FOR THE UNKNOWN KINGDOM | BOOK 1

CHAPTER 14

STRONG HANDS WERE WRAPPED around my waistline in a second, urging me to move, to step back and just stop whatever I was doing before the Castle of Sunlight was nothing but the ashes of a once glorious palace. Yet the startling sensation of the eruption in my body didn't halt in the slightest, even when I was on the floor with someone next to me shaking me, trying to bring me back in control of my shaking body. I couldn't understand who was next to me. I could see but I couldn't. Hostage to my own body that had gone taut, a striking ache made its appearance in my bones, in my head and I couldn't—

It felt like there was a gash in the place I'd once locked everything in, a withered part that couldn't stay that way any longer. I'd sworn to myself that I'd never let that part open and fill the world with unending catastrophe. Yet the locket was small and breakable. And the moment that it couldn't keep contained and unleashed all that power, all those feelings, all the things I'd wanted to hide and destroy, had finally arrived.

I didn't welcome it.

"She's insane!" someone shouted. A male voice cut through the storm in my head.

Fire and ice, wind and water. Burning red and sinful white, dusty gray and triumphant indigo. I could even hear the reverberations of my rattling heartbeat; I was burning and I was freezing. I was everything that this earth was made of and nothing at all. I'd lost control. For the first time in my entire lifetime, I'd lost total control.

"You need to calm the hell down!"

Screaming, shouting, roaring. Silence had long ago abandoned this place. And those few words hit me harder than what nested inside my body. The desperation in them, the fear, the terror.

Amanda.

That was Amanda's voice and she was afraid of me, of what I'd done, of what I could do.

Shaking my head, I opened my mouth to reply that I was scared as well, but then closed it again because suddenly the room seemed normal, my body stopped burning with ice and fire and water and all the elements of nature combined in one crippling sensation. All at once, I'd lost control. And all at once, I'd found it again.

And I could clearly see Denfer now, bundled up in a cloud of smoke, generating waves and sending them toward—

Sending them toward the table that was now a mass of flames and debris. I looked out the window. The rain had turned to snowflakes. They were falling with grace, slower now, not with the same intensity as a few seconds ago.

What had I done . . .

I would think about that later.

I focused on Denfer again.

Tackling the flames, as the king of the Gap World and the king of the ocean as well, he kept sending sparkling balls of water to what had once been a wooden table. I dared a step closer, just so that I could observe him better. His serene eyes glowed with concentration. When everyone around him had lost control, he hadn't. When the room and the whole castle was about to be buried under the flames of my existence and the Gap World to turn into a kingdom of ice, he hadn't faltered. Well, he couldn't have faltered. He hadn't had another option. To defend and protect and save was the aftermath of his title.