Starkeeper of the Fractured Crown

Once Mark gets here, I’ve decided I have to stop taking such terrible risks. I have to be more careful, at least until I can teach him how to survive in the shadows like I have.

How easy is it to stop cold turkey? Cut off an addict from the thing they love the most?

I’ll be fine. I don’t need to take stupid risks. But I suppose addicts don’t need their drugs either. I’ll be fine.

I don’t think you would recognizeme now, Ket. Maybe that’s a good thing. The people we were 11 years ago, maybe they were never supposed to survive.

I have to go now, before the sun sets, but I’ll be back, I always am. See you later.

Ket had known more about me than anyone else in the world, but he never knew it all. I had wondered in the last few days if he would even like the person I had become. If he would yell and scream and throw things because of the choices I’ve made towards the Court, towards my own body.

Even so, I suppose it didn’t truly matter. The only thing that mattered now was surviving my mother and keeping Mark safe. Not only from Mom, but from the world as well.

The High King hated magic so much, he hung anyone even suspected of it on the crosses in Condemnation. They starved to death or died of exposure, sometimes they were even stoned to death.

I had risked everything to get those Nightwalkers some food or water. Had traded off important things to get untraceable magical sleep agents from the Impossible Street just to make their deaths easier, and it changed nothing.

No one could keep magic completely away from an entire Court, not even the great Raphael Gerodia. There was magic hiding in the very seams of Therian, the court so fractured, they were blind to it. The Impossible Street was a secret I would keep until my bones were nothing but ashes in the wind, not just for me, but for them. For the Nightwalkers living there even if they never trusted me completely.

With a sigh, I shut my journal and started rummaging through my cupboards. I was sure I only needed Asilos Root, but there was always a chance I used more than I should have elsewhere.

After I was satisfied with my search, I emptied my satchel of the other items I had stolen that day. Gloves, socks, a bowl, and a couple more journals. There was always more information to be found, which meant that I could never have enough journals.

At the moment, I was trying to smooth out the hierarchy in each court. I knew the names of every High King and High Queen ruling now, save for one, but I didn’t have the names of the members of their courts.

Raphael had made it a point to erase all history from the libraries of everyone save for the humans. It was almost impressive how well he had managed to do it, but also incredibly annoying.

Luckily for me, there was a bookstore on the Impossible Street that I used as a resource. It didn’t have much, but the people, after they had come around to trusting me, filled in a few of the gaps.

Sometimes I felt like a failure with what little information I’m able to gather in one day, but when I look around the cottage, I’m reminded that I know thousands of years of information most everyone in the world either refused to remember or were never taught about.

There was a lot of darkness in the past of this world but a lot of light too. It’s all about where you choose to look. Mark was going to see it all. His eyes are going to be wide and while not all seeing, pretty close to it. That was my main goal. After all, the starscannot shine without the darkness of the night.

~~~

Trick

Blood dripped down my face, soaking my clothes, my skin, drenching my hair.

Cole always lectured me about being so messy, but I liked the mess. The mess settled something deep and unrelenting in my bones, but not for long. Never for long.

I looked down the alley as my shadows whispered a warning of wandering humans.

In a few moments, they would come across yet another pile of their own kind, dead. They would be horrified at the dismemberment, at the blood covering the walls of the alley, and they would investigate, coming up with one possible conclusion; there was a serial killer among them.

It was just tragic that they would never know who it truly was.

“Tragic,”my magic chuckled.“Let me out and I’ll show themtragic.”

I rolled my head on my shoulders and pushed my hair back. Not yet. It was too soon.

Besides, there was a little Angel I had to visit. I had to make sure she wasn’t getting into any trouble.

My beautiful, sweet little addiction that I had stumbled across one evening while dismembering another group of men on the other side of the city. Well, a group of men and a couple of deranged women.

Humans weren’t the only species I did this with. Iwasn’t racist. I killed anyone who deserved it, the humans just…they held some truly bad apples.

But her?