We had no choice.
I ripped my gaze away from Aran and forced my feet to walk toward the door. If I let myself get closer to her, then I’d never leave. I’d curl myself around her like a cat and breathe in her wintry scent. I’d close my eyes and pretend everything was fine as I clung to her like an addict with his fix.
Sunlight reflected across the small room in streaks of unnatural gray.
I made a harsh gesture toward the door, and John sighed loudly, the noise desperate and broken. He tangled a blue curl around his finger and gave it a soft kiss. He released her slowly.
Incorporeal clouds of regret and unease hung around us as together we slipped out of the warm, enchanted room, and into the snowy forest.
The air was freezing.
I barely noticed.
I was too busy drowning in cool tones. The world was shades of bland. The once vibrant green needles of the conifers was now a sickly gray, and what was once a rich brown bark was now a sullen, bleached white.
Even the snowflakes were muted.
They no longer glinted as they fell and reflected sparkles from the sky in prisms of colors. They swallowed the sunlight.
Consumed it.
John stared at me with intensity. His dark-brown eyes now appeared black. He asked, “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m not sure of anything anymore,” I said honestly, and John grimaced in agreement.
He gave me a curt nod, and I didn’t wait for him to change his mind.
I released the darkness I always held in check.
Gray snowflakes disappeared into the void and the forest grew quieter as if it sensed the disturbance.
Shimmering black expanded before me as I let my power flow. The dark coalesced into something wider.
Taller.
The fabric of reality trembled, as it always did when it was introduced to a new form of matter. Our power wasn’t solid, gaseous, or liquid, and it didn’t buzz like enchanted technology.
It was silent.
The absence of matter within the presence of a realm’s force.
I tipped my head back and let it flow. It was like taking a deep breath after drowning. Using my mind’s eye, I shaped the darkness into a floating rectangle that was about the dimensions of a door.
It hovered over the steaming ground in front of us, glittering and black. It was a state of high energy.
Cold air filled my lungs, and snowflakes gathered on my lashes, reminding me of the woman we were leaving behind.
We had to do this.
For her.
For all of us.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Hopefully we can get answers before anyone realizes we’re gone.”
John dragged his hands over his eyes tiredly as he half stumbled, half threw himself into the darkness.
He disappeared.
Branches scraped together, as the storm picked up. My hair whipped around my head as frost burned my cheeks.
It was blizzard conditions.
For a second, I hallucinated that the realm was sentient. The storm was alive.
I threw myself through the doorway—I walked across realms.
RJE was our preferred form of travel, but this was an emergency, and we needed an audience with the king immediately. Entering directly into his domain was the best way to get his attention. He would recognize our presence immediately.
John was waiting for me on the other side. He brushed snow off his shoulders as I pulled the darkness back inside.
The door disappeared like it had never existed.
“Let’s go, I don’t want to linger,” John grumbled as he stalked down the cavernous path that we were both intimately familiar with.
Monsters roared, rocks vibrated, and pebbles fell as the cavern shook. We both ignored the noise.
We were used to it.
My eyes adjusted to the new dim lighting. Hellfire glinted off the silver bars that lined both sides of the path.
I followed my twin deeper into the most dangerous prison in all the realms. I smirked as another monster roared.
Its existence was widely believed to be a myth. People were stupid.
The boogeyman was real, and so was the prison that housed him.
The king ran the prison, and in some ways, he was the prison because his powers were inexplicably tied to it.
Since we were his heirs, our powers were also tied to it.
John ran his fingers along the stalactite that hung from the ceiling like he was greeting an old friend, and the rocks vibrated with pleasure.
As we walked down the winding caverns—thousands of feet beneath the realm’s surface—my twin stood taller.
Power clung to him.
He was stronger now that he was within the source of his abilities.
We both were.
We turned a corner, and a Minotaur prisoner threw himself at the bars next to John, opened his maw, and screamed bloody murder.
My twin turned to him and smiled.
Dimples flashing, he tsked at the beast that had murdered thousands.
The Minotaur went wild.
I rolled my eyes at my brother’s antics. Since we were little boys and had discovered our heritage, he loved to taunt the prisoners, and they hated him for it.
I was indifferent.
Per usual.
John’s steps took on a swagger as more prisoners threw themselves at the bars as he walked past. They screamed, roared, and shrieked at him but flinched when he turned toward them, and scuttled back into the darkness.
If it weren’t for his youth and dimples, he could be mistaken for the king. His darkness formed a glittering cape that hung off his shoulders.
A dark crown jutted off his head.
Similarly, the heavy weight of a cape settled on my shoulders, and I adjusted the crown that dug into my head.
The Princes of Darkness had returned to their land.
Rocks shifted beneath my feet like they were trying to touch me through my boots. The jagged path became smooth before us as the rubble reshaped itself. The rocks were always trying to impress.
“Thank you,” I said as touched a boulder on the side wall.
It warmed and shivered.
I felt the cavern sigh with pleasure, then the energy shifted into pure excitement.
As if a switch had been flipped, the prisoners went dead silent and fell to their knees. They bowed their heads.
“My sons, to what do I owe this delightful visit?” The king’s voice boomed. He stood under arching stalactites, hellfire casting shadows across his velvet robes, as he smiled at us.
Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin.
Power rolled off him.
We were his mirror images. The blood of the royal family overwhelmed any other heritage we might have had. Which made sense because our mother had been a layperson. A human who’d secretly traded goods in both realms.
She’d left pregnant on a trading trip and had never returned. The king hadn’t known of our existence until Lothaire rescued us and brought us to him.
We’d gone from mortals to princes overnight.
Both had their challenges.
The king smiled with happiness in a cavernous prison dripping with stalactites, power, and fear.