kill him, his father would simply use the full force of the brain fury. There was no escape from that; nobody ever survived once his father decided to unleash the whole of the brain fury.
If he did his father’s bidding, though, he would survive, and live the life he was meant to. Fulfil his destiny as the heir of Shadows, and come the time when finally his father’s life force faded, he would take his place.
When a spirit dissolves, there’s nothing left; the body has gone long before, the soul is all that survives. And then the soul is gone too, leaving nothing but a memory.
Sometimes death seemed a better option.
Death was the way Martyna had chosen. Another black-haired girl ensnared in the King of the Shadows’ plans, chewed up and spat out. Martyna. The name was like a curse in Nicholas’s memory, the curse of the woman he had loved and helped destroy.
Martyna had been beautiful in a strong, insolent way, the kind of girl who would always get noticed wherever she went. It seemed as if light shone from inside her. She was a Dreamer, of course, and a powerful one. Over the years Nicholas had found ways to prevent himself from remembering, but memories have a way of ambushing you when you least expect it.
Nicholas was the one who’d chosen Martyna, not his father – and his biggest mistake, as the King of Shadows was so fond of reminding him, was falling in love with her. Nicholas asked his father not to start working on her mind straight away, to give him a chance to do things differently. And his father agreed.
Things went well, for a time. Or at least Nicholas thought they did. He succeeded in pretending there would be no mind-moulding needed, no deceit, that they could step out like any other man and woman in love. It was the best time of his life.
It didn’t last long. The King of Shadows ended up taking control, as he always did in every matter concerning his son. Nicholas’s mother cried and begged Nicholas to stop, to leave Martyna alone. Not to do to Martyna what had been done to her. But Nicholas was resigned. Deep down, he’d always known that their enchanted time, their time to love freely, had to stop sooner or later. It was fantasy, a useless masquerade, to pretend to be a mortal man with the chance to live a normal life. Martyna would never accept shedding her body and entering the Shadows forever, not unless they mind-moulded her. And slowly but surely his father made Nicholas see reason. He proved to him that to destroy a woman in body and mind was the only way she could ever be convinced to come and live in the Shadow World. Nicholas was made to see that his pretence that things for Martyna and him could be different was just a pathetic dream.
The King of Shadows decimated Martyna’s whole family in the space of one night. Between sunset and sunrise her parents and her sisters died, one by one, leaving only the ashes of burnt bodies. The sun rose on a world she couldn’t recognize, a world she couldn’t live in. It was too sudden and too traumatizing for her to accept. And she never did.
The day Martyna died was the worst day of Nicholas’s life. He found her trapped among the reeds, her body floating face up, her hair covering her face, a face that used to be beautiful and that was now a blue mask of pain.
For a while after Nicholas wished he’d been with her when she drowned herself, and that he’d done the same. Her life was over because of him. She wasn’t going to be anybody’s wife now. Nicholas hadn’t given a second thought to her parents or her sisters, just as he hadn’t given a second thought to anyone they had caused death or despair to, but Martyna’s destruction stayed with him, haunted him. He couldn’t stop thinking about what had been done.
Maybe it was also because his mother had watched him do to Martyna what his father had done to her.
After that, Nicholas’s mother was never the same. She refused to be kept prisoner anymore, and she took the only way she knew to be free again. Spirits live a long time, but they aren’t eternal; they will, in time, fade away. Ekaterina let go of her will to live, and allowed herself to fade slowly, leaving nothing