The Dark War: Book One, page 7
It knocks me to the ground with its razor-sharp claws, tearing through my doublet coat and leaving me with a massive scratch on my upper arm. I hop to my feet and charge at the heinous creature. It raises its giant paw and smacks me down again, knife-like claws raking down my back. I cry out, the pain like fire from shoulder to waist, blood soaking into my coat and shirt and dripping down my skin.
The creature beats its wings and glides through the air, landing on top of my body. A disturbing amount of slobber flies out of its mouth when it roars in my face, its breath reeking of human blood. I gag at the odor, my vision blurring and darkening.
Its love for human flesh is crystal clear, and I’m about to be its next meal. When it rises up on its hind legs, about to deliver a final blow, I dodge its bulbous head and kick it in its stomach.
I struggle to my feet and lunge, finally able to give the creature a small gash on its arm. But it seems to hardly feel it. Its glowing amber eyes fill with rage, and I know that it will keep coming at me until I’m dead.
I continue swinging my cutlass but I can barely give it a nick. It keeps flying around me, dodging my blows and throwing me into the wall with its bulky claw. One of the flaming lanterns falls with me. The Flipperfore bolts over to me and grabs my arm in its mouth, teeth like daggers sinking into my skin, scraping against bone. I scream.
But I’m holding something too. The lantern I knocked down is in my grasp. With my free arm, I throw it at its head. The flames lick at its skin. The creature roars in pain, releasing my bloody arm from its mouth. It knocks the lantern away, but the Flipperfore’s whole cranium is on fire.
The creature crashes to the floor, howling and scratching at the embers and flames. It can’t see me. I take the opportunity, grab my cutlass, and stab it in the heart.
Then I dart down the hallway, my instincts telling me to turn right. I don’t care if the monster is dead or not, I just need to get out of whatever hellhole I’ve fallen into. I keep running, every twist and turn vanishing into more darkness. My body hurts, blood pumping from my wounds. It feels like I’m running for miles, and I can hardly see anything in front of me.
When I come to the end of the long hallway, I trip over a step, relief flooding through me when I see a spiral staircase in front of me. I don’t know where it will take me, and that doesn’t even matter. I just need to get out. It feels like the walls are closing in on me, and I press against them with my hands, following it up. When I reach the top of the staircase, I shove open the door. It feeds out through the back wall of the room of gold.
I stumble into the light from the darkness, charging into the center of the room and looking around. Prince Pinhead is still here, caught in a net, and the orb is still on the peak of the rocky mountain.
“Serena!” he calls when he sees me. “What happened to you? I tried to go after you, but I took one step and this net—”
His mouth moves, but the rest of his words are drowned out. By the time I reach the net, I feel faint. I stop moving, my limbs like jelly. This time, there is no cloud of smoke.
I see myself in a white room. A shadowy figure carries me, and I’m trying to break free but I can’t. It’s suffocating me. I gasp for air, the illusion feeling like reality.
“It’s not real,” I whisper. “It’s not real, it’s not real!” I scream it in my head as the ringing noise returns. I clasp my hands over my ears, trying to drown it out, and clench my eyes tightly to rid myself of the vision.
Both fade. I return to reality coughing, finally able to breathe.
I take a deep breath and drop to the floor to cut the net that the prince had managed to get stuck in. He’d stopped fighting it; now, he stares at me. “You had another one, didn’t you?” he asks. I ignore him, grabbing my cutlass to cut the rope. “I already tried using my sword. The rope is too thick to cut.”
I ignore his comment on the vision. Instead, I drop my cutlass and look around me. If steel won’t cut it, something else must. There’s an emerald on the ground a few feet away from us, the edge sharpened. I grab it. One press to the rope and the strands came apart. I lift the heavy net off of his head and my legs fail me. I plop on the ground to my stomach, finally taking stock of my injuries. My arm is killing me and so is my back. My skin is smeared with dirt and blood.
The prince kneels beside me and pulls a canteen of water from his satchel.
“Oh, please don’t,” I say. “I don’t need—”
He doesn’t let me finish. “Stop being stubborn for two seconds and let me help you.”
I’m too exhausted to argue. Jack uses the water to clean my wounds before he rips a piece of fabric from the end of his shirt and wraps it around my arm. He carefully dabs my back with another piece of fabric, though it hurts much more than my arm.
“Thank you,” I say through gritted teeth, the stings lessening.
Jack gives me a moment, then he helps me up and nods his head toward the tip of the mountain.
I stare at the orb. It’s mocking us as it sits on its peak. As I stare at it, wondering if it’s worth it, after all of this, to defeat the darkness—wondering if it will even work—that’s when it comes to me. These visions, my paralysis, it only started when I came into contact with the darkness in Olovia. If the orb works, maybe we could use it to figure out what is going on with me.
“We need to get that orb.”
“We just nearly died trying,” Jack reminds me.
“I’ll take that chance again,” I say, and I take off for the mountain.
“Be careful!” he calls out as I begin to climb. “I wouldn’t put my foot there if I were you!”
“Ignoring you now!” I yell back. My muscles groan and my wounds scream. But I won’t let this tower defeat me.
Then again, maybe it won’t be the tower. I’m halfway up when I hear footsteps bolting into the room. “Freeze!” a voice echoes. In my surprise I slip, and I slide down a few feet before being forced to jump off of the mountain, nearly breaking my ankle as I land. Without a chance to see who’s coming, the prince grabs my arm and runs.
“Where are we even going?” I ask.
“Anywhere but here!” He skirts around the edge of the room and through the hallway, putting us in front of our pursuers and nearer the door. We crash through the door of the tower and into the trees.
“I don’t think this is the way back to the portal!
“It doesn’t matter right now!” he shouts back. We continue our escape, but we’re trapped once we hit a dead end at the forest’s edge. Jack panics, searching the wall of stone. “We’re done for now.”
Our pursuers’ footsteps catch up to us. I spin around. They completely surround our perimeter. Silver amor, the same helmets on their heads, revealing relatively young faces.
I grab my cutlass from its sheath and meet them. I cannot risk any obstacles standing in our way. If it’s the only possible way to defeat the darkness, we need to go back and get that orb. They’re interfering, so I’m ready to fight.
Jack copies my stance, pulling out his own sword. Then we run toward our pursuers and attack.
9
O
ur pursuers are clearly quite experienced fighters. But then again, so am I. Swing after swing, I beat back the man I’m fighting. “Where did you learn to fight?” he asks, breaking away and panting.
“My stepfather taught me,” I reply with a grin. “Lennard Jones, the most infamous pirate ever to live.” I lunge forward and swing.
“Indeed?” He dodges my swing. “I don’t want to hurt you. The queen requested that you see her immediately.”
I attempt to stab him and miss, stumbling to the other side of where we’re standing. “Why should I believe anything you say?” I ask, chasing him. “How does the queen even know me?”
“I understand why you would be reluctant to trust me,” he says, parrying my next blow, “but you must know that if I was going to kill you, I would have done so already. My magic would have made this fight quick.”
If you have magic, then why use swords?
I pause a distance away, circling him, wondering if he’s telling the truth or not. If I agree to go with him, he could just kill me, anyway.
“I don’t believe you.” I’m tiring much more quickly than I should. My injuries won’t let me keep going for much longer. I eye him skeptically. “How does the queen know me, and how does she know I’m here?” I ask. “How did you even find us?”
The man lowers his sword. “I will explain everything if you just come with me.”
But he still hasn’t given me a good enough reason, or any reason, and I can tell that he’s getting annoyed with me.
Suddenly, he knocks my cutlass out of my hand. No sword. There’s just a block of ice on the ground near its hilt. Magic? But he used ice. Ice. Neither sorcery nor celestial magic could affect the elements. How is this even possible?
I stare at my sword, my mouth agape as I look closer and realize the entire weapon is covered in a thin sheet of ice as well. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. I look over my shoulder at Prince Pinhead. He was handling himself well, but now he’s lying on the ground with the same expression on his face that I had on mine. The soldier he was fighting has fire coming out of his hands. I would have thought I was hallucinating, but it’s most definitely real.
“What kind of magic is that?” I ask, trying not to allow my fear to shine through.
“It’s elemental magic,” the man I’d fought says. “Just come with us and you will find out whatever you want to know.”
I step away from him. “Tell me how the queen knows me and how she knows we’re here.”
The man looks to his colleague, then nods. “When the two of you entered the portal, we received energy signals of dark magic. Unheard-of dark magic.”
“That’s impossible,” I say. “And even if it wasn’t, if it was unheard-of then how would you even recognize it?”
“We don’t know, but I have never felt an energy signal that dark before,” he says gravely.
I agree slowly. I need to know what this energy signal has to do with us. “Fine. I’ll go.”
Prince Pinhead finally climbs to his feet and comes to my side. “Well if you go, I don’t have much of a choice. If I show up to the Tigerlily without you, I’m dead meat.”
“Prince Jack.” The man bows his head suddenly.
“You know who I am?” Jack asks, surprised.
“We know every kingdom in the world, and who rules them,” the man replies. He finally removes his helmet, revealing his features. He looks maybe twenty-five years old, and he has blonde hair and sky-blue eyes. Not terrible looking, really.
“My name is Ian, and I am Head Knight to Queen Iana of the Realm of Magic. It is my job to know about the outside world in case they make their way into our realm. Now come along, Queen Iana is expecting you.”
We hesitantly follow the few soldiers back on the path to Queen Iana’s castle. There aren’t many of them, but I don’t trust them one bit. If Ian truly is going to kill me I suppose he would have done it already, and before bowing to the Olovian prince. Besides, I have never seen a castle up close before, and now that we’re headed to one I’m actually quite eager to see one for the first time.
But my eagerness is interrupted by a wave of perplexity. Elemental magic? How had that been kept a secret from the rest of the world? I mean, I’m sure some people know— secrets can’t be kept that completely—but nobody in Olovia knows. I’m also upset that Ian froze the sword that my mother gave me, and he hadn’t offered to unfreeze it. It’s in its sheath now, hopefully thawing enough that it will soon have a sharp edge again.
I do have another one in my chambers on the ship, but it’s just not the same.
Jack echoes my concerns, leaning in and whispering, “It’s not just me who is totally confused, right?”
“It’s definitely not just you,” I reply. He nods at me.
I jog up to Ian, the prince trailing behind me. “Why hasn’t the majority of the Human Realm’s population ever heard of other types of magic?”
He shrugs, but I see the grimace on his face. “Well, you know how non-magics are. And people in general. They tend to fear the unknown. Celestial magic was never questioned, since it’s the powers possessed by the same gods the people worshiped. Sorcery has always been common, for many centuries. Other types of magic are more rare. A long time ago, there was a misunderstanding between someone with elemental magic and someone who knew sorcery. The person who possessed elemental magic was just a child. She didn’t know how to control her powers.
“She killed a beloved sorcerer, accidentally, and was burned at the stake because of it. It happened again, and again, elemental magic users who couldn’t control their powers becoming criminalized. After a few more cases like that, other kinds of magic have been seen as deadly, dangerous, and unpredictable. Most importantly, it was uncontrollable. It became a sin to the gods to even mention the magic. So in the silence, all of our history was thrown away and forgotten. Even royal families like yours, Prince Jack, were not allowed to have access to that knowledge. Centuries passed, and over time the world just forgot about it.”
Even with the explanation, it’s exceedingly difficult to wrap my mind around. Celestial magic and sorcery are also as strange as elemental magic, but we know about those.
“So you have ice, he has fire,” I say, pointing to the other soldier. “What does Queen Iana have?”
“Queen Iana is quite spectacular. She possesses the lightest type of sorcery magic, and she has a form of elemental magic—ice, like me.”
“Two?” Jack exclaims. “How is that even possible?”
“Genetics,” Ian answers simply. “Or sometimes it can be a gift from the gods.”
“Just out of curiosity, can anyone obtain magic?” I ask.
“Technically, yes. But it’s quite rare. Most people are born with it or are gifted it.”
“Ian,” one man calls out.
“Excuse me.” Ian nods to each of us, then moves ahead to see what his soldier needs. The prince and I share a look that’s part excitement, but mostly nerves.
We finally come to the castle gates. Up close, the castle seems to be a thousand feet tall. I have to crane my head all the way back to see the sun reflecting off the bright white marble building.
The gates in front of the castle are made of real gold, and there are two guards on each side. Inside, we’re met with a gigantic courtyard with two white stone fountains and a beautiful garden surrounding it. There are roses, daisies, and tulips alongside baby pineapple bushes. We walk along the gray stone pathway between the greenery, approaching the large wooden double doors to the castle. Beneath the branches from the garden, the sun is completely visible and shines its warm rays down on us, my hair catching the light and burning even more red.
I’m actually almost blinded by the light. There’s so much of it.
But I can’t look away. Everything is absolutely breathtaking, the flowers more colorful than I’ve ever seen and the water from the fountains sparkling.
“This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” I admit.
“It’s the second most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” the prince mutters.
I look away from the grandeur and at him instead. “What’s the first?” I ask.
He doesn’t respond.
We remain silent as we approach the door. The guards open it for us, and we enter the foyer.
If I thought the courtyard was beautiful, this is something else. There is a ginormous glass staircase in the center of the giant room, and two large windows that make the staircase glimmer like the waters outside. Portraits cover the baby blue walls, and in front of us is a large red velvet throne on the landing. This must be where the queen greets visitors, and in my torn, bloodied, and dirty clothing, I’m completely out of place.
Two men come down the stairs quickly.
“Presenting, Queen Iana Orlendada of the Realm of Magic,” one of them announces. The guards line up on either side of her throne, their swords resting in their hands.
The queen appears, moving down the stairs gracefully, wearing an emerald green dress with long sleeves. She’s escorted by a man who is not dressed in a suit of armor, making him difficult to identify. I wonder who he is to her as he leads her to her throne.
But that thought is only brief, my attention returning to Queen Iana. She wears an emerald stone hanging off a silver chain around her neck, and her crown is golden, resting on top of her long, curly, chestnut-colored hair. Her eyes are ocean blue and she has matching emerald earrings hanging from her ears. Her pale skin is absolutely perfect, flawless to the point she looks like she’s glowing from the inside. She sits down on her throne, swiftly and neatly, and she grins at us as she motions for us to come forward. The man who escorted her down the stairs stands behind her, his face emotionless.
I bow before I speak. It seems like the right thing to do in this situation, even though it makes the aching pain in my back from the Flipperfore burn. “It is an honor, Your Majesty.”
I wait for Jack to do the same, but I then peer over at the prince. His eyes are glued to the young queen, mesmerized by her beauty. My throat burns at his ogling, and I step on his foot.
The queen nods to me, then shifts her attention to Jack. “Prince Jack of Olovia, welcome. Who is your friend?”
She asks him this without taking her eyes off of me. She looks as if she’s studying me—truly, thoughtfully studying me. So I answer for Jack. “I wouldn’t exactly call us friends. I’m Serena. Serena Jones.” I bow my head again.
The queen’s smile grows, the closest I think she can get to embarrassment. “Forgive me for staring. Your features are familiar to me, but I’m afraid I can’t place them. Have we met before?”
“No, Your Majesty.” I’d remember meeting someone like her.
“Hm . . . Well, I’m sure it will come to me later. Now, Ian has told you why you were brought here, yes? I was not sure which one of you it was, but now that you’re here in front of me it is clear which one of you radiates the dark magic that alerted us to your entrance through the portal.” She stares at me with great intensity in her eyes. “Miss Jones.”
