She should not have loved him, and he should not have dared to love her. The woman had said that-and then she died. That was one of the emotions he still knew. And when he did, no one noticed that he had become hardly more than a marionette, struggling to speak, to act past the shackles on his mind. He was forced to participate in it by the man who had ordered the slaughter of that lovely woman. There was still a real world beyond the shadows. Yet he had not saved her, and he knew there was no one coming to save him. A prince would not have allowed that woman’s head to be cut off. He could not remember if the thing was the prince, or if he himself had once been a prince. There was nothing but that moment, again and again and again-and that thing pacing nearby, waiting for him to break, to yield, to let it in. There was nothing in the darkness beyond the moment when that woman’s head thudded to the ground. It was the fault of the man on the glass throne, who had ordered that guard’s sword to sever flesh and bone. It was not her fault, even if he could not remember her name. Lost, as if the beheading were her fault.Ī lovely woman with delicate hands like golden doves. There had been people he loved in that room of red marble and glass the woman had lost her head. He could recall horror and despair-only because of the solitary moment that kept interrupting the blackness like the steady beat of a drum: a few minutes of screaming and blood and frozen wind. Then he’d forgotten the names of the others who had meant so much to him. That was the first thing he’d forgotten when the darkness enveloped him weeks or months or eons ago. Some invisible barrier still separated them, but the wall crumbled a little more every time the thing stalked along its length, testing its strength. It was not of his world, and had been brought here to fill him with its primordial cold. It was ancient, and cruel, and paced in the shadows leashing his mind. There was a thing waiting in the darkness.

Queen of shadows series