Mal Shadow And Bone Novels & Stories

Fuck. Something runs past me hiding in the shadows of the woods. I stop in my tracks, scared of death. I can almost hear my heartbeat. My blood is raging in my veins. "Show yourself," I yell angrily. I hear a low growl and see strange eyes focused on me for a second. I scream and fall to the ground. "Alice! Alice! Alice!" The voices have gotten closer. Something is definitely following me in the woods. I stand to my feet hurriedly. My cloth and shoes have mud stains on them. "Fuck," I grunt. The midnight bell rings from afar in the village. What a hell of a way to start my eighteenth-year birthday. I hear the growling clearly as it draws closer to me. My hands are shaking as I grab the dagge

I launched forward, fists glowing, and with a single punch, collided with the shadow. An explosion erupted on impact, blasting me backward and shaking the battlefield. When the dust cleared and I blinked through the debris, I saw the shadow disintegrating into glowing ash, carried away by the wind. “Not bad,” Darius called from atop a nearby cliff, staring down at me. “But let’s see if you can survive what comes next.” As his voice echoed through the valley, the scattered bones around me began to rattle and move. One by one, they fused together, forming a towering monster made entirely of bones.

Mace muttered, nudging one of the dead beasts with his boot, “whatever these things are, they go down real easy when you know where to stab.” I narrowed my eyes. “And how exactly did you figure that out?” Felix held up his claws, now glinting faintly with powdery residue. “We blended the bone dust with silver and fused it to our claws.” “It actually worked?” I asked, genuinely impressed. “Worked like a charm,” Juno chimed in. “If charms involved arterial sprays and severed limbs.” “Lovely image,” I muttered, but my mind was already racing ahead. “This is turning into a warfront,” Mace said, sobering. “Allen still hasn’t found a better way to use the skeleton’s power?”

For a second, all I could hear was the sound of my heartbeat crashing against my ribs. Then the silence came. Heavy. Too heavy. Moonlight slanted through the cracks above, cutting pale ribbons through the dark. Shapes swam out of shadow—walls that weren’t whole, a ceiling torn open to the night, marble scattered like bones. And then I saw them. Bones. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Piled in corners, caught under stone, bleached white and dusted with ash. A ribcage split open beside what had once been a pillar. A child’s skull crushed beneath a fallen beam.

It wasn’t flesh, not entirely. Its body was smoke and bone, stitched together by shadow, its mouth filled with jagged teeth that gleamed like shattered glass.

It wasn't stone anymore, either. It was a skeleton of obsidian glass. Razor-sharp shards of black crystal formed the radius and ulna, floating in a suspension of dark, purple energy. There was no connecting tissue, no muscle, no skin. Just black bones held together by the will of the Void. And it was breathing. The purple mist between the bones was expanding and contracting, rhythmic and slow. Inhale... Exhale. With every inhale, the lights in the cockpit dimmed. With every exhale, they flared.

The voice in my bones whispered again: Decide. Kieran lurched forward. “Stop!” he barked at Mara. “You can’t—” Mara turned her head slightly. “Watch.” Selah’s jaw unhinged. A black, wet shape slid out—not a baby, not a wolf, not human—something glossy and boneless, like a leech made of shadow. It dangled from her mouth for a heartbeat, then dropped to the floor with a soft slap. Selah collapsed, coughing blood. The thing on the stone twitched, then lifted itself—upright—using joints that weren’t meant to bend that way. Its eyes opened.

The throne of bone began to vibrate. "What are you doing?" Iyanla shrieked, her red-feathered wings beginning to dissolve. "I'm opening the pantry," I said. I shoved my bleeding hand into the obsidian eye in the floor. The sound that followed was not a scream. It was the sound of three thousand ghosts realized they were being offered a different kind of meal. The ashen shadows didn't attack Adaeze. They attacked the shears. They poured into the void-blades like water into a crack. The obsidian slivers began to glow with a sickly, bruised violet. Adaeze’s face twisted, her skin beginning to crack into white salt.

The darkness of the room was all around her. The smell was the same as she smelt last night but heavier. She got the mitt and opened the door, and looked in to see the coals on the bottom still glowing red. She knew she could not really go into the unit until they were out completely. She looked around in it and then saw the one thing she was hoping she wouldn’t. A bone. A long human bone. She stood there and looked into the unit some more.

Rain continues to hunt for answers to her curiosity, making it seem like she's found an exceptional new toy. "These are the black bones of beings of darkness with over-mystical powers. I have some bones as this, and I keep them in churches and other secret places." "But you said it was a human bone!" Jace sighed. "Yes, these are the bones of creatures of darkness that have manifested as humans for thousands of years. They are different from the other shadow creatures who, if they die, will turn into dust or smoke. They are undetectable and hard to beat. Therefore, once they are defeated, their bones are like a cup."