Page 18 of The Crown of the Dark Prince
I was in a wooden box.
The box lurched suddenly, sending me crashing into the side. Pain flared in my shoulder as my body twisted uncomfortably in the tight space.
What in the name of the Gods was happening?
I blinked rapidly, desperate for even the faintest light to pierce the suffocating blackness, but there was nothing. No faint glow from a moonlitwindow. No flicker of a hallway torch. Only the crushing weight of dark and silence, pressing in on me.
I shoved against the wood above me, muscles straining, and it didn’t so much as budge. My mind raced, but circled back to one terrible, unshakeable possibility.
It wasn’t just a box.
It was a coffin.
Someone had locked me in a fucking coffin.
My magic surged, crackling hot and furious through my fingers. I clenched my jaw so tightly I thought my teeth might crack as dampness started seeping into the back of my nightgown as the coffin shifted again.
There was only one person in the kingdom who would dare to do this. Only one person was brazen enough, psychotic enough, to trap me here.
The Dragon.
Which meant only one thing.
This was my final trial.
The magic trial had begun.
Chapter Six
I wondered how long it had taken Clara’s son to realize he was going to die in his magic trial.
Had it been immediate?
Was he dropped into that desert and struck by the certainty of his demise right away, or had the truth crept in slowly—hours passing before he understood the Dragon would kill him?
Did he feel like I did now, realizing that I had already been locked in my own coffin?
Thick, foamy liquid rushed into the bottom of the box at a steady rate, the kind you’d only find in lakes or the open sea.
For the briefest of moments, a thought brushed across my mind. The idea of just... letting it fill.
If I drowned here and now, the prophecy wouldn’t come true. Hyrax wouldn’t rise from the Underworld.
A dead girl couldn’t raise the God of the Dead into the Mortal Realm.
No.
I would not die here.
I would not give the Dragon the satisfaction of knowing I’d been that easy to kill, and I certainly would not let Hyrax and his duplicity be the reason I lost my life.
Shaking off the wave of despair, I forced myself to focus, pressing my hands against the wooden walls, searching for some kind of weakness.
Then, suddenly, the coffin slammed against something solid.
For a split second, the world seemed to hold its breath.
And then it tilted.
