Twilight never rose in the Black Vale.
The sky was a bruise-colored dome stretched too tightly over dead earth. Berith's horse reared, its flanks quivering, nostrils flaring at the scent of something it couldn't name. The skeletal trees bent like sinners' mid-confession.
The deeper Berith went, the more the devil inside his chest clawed, tasting the air like a hound nearing blood.
He dismounted from his horse before it could stop. His boots hit the rotted soil, stumbling forward as his eyes caught the glimpse of her. His cursed blood had already begun to burn with the memory of her name.
Marcella.
She was cradled in the roots of an ancient gnarled tree, half-sunken into the earth as if it tried to claim her in a bed of damp moss and ash. Her silver gown now clung to her, smeared with blood, dirt, and old magic. Her limbs were limp, draped like a broken doll's. Her silver hair sprawled around her head in snarled tangles, matted with soot and blood.
