Chapter 102: The One Who Knows
>>Aelin
The air was thick with panic—screams, wails, the thunder of feet slamming stone floors. I pushed through them all, my heart racing like a war drum.
"Princess!" Ariston’s voice bellowed behind me, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.
Bodies pressed against each other in blind desperation, and his voice grew more distant with every second. I glanced back only once—just long enough to see him being shoved sideways by the tide of people trying to get away.
"Princess! Don’t! Wait!!" He reached for me, fighting the crowd like a man caught in a rising flood, but I had already surged ahead.
I was smaller. Faster. And I had something no one else in this stampede had—a direction that led toward danger, not away from it.
I turned a sharp corner, and suddenly, the mass of people thinned. Only a few still ran, and they were headed the opposite way. A demon noble, his crimson cloak shredded and face bloodied, nearly slammed into me. One of his buck horns was broken somehow. He might have fell into the stampede.
He didn’t even look back. Just kept running.
That was when I knew. I was truly going somewhere no one else wanted to go.
The familiar corridors of the palace warped under the pressure of disaster. The air was filled with dust and flickering torchlight, shadows darting like panicked spirits. The abandoned wing lay ahead—silent, detached, forgotten. But Seraphine was in there. She had no idea what was happening.
Or maybe she did. She could still see it from the window. But would she be able to run for her life?