Brute 294

Chapter 294 

Atasha’s POV 

Or so I thought. 

55 vouchers 

Just when the darkness started to envelope my senses, a pressure snapped around my chest and yanked me back like a hook buried in my ribs. 

It did not feel like waking up from sleep. It felt like being dragged out of deep water by something that refused to let me sink, something that reached into the part of me that had already given up and forced it to open its eyes again. 

Heat surged through my veins. 

Not the familiar burn of my healing when it knits flesh and forces bone back into place, but a different kind of heat that spread through my limbs and chased the fatigue out as if it had never been there. 

My heart, which had been slowing into that heavy quiet, slammed back into a steady rhythm. My lungs expanded without resistance. My hands stopped shaking. 

For a moment, I could only stare at my own fingers, still pressed to the King’s boot, because they felt too steady for hands that had been empty a breath ago. 

I swallowed and pushed myself upright, confused, breathless, and angry at my own body for recovering when Grace had 

not. 

Then I felt it. 

A pull in the air, a faint hum that made my teeth ache. 

I turned my head toward the clearing. 

The floating stone. 

The white stone the size of a human head that hung above the core like a crown no one had the right to touch. 

It was shining. 

Not a soft glow meant to comfort, but a hard light that leaked through the air as if the stone had cracked open on the inside and the core’s pulse had found a way to spill out. 

Thin threads of brightness ran over its surface like veins. The rotation had sped up, and the light flashed in irregular beats. as if it was responding to something deeper than the beasts. 

My throat tightened. 

That was what pulled me back. 

Not my will. 

Not my stubbornness. 

Something in that stone had reached for me. 

I looked down at King Xylas. 

He was sitting up straighter than he had been a moment earlier, one hand braced on the ground, the other pressing to his chest as if he could not believe he was breathing without coughing blood. His face was still pale, but his eyes were clear, and 

10:04 Thu, Feb 19 MO 

Chapter 294 

when he drew in a breath there was no hitch, no wet rattle, no immediate strain. 

He met my gaze, and I saw the same realization there. 

Whatever had touched me had touched him too. 

My stomach sank anyway as I turned toward Grace. 

I wanted to see her sit up. I wanted to see her gasp and blink and return. 

But there was no body to return to. 

97 

55 vouchers 

The place where she had fallen was smeared with blood and shattered flesh, and the jagged pieces of her were scattered like the aftermath of a blast. The fae stone explosion from earlier had not left her wounded. It had reduced what remained of her into broken proof that there was nothing left for my healing to gather. 

My chest tightened until it hurt again, but this time it was not fatigue. It was grief that had nowhere to go. 

I forced myself to stand. 

My legs held. 

Xylas rose with me. When his gaze swept the clearing his face tightened into the look of a man who had already decided what must be done. 

“We need to close that passage,” he said, voice rough. 

I nodded even though the words tasted bitter, because I did not know how to close it, and I did not know if closing it would stop what had already begun. 

We moved sideways along the rock curve that gave us cover, keeping our bodies low, keeping our breathing controlled, listening to the surge beyond the clearing as beasts spilled into tunnels and scattered through the mountain. 

From the gap in the stone, we watched. 

The beasts were still coming. 

Some crawled out on limbs that looked half formed. Some rose in jerking motions as if their bodies had been stitched together in haste. Some hit the ground and immediately turned toward sound and scent like hunting was the only instinct they had been born with. 

Then the stone’s light struck them. 

It did not burn like fire. It did not cut like steel. It sank into them. 

The ones closest to the core flinched at first, their bodies tensing as if resisting, and then their shapes started to change. 

Plates along their shoulders thickened. Their spines lifted into sharper ridges. Their limbs lengthened in uneven bursts, joints shifting, bones moving under skin in a way that made my stomach knot because it looked like growth without mercy, 

One beast lifted its head and released a shriek that sounded wrong even for something born from smoke, and when it turned, its eyes had changed, brighter, more aware, as if the light had fed it something more than strength. 

Xylas’s jaw clenched. “This is bad.” 

“It is evolving them,” I said, my voice low. Hearing the words out loud made it worse 

The stone was not just a marker. 

10:04 Thu, Feb 19 MO 

Chapter 294 

It was a mechanism. 

A gate. 

A core. 

And the longer it stayed open, the more it refined the things coming out of it. 

My teeth ground together. I looked at the King. “You should know something, right.” 

His eyes flicked to me. 

97 

E55 vouchers 

“You know how to close it,” I pressed, because I could not afford him pretending otherwise. “You are the King. You know things no one tells me.” 

His mouth tightened until the muscles in his cheek jumped. “I have ideas.” 

“Like what,” I demanded. 

He held my gaze for a beat, then spoke as if every word cost him. “Using fae stones.” 

My stomach dropped because I immediately understood what he meant. 

Explosions. 

Collapse. 

The kind of force that might seal a passage, might shatter the floating stone, might bury the core under tons of rock until it could not breathe. 

And also the kind of force that could kill the person holding the stone if they were too slow, too close, or unlucky. 

“You need to be fast enough to use the stone and get out,” I said, voice tight. 

“I can try,” he answered, and his gaze sharpened as if measuring distance and angles and the placement of the beasts. “But you have to be ready to heal me.” 

“That is not-“I started but both of us stopped mid–thought. 

Because the beasts began to shriek. 

Not the normal roar of hunger. Not the violent calls they had been making as they surged through tunnels. 

This was panic, 

The sound rose in a wave, layered and frantic, as if every beast in the clearing had sensed something and could not decide 

whether to run or attack. 

The pressure in my chest returned so suddenly that it made me stagger, my palus slapping against the rock to steady myself. 

Xylas’s head snapped toward the core. 

My eyes followed. 

The floating stone flared brighter, and the dark swirl behind it bulged outward, not like smoke pushed by wind, but like something inside was pressing against the opening from the other side. 

Then something fell out. 

10:04 Thu, Feb 19 M 

Chapter 294 

At first, it looked like a piece of darkness tearing free and dropping into the clearing. 

But it did not hit the ground like a solid body. 

It hit like liquid. 

55 vouchers 

It splashed without sound, yet the shape did not spread like water. It gathered itself immediately, pulling inward, rising in slow, wrong motions as if the darkness had muscles, as if the smoke had learned how to imitate a spine.” 

It formed into something that resembled a person. 

Not a clear figure with skin and limbs, but a tall shape made of black fluid and crawling shadow, with edges that kept slipping and reforming, with a surface that moved like a slick layer of oil trying to stay upright. 

It began to crawl. 

Not on hands and knees the way a human would. It dragged itself forward with too many points of contact, like its arms were not really arms but extensions that melted into the ground and pulled again. Wherever it moved, the stone beneath it seemed to darken for a moment, as if it left residue that the earth did not want. 

The beasts backed away from it. 

Some retreated so fast they tripped over each other, claws scraping as they scrambled to clear a path. 

My pulse spiked. 

The shadow reached the place where the bodies were embedded. 

It moved toward my father and Celeste. 

It did not rush. 

It moved with certainty, as if it could feel them through the rock, as if it could taste what the core had already been drinking. 

When it reached Celeste, it leaned over her like a lover bending to whisper. 

The black fluid stretched downward, and something like a hand formed at the end, fingers separating slowly, trembling as they took shape, then pressing against Celeste’s face. 

Celeste did not wake. 

She did not scream. 

Her body did not even twitch. 

The shadow’s “hand” slid across her cheek, then moved to her mouth, and the darkness poured in like it was entering a vessel that had been prepared for it. 

The pressure in my chest became a strangling weight. 

Xylas’s breathing hitched beside me. 

I looked at him, and he looked at me, and the word formed in both of our minds at the same time because there was no other name that fit what we were seeing. 

We spoke together. 

“A Shadow.” 

10:04 Thu, Feb 19 M