Chapter 4 The blinding sunlight
And then it was time.
The portal opened in the center of the courtyard, a tear in reality that blazed with golden light, utterly alien against the violet shadows of Hel. Through it, I could see the surface world. Green grass. Blue sky. Sunlight so bright it made my eyes ache.
The Fae escort was waiting on the other side.
One of them stepped through, a tall male in gleaming golden armor, his face set in an expression of carefully controlled disdain. He looked at our courtyard, at the bone-spires and shadow-beasts, at Vesper's compound eyes and the Stone-Wight guards flanking the gate.
His lip curled.
"Princess Nyx," he said, his voice carrying the particular arrogance of someone who had never been punched in the face. "I am Captain Aldric of the Aurelian Royal Guard. We are here to escort you to His Majesty's court. Please gather your belongings and..."
A shadow moved behind me.
A very large shadow.
Captain Aldric stopped talking. His face went pale. His hand twitched toward his sword.
"Ah," I said pleasantly. "I should introduce you. Captain, this is Ash."
Ash lowered his massive head over my shoulder and smiled.
Ash was a dragon. Not one of the sleek, serpentine dragons of the surface kingdoms. Ash was a Hel-Drake, a creature of shadow and obsidian, with scales the color of cooling lava and eyes that burned like dying suns. His wings, when fully extended, could blot out the sky. His teeth were each the length of my forearm.
He was also, and I cannot stress this enough, the sweetest creature in existence.
To me.
To everyone else, he was a living nightmare.
"He goes where I go," I said.
Captain Aldric made a strangled sound. "That—that is a..."
"Dragon. Yes. Very observant."
"It will not fit through the portal!"
"Ash." I reached up and scratched the ridge above his eye. He rumbled, a sound like distant thunder, and began to shrink. His massive form compressed, folding in on itself, until a creature no larger than a house cat sat at my feet. His scales gleamed. His tail flicked with feline irritation.
"Better?" I asked sweetly.
Captain Aldric looked like he had swallowed a lemon. A whole lemon. Possibly several.
"The High King," he managed, "did not mention a dragon."
"The High King," I replied, scooping Ash into my arms, "did not ask."
I turned back one last time. Eris stood tall and stoic, but his eyes were wet. Maz was grinning, but the grin didn't reach his eyes. Vesper was a mess of fluttering wings and distressed chitters.
And behind them, Nyxara. My city. My home.
I will return, I promised silently. No matter what. I will return.
Then I stepped through the portal, my dragon in my arms, my shadows trailing behind me like a cloak.
And Hel fell away into darkness.
\-———————————————
The surface world was trying to kill me.
Not with swords or poison or the cold disdain of Faes though I was certain those would come later. No, the surface world was trying to kill me with something far more insidious.
Sunlight.
It was everywhere. It poured from the sky like molten gold, reflecting off every blade of grass, every polished stone, every insufferably cheerful puddle of water. It had no mercy. It had no off-switch. It simply was, constant and blinding and utterly, incomprehensibly bright.
"How do you people live like this?" I demanded, pulling my traveling cloak tighter around my face for the fifth time in as many minutes.
Captain Aldric, riding at the head of our procession, did not turn around. "I'm sorry, Princess?"
"The light. It's..." I gestured vaguely at the sky, at the ground, at the entire blazing world. "Everywhere. Don't you have an off-switch?"
"The sun does not have an off-switch, Your Highness."
"That seems like a design flaw."
He said nothing. I was beginning to suspect Captain Aldric said nothing a lot, specifically when he wanted to say something insulting but couldn't because I was technically royalty.
We had been traveling for three hours. Three hours of this. Three hours since I had stepped through the portal and left the cool, comforting darkness of Hel behind. Three hours of sunlight and green things and a sky so aggressively blue it made my teeth ache.
The portal had deposited us in a meadow somewhere in the Verdant Reach, the southernmost territory of the Aurelian Kingdom. According to the maps I had memorized, we would need to travel north for five days to reach the capital city of Aurelia Prime, where the palace, and my betrothed, awaited.
Five days. Five days of this.
In my arms, Ash made a disgruntled sound. He had shifted to his smallest form, no larger than a particularly spiky house cat, and was glaring at the sunlight with the kind of personal offence only a creature born of darkness could muster.
"I know," I murmured to him. "I know. It's terrible. We're going to have words with whoever designed this realm."
Ash sneezed. A tiny puff of smoke escaped his nostrils.
Captain Aldric's horse skittered sideways.
"Did that thing just..."
"He's allergic to sunlight," I said. "It's very sad. Don't you have anything dark in this kingdom? A cave? A particularly gloomy forest? Anything?"
"The Aurelian Kingdom is known for its golden fields and sunlit splendor, Your Highness."
"Of course it is."
We rode on.
\-————————————-
By the fourth hour, I had compiled a mental list of Things I Already Hated About the Surface World.
One: The Sun.
We've covered this. It was awful. It was oppressive. It was, I was beginning to suspect, a personal attack.
Two: The Colors.
Everything was so bright. Green grass. Blue sky. Yellow flowers. Red rooftops in the distant villages. It was like someone had vomited a rainbow across the landscape and called it beauty. In Hel, colors were subtle. Deep purples, rich blacks, the soft silver glow of witch-fire. Colors that respected your eyesight. Colors that didn't assault you before breakfast.
Three: The Smells.
The surface world smelled wrong. It was too sweet, too earthy, too alive. In Hel, the air carried the crisp bite of ozone and the faint, comforting scent of obsidian dust. Here, everything smelled like flowers and grass and something the horses kept doing that I refused to investigate.
Four: The People.
We passed through several villages as we traveled north, and every single one was the same. Ordinary houses built from normal wood. Ordinary people with normal faces. Ordinary children who pointed at our procession and whispered to their ordinary parents.
They all looked the same. Two eyes. Two arms. Skin in shades of pink and brown and tan. No other colours, no exoskeletons. No compound eyes. No shadow-limbs or translucent skin or bioluminescent markings.
It was deeply unsettling.
"Liriel," I said, turning to my handmaiden. She rode in my carriage, her posture perfect and her expression carefully neutral. "Are all surface-dwellers so... symmetrical?"
"Symmetrical, Princess?"
"Two arms. Two legs. Two eyes. It's very repetitive."
Liriel's lips twitched. "That is the standard configuration, yes."
"Boring."
"Extremely."
I caught Captain Aldric's shoulders stiffen ahead of us. Good. Let him hear. Let him report back to his precious High King that the Princess of Hel found his realm dull and over-lit and tragically symmetrical.