worthy in his plans to eradicate those he’s named lesser,” I growled, and Darcy gripped my hand tightly in defiance of that.

“He also seems keen to see if Fae can survive without any Order form at all, and I fear…” Eugene shook his head, his arms curling tighter around his knees like he was trying to hide himself from the truth.

“What is it?” Darcy urged kindly, prompting him to go on.

“I fear that he plans to do that to the lessers. If he can find a way for us to survive the procedure, then he can simply cut our Order forms out of our bodies, remove them entirely and end the problem he has perceived with those of us he doesn’t favour.”

“That’s…surely he can’t be planning something so awful?” Darcy gasped, though the dark look I exchanged with her let me know that she knew that Lionel would do just that if he could, tyrannical son of a bitch that he was.

“You said Vard was doing multiple experiments?” I asked, my gaze fixed on Eugene’s pale face and he nodded slowly.

“It was hard to glean precisely what the other work he was doing entailed, but…there were such screams coming from those subjects. Screams that went far beyond terror and agony and became something else.”

“Was he torturing them?” Darcy asked but Eugene shook his head.

“I heard him saying that he was making them into something more than they were. There was talk of genetic engineering and using the DNA from creatures of the wilds to help create new soldiers for his army. Whatever he was doing to those Fae, I don’t think they are themselves anymore. I think he was taking the essence of who they’d once been and stretching them into some new and awful mould. They were begging for death before their cries turned to roars…I think he was having more success with whatever he was doing to them too.”

“By the stars,” I breathed, scoring a hand over my face as I took in the atrocities that Lionel was participating in already. What fresh hell might he accomplish if he won this war and managed to maintain his rule over Solaria indefinitely? The thought alone was enough to make bile rise in my throat.

“We’ll get you out of here,” Darcy promised. “Maybe you could escape through the pipes again when it’s safe to try.”

Eugene shook his head. “Lavinia was taunting us all in the woods before you got there. She said the pipes are full of shadow now, that there’s no way back in and no way out.”

“We’ll find a way. And we’ll keep you hidden until then,” Darcy swore.

“Thank you,” Eugene squeaked. “And I hope you don’t mind, but I made a little nest out of your things.” He pointed to the book, the Guild Stone, and a few strips of an old ‘Long Live Lionel Acrux’ t-shirt I’d had half whipped off of me by Lavinia which must have ended up in there somehow. “I’ll keep your treasures nice and safe. You can count on me.”

He shifted back into a rat and jumped on top of the items, sitting there vigilantly, and I glanced at Darcy as she slid the door shut.

“How did you get him away from Lionel and Lavinia?” I asked.

“I fought off Lavinia’s summons,” she revealed, and my heart ticked faster.

“You did?” I asked hopefully, taking her hand, and pulling her closer.

She smiled as she nodded. “And I think I can do it again.”

“You will do it again. And again, and again, and a-fucking-gain.” I kissed her hard and she laughed, the sound so damn rare these days that it almost hurt to hear it. “Now we just need your Phoenix to wake the fuck up.” I pressed my face against her chest. “Get out here, you little shit.”

“Why don’t you try one of your motivational quotes of the day on it?” Darcy teased.

“You’re a useless bird that couldn’t light a match, let alone start a forest fire,” I growled, jabbing her in the side, and she laughed again. “Your Phoenix is almost as stubborn a student as you were.”

“Hey, I was a delight to teach,” she said with a grin.

“You were a delight to punish,” I corrected darkly, and she bit down on her full bottom lip.

“A delight’s still a delight,” she said airily, and I laughed, dragging her down into my lap and nipping at her throat.

“Bite me like you mean it,” she encouraged breathily.

“Only because I want to taste that fire in you,” I said against her skin before releasing my fangs and sinking them into her. And there it was, her power deep and hidden away but still burning.

My queen’s fight wasn’t over yet.