Ash and Dusk

Chapter 30

Darkling's POV

Another candle died in wisps of smoke as a smooth gust of wind made its way into the room. It also could have been the same one I kept on lighting for the past hour. The disappearance of the flame brought the study into uneven darkness, striped by the moonlight in rays onto the carpet, the desk, the walls...

I didn't light the candle again.

Past midnight was probably the quietest time of the night. When ink flows the easiest on paper, and the paper shifts quickly from left to right, work is usually properly done when the moon is high on the sky.

Still, tonight didn't seem that productive.

I've barely reached the middle of the stack after hours of apparently uninterrupted work. Only it was, in fact, interrupted by her. By those terrifyingly captivating eyes of hers.

Merzost.

She did it after all. I thought Alina's first encounter with the making at the heart of the world in the chapel at the Little Palace would also be the last one, being that it had almost killed her. And me as well. There was one thing using it through another Grisha and a whole other situation using it on your own. Especially transpassing orders and powers altogether.

Aren't we all the same?

She has used healing power, Corporalki power, all that with just a shrug as an explanation. There was no one in the world who could do that besides Alina Starkov.

And I intended to keep it that way.

I got up from my chair, facing the window behind me. The study seemed too small in this kind of nights, not even the dark painted walls giving the illusion of space. Instead, they were closing in, forming the barriers of my own mind. That's why the window was so large, to be the hole in the lock.

Why?

I kept my sight on a single, far spot above the tree crowns.

Why would she do that?

Her own response was out of equation. I was careful enough not to let my thoughts drift to it, to the uncleaned wound on her forehead or the unbothered look on her face or the way her lips looked when they formed my name.

Permitting a sight, I crossed the few steps separating me from the small table placed near a corner of the room, holding a bottle of kvas and three glasses. I poured some in one of them and took a gulp.

I knew what Alina said couldn't have been true. I knew she was still holding on to the long-dead tracker and the even more long-forgotten sobatcha, to those traitors she insisted on calling friends. Those were the three factors that kept on fueling her to fight me, that still do, even in their absence. With her friends' escape, there wasn't the case of hesitance anymore from her. The otkazats'ya being dead, all she could get from this direction was revenge, something I knew she wanted with an almost burning passion. But this couldn't have been the main reason...

Alina wanted something from me, that's why she saved me. She couldn't let me die, because I was still useful to her in one way or another.

"No!", her desperate cry rang through my ears again.

Everything happened so fast. The metal above my head. Her power intending to cut it in half. The agonizing pain in my body, the moment my arms detached completely. Her cry of pure, unhidden terror, ripping through my ears before I lost my senses. And finally, the certainty of death.

There wasn't any light waiting for me. Not even darkness. Only... nothingness. Like the state of sleep without dreams, this time shaped into a place of eternity. It might have been a never-ending blurred gray, devoid of anything else other than... myself. I was the only one there and I didn't even realized or cared. A whip of light tangled around me anyway, bringing me back faster than I could have blinked.