[ONGOING: New Chapters Every Sunday]
Kingsblade. Rise of the Raven Queen.
Her kingdom is in ashes.
She's supposed to save it, but there's one problem.
She doesn't remember she's the queen.
She doesn't remember anything at all.
With war looming on...
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Adeniyi, it turned out, would have to wait.
Shadow Sickness had only struck once before, and Leyrl wasn't prepared for the fallout then. She certainly wasn't prepared for the fallout now.
Unlike ordinary illnesses, Shadow Sickness fed on fear. It began with a fever, then a chill would spread from the bottoms of the feet through the rest of the body until the heart itself slowed and eventually went cold.
If it progressed enough, its carrier became a Fallen One. The only solution then was to kill the afflicted and hope the soul could still find peace.
Since it was a sickness of the heart, the only way to fight it was in the spiritual realm. Leyrl was the only known Seer with the Gift of Discernment, so it fell on her to help the ill.
They had already lost one cadet. A young little thing from House Hen. He'd seen nine winters... almost ten. Leyrl tried not to dwell on it.
While Lady Diana dashed about, rewriting memories of Chilo even having existed out of the children's minds, Leyrl had entered to do battle with the demons that held them captive.
It was on her eleventh patient that Leyrl began to wonder if she was going to hold up. As she placed her hand over a young Aikerlish girl's heart, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and felt herself plunge deep into the darkness.
When she opened her eyes, the scene around her was a desert. Although there was no night or day in this land, it felt like midnight. Shadows lay thick blanket over the sky above her, and she could feel clouds of it swirling around her, tugging on her sleeve, and brushing its fingers across her cheek.
"Get away from me," she growled. "Show me the heart! I am the Daughter of Elindir, and I demand to see the door!"
Her voice seemed to die in the empty, open air of the desert. She took a step forward.
Odd. Usually Aikerlish soulscapes were forests. She must've grown up on the border. Thrab, which lay to the south, was almost entirely covered in desert. The one Leyrl now found herself in stretched in all directions, and the sand shifted beneath her feet as she walked forward.
Leyrl summoned a sword into her hand, and she watched as a fiery blade appeared out of thin air. It took longer this time. The first she'd summoned took only three seconds. This one took a full minute. She felt her legs wobble, and her mind spun.
I don't know how many more times I can do this.
Her physical body, she knew, sat on the edge of a cot in Lady Diana's infirmary. Hisashi had been the one to sit beside her this time. Both he and Marc had agreed it would be too dangerous to leave her alone and vulnerable while she roamed the spirit realm. Especially with Lady Diana so close.
She waved the sword ahead of her, and she sighed with relief as the shadows parted.
"Welcome, holy servant of the Light," a voice snickered from the darkness. "Come to claim what's yours?"
