[Warning: violence and gore, profanity]
The room was dark. The fire played on the walls, making shadows that ravaged and devoured one another with the shift of the flames. Their illumination didn’t seem right somehow. They only fed the black, turned it into tar. Isn’t light supposed to drive the night away?
I hurt everywhere. I’ve been flung, I know that, cracked against the stone again and again. I can’t feel my legs. The fire flares, and shows the corpses of the people I brought here. Demagul’s body is bent in half, a stalactite carved through him as though he were some macabre hunk of meat on a shish kabob. Aleeane slumps in the corner, her eyes vacant, a trickle of blood running from her nose and a hunk of iron thrust through her temple. Anysu and Sacho lay dead on a velnishi’s nest. The blackened spear was meant for her, but he jumped in between.
It got both of them.
Why aren’t they fading into the Realm?
“Did you think you mattered?”
The voice draws at me. Not alluring. More like a fish caught on the end of a hook, the barb stuck in its gills. It knows it’s made a mistake. It knows it took the bait. It’s being reeled in and in and the pain gets sharper and sharper, but there’s nothing it can do. Its fate is sealed.
“Did you think that anything you did, mattered?”
The footsteps get closer. I can’t look. I am a coward and I cannot look. I can’t draw the breath to cry. I think my ribs are broken. I turn my head and I see Asmo’s face not a foot from mine. His skull is crushed, one of his eyes hanging from its socket, the tendrils barely clinging. It only took a single blow. He didn’t see it coming.
“You are nothing.” The words hit me like hammers because the voice is one I love. “You were never anything. Did you truly believe, in your arrogance, that you could defeat me? I am immortal. I am eternal. I am fueled by the hatred that courses through this world like blood. You knew that. Of course you knew that. And yet you dragged them here, brought them forth like sheep.”
Hands clutch at my collar. They drag me up the wall and I scream as pain rips down my spine. The sound echoes through the cave, coming back to me, mocking me. She smiles and tilts her head to the side as the light plays off the markings on her skin. She inhales as though my agony is her ambrosia. She smells of burning hair and flesh from the spells they flung before they died.
“Thank you, Evirea. Thank you. This is just the beginning of it. Your sacrifice, my initiation. This is the first altar upon which their blood will pour and I revel in it. I bathe in it. Without you, this never would have happened.”
She leans forward. She kisses my cheeks, one at a time, and then my brow. Her lips are ice. “A part of me will miss you. A part of me will miss watching you scramble desperately. You always knew, from the beginning. It was hopeless and you knew it. But you couldn’t admit it to yourself. And here you are. This place, your tomb. I shall mark it for you. ‘Here lies Evirea Pomolle. She was never very clever.’”
I will not cry. I feel the tears on my cheeks, hot, searing. I am not worthy of them. Somehow I lost my way, I lost it all, and there is no one here in the darkness to blame but myself.
The fire flickers. Movement from behind her, as she holds me to the wall, as she presses her fingers against my shattered bones and revels in my shrieking. I can barely see him through my tears, but I know he is dying. I know that as the blood flows from the dagger in his belly his face is fixed and determined.
I know there is a spell forming on his lips.
And there is light. Pure light, white light, blasting through the corridor. Roled lets it fly with his last breath, his knees buckling, eyes lidding as he collapses to the floor. It barrels forward, pounding through her back, erupting through her chest in a spray of charred organs. The ruins of her heart.
She clings to me. The markings on her flesh dissolve away, and we lean against the wall as we crumple. The malice leaves her face as the Ja’uh melts from the pupil of her eye.
Allena’s lips part in surprise, then in horror. I see the tears trickle down her cheeks, and with her words she tears my heart out as well.
“Why didn’t you save me?”
And the darkness consumes us.
____________________________________
I wake screaming. I feel myself fall onto the bed, and then I roll off of it, crawling on hands and knees in a brief panic. The nightmare’s grip is a powerful one. I reach the water basin and splash the coldness on my face again and again, gasping, letting it make me numb.
My fingers grip the sides of the desk tight enough to leave dents in the wood with my claws. As I stare into the mirror, I catch my breath, and then I force myself to slow down alongside it.
My reflection stares back at me from the foggy, cracked mirror. I still looks terrified, my eyes wide and bloodshot, my chest moving in shuddering heaves. I compose those features like soldiers on a battlefield. I glare at the mirror and bare my teeth in defiance.
“Bullshit,” I hiss. “It’s all bullshit and you know it.”
There is no answer, but I feel that familiar heat stirring inside of me. I keep going.
“There’s no way you’re letting this happen. Nobody, not Bazaal, not Rigwyn, not anybody is going to take them away. And they sure as fuck aren’t going to take her away.”
I embrace the rage. My face is curled into a snarl, and it only grows more contorted when I grin. “You’re going to kill that mother fucker,” I whisper harshly. “You’re going to make him buuuuuurn, baby. You’re going to pull him out of her strand by strand and watch as they end him in the prison of some corpse. You’ll watch as they rain damnation down and sear his soul out of this existence.”
I straighten. Grabbing my shirt from a hook on the wall, I yank it over my shoulders so viciously I hear them pop. I don’t bother with the buttons. I cast one more look at the mirror and I thrust my finger at it, my words dripping like molten lava from my lips.
“He can’t have her.”
I leave the room, slamming the door behind me.