48. Bane
Chapter 48
Bane
W ith great agony came great determination.
The determination to perform one last deed in this life, and to make it a great one—a deed born not of selfishness, nor self-glorification, nor conceit.
Today I would win no thrones, no wars, no homages.
Today I would avenge the one I loved, the one the ancestors pushed into my path, and for her sake I would leave this world a better place.
If Cirri did not live, neither did I, but with my last breath I would bring Hakkon down as well. No more death. No more innocents led to the slaughter.
I would destroy him in her name and let peace fill the void he left.
As if in defiance of my hypocrisy, the wargs tore into me. They threw themselves against my armor, impaling themselves even as their teeth and claws seeked for flesh to rend. My wings hung heavy, a useless, limp weight of shredded flesh and bone.
The world was darkening at the edges, and still Hakkon resisted death, fighting with the same desperation, the same ecstasy that entwined into a single unnameable emotion on the battlefield.
His jaws clamped shut around my shoulder, digging deep, claws skating off the armored carapace of my flesh.
We were locked together, tooth and claw, and still he didn’t die.
He growled words low in his throat as he gnawed into me, a language indistinguishable to any beyond those of us who had walked in dark places.
“You could have been something,” he snarled. “We are one and the same, brother.”
I had once believed that.
Hakkon was my dark mirror, the reason I had done what I had done. The reason I had offered myself to the night, to the primal rage that lives deep in the minds of mankind.
My beautiful Cirri had been right. We were the same. I had been angry with her for seeing clearly only because… I was ashamed.
Penitent, but far too late. Remorseful, but that would not bring back the dead.
But with her death, all shame had died. All emotion withered into dust. There was nothing but emptiness, and the knowledge that I would end this day a dead man, my bright fire avenged.
Muscles screaming, I forced my ragged wings up, knocking wriggling wargs aside. They beat hard, once, twice, and I carried Hakkon into the air.
They were weak, soon to fail, but I could destroy him. I could make this last effort.
“We were the same.”
I gripped Hakkon’s throat even as claws sank into my belly, white-hot fire tearing through me.
“But I tried to atone for what I’d done.”
His breath wheezed through constricted lungs, spilling hot cadaverous air.
Each wingbeat was agony, their shredded lengths struggling to carry us upwards. Into the clean air of the sky, away from the mad horde of wargs below.
The tower fell away; the doors were broken open, and rabid wargs spilled through, parting from the greater mass like droplets from a stream. The legions were nearly overrun, the knights slowly falling under their sheer abundance as Wyn’s blood sigils blazed crimson and began to die out, their power spent.
Whoever won today, I would ensure Hakkon would not be there to celebrate it. That was all I had left.
The warg in my grip let out a high, ululating snarl, thrashing against me, his feet striking out at my legs and opening deep furrows. Blood dripped onto the field below, painting the wargs, sending them into a frenzy.
It took everything I had, every last drop of willpower, to keep my claws buried in him. We would go down together.
But even as my muscles strained, digging deep into his throat and chest, shaking with effort as I prepared to rip him apart, there was a flash of color.
High in the tower, in the narrow slit of the window… a red as bright as blood, gleaming like a flame.
A red the same shade as the tangle of hair wrapped around my wrist, now torn and drifting away.
No .
I didn’t realize I’d spoken until Hakkon started laughing, the sound thick with bubbling blood.
The wargs were invading the tower, clawing and tearing at each other to be first, and Cirri… there at the window, she held out hands full of blood, her face as pale as the dead.
She still lived, and I had wasted my wings on this last chance.
Hakkon snarled, still laughing, and gouged his claws deep into my back, ripping away at my wings. “We die, my enemy, but the pack will live on.”
I thought I made a sound. Maybe I shouted her name. The world pressed in on my eardrums, a dying heartbeat that drowned out everything else, and the only word I knew was her name.
We fell.
My wings fluttered, bones snapping, collapsing in with the force of wind. I felt the snap of the joints, the rip of flesh as Hakkon tore at them, destroying the both of us, and felt nothing at all.
The earth rushed at us, and I squeezed Hakkon’s throat tight, driving him down.
We landed in the midst of the wargs, and I felt the life flee his body, the pulverized crush of ribs collapsing under my weight, his heart and lungs pulping like rotten fruits beneath my hands.
His eyes went blank, mouth still stretched to the ears in a mad, wide smile, teeth red with blood. His last breath rushed out in a soft gasp.
I stretched my shattered wings, leaving him for the carrion he was, and rushed for the tower, for the flame in the window—and instead they drooped, slumping off my back, nothing more than dead appendages.
“No,” I snarled, clawing wargs blindly, dragging myself through the sea of bodies. “No, Cirri!”
A warg latched onto a wing, ripping it free. I ignored it, gaining precious ground to the tower.
And there she was, in the window once more; but she was too visible, she was—
Falling.
Everything stopped, time slowing to an agonized bubble, and all I could see was Cirri as she fell.
Faster than wings could fly, faster than I could move…
And above the screams, the howls, the maddened laughter and sobs and groans, I heard the bone-shattering thump as she hit the ground.
It echoed, a sound like a bell tolling, ringing through my head.
I did not remember what I did to the wargs. They were there, and then they were not; my hands were hot and slick, nothing in my ears but the echo of that thump and the steady heartbeat that was slowing, dying by the second; I pulled free of bodies, stepping onto a carpet of thorns.
They plunged into my flesh, a sharper, brighter pain than any warg had inflicted, and there she was.
She sprawled atop the corpse of a warg, her chest stuttering as she sucked in desperate breaths; eyes wide and sparkling with tears as she stared skywards.
“Cirri, no,” I breathed, but she couldn’t understand this speech.
I knelt beside her, wanting to touch and terrified to cause her still more agony in these last moments. Her hands… I knew what the hammer had done now. He had ruined them.
Her eyes slid to me, and impossibly, a smile stretched across her bloody lips. Her mouth moved, shaping words, and I stared at them intently to read what she said.
Her mouth did not move as someone else’s would; it seemed unfamiliar and awkward to her.
And I couldn’t read them. Her last words… were impenetrable to me.
“Gods, no,” I whispered. “You cannot leave this world yet.”
Her tears were spilling over, dripping off her cheeks; they landed in bright pools on the petals and thorns of the ruined golems. Her lips shaped more words, but blood bubbled up, dripping from the corner of her mouth.
Her body was broken, held together only by stillness… soon that blood would fill her lungs and she would drown.
I would not allow her last moments to be unheard. Not while she still had breath in her lungs.
“You cannot die.” The words snarled out of me, incomprehensible to her. “You made your vows to me , and I do not give you permission to die. There is no world in which you do not exist. I won’t allow it.”
I didn’t realize that my eyes were wet until I sank my teeth into my wrist, a fresh rill of blood spilling over her broken body, and there was no shame in letting those tears run free.
“Drink.” I held my bleeding wrist to her mouth, letting the blackened drops spatter across her lips. “I love you, Cirrien, and you are going nowhere without me. You are mine. I gave you my body and my soul, and now I give you my blood. It’s yours. It’s always been yours.”
But her eyes were unfocusing, and her chest struggled to rise with the next breath.
Agony was crawling over my back, my shoulders; I ignored it, squeezing blood into her open mouth, forcing the darkness down her throat.
She was mine, and none could have her. I would bleed my last before I allowed her to pass on without me.
The darkness was all-consuming, hazing everything I saw, as the wound began to seal. Her lips were smeared with gore, but as I touched her, her chest rose once more.
Another breath, the gift of life, as another sharp stab of pain tore through my neck.
Gods. She somehow still lived, clinging to a single thread of life.
I exhaled, dragging a hand across my face and wiping the tears away. I needed to bring her away from the battlefield…
Her chest arched, shattered hands loosely flopping, and without thinking, I reached for her, cradling her in my arms.
But even as I held her close, I understood it was not Cirri that had moved. She was still in my grasp, still breathing, her eyes closed and cheeks glazed with tears, her heartbeat thready but wonderfully alive.
It was the warg under her.
He jerked, head tilting towards me, and under the milky haze of death I saw the bright jade color of his eyes; even with those distorted bones and terrible features, I saw Miro in the thing he’d become.
His jaws slid open, and a vine crept through his mouth, snaking around his muzzle. It was like watching time move faster, thorns exploding from the vine, glossy black needles that pierced Miro’s body with every inch of the vine’s creeping expansion.
His entire body was moving, the ground beneath him a roiling mess not of wargs, but of more vines. They glistened, red with blood and wet with glassy tears, the thorns and petals of the golems shivering in the dirt where those liquids had touched.
They swallowed Miro whole, dragging his corpse into the earth, and the vines spread outward.
I stood, Cirri in my arms, and the agony in my back grew bright and hot as I pulled away from the thing that had latched onto me.
I turned my back on the churning ground and saw what had bitten me.
Not a warg, no, but blackened brambles bursting out of the earth. Wargs were tangled within their thorny branches, screaming and fighting, but the brambles grew through them, bursting through eyes and piercing mouths.
The golems’ remains were reaching for me, trying to send sharp thorns into my skin and hold me in place.
Clutching Cirri, I backed away, and the vines swirled up my ankle like living things, needles bursting outward and driving through my skin.
I couldn’t fly, my back a mutilated mess. But I needed to bring Cirri from the terrible Fae magic erupting around us. She had my blood, but she needed Wyn to put her back together.
That became my sole thought. Get her away. Take her from the magic.
I tore my foot away from the vines, leaving blood and skin behind.
We walked from the battlefield surrounded by thorns, only a step ahead of their slithering, hungry masses, the thorns lengthening into tiny blades and reaching for me with every step.
I held Cirri close, keeping her from their reach, but it wasn’t her they wanted. It was me they tried to take, and I left more of myself behind with every step.
But as thirsty as they were for my blood, they cleared my path. The vines snaked beneath the earth, and I could hear the screams of the wargs as they were caught in the ravenous brambles, trying to flee and failing.
I passed over a scattering of petals that shivered, sprouting into hungry new vines, and looked up at a warg caught in the towering brambles overhead, his eyes dull and dead, a hundred long thorns piercing his heart.
Strangely, what occurred to me in that moment as I carried Cirri from the forest of brambles was the letter, the one I had disavowed and burned to ashes the night I decided that she was mine, and that I would have her, one way or another.
They knew fiends and wargs come from the same dark place.
The thorns, the brambles, they saw no difference between me and the wargs.
And they were right.
We were things that should not be.
But that meant nothing to me now, because if I had been a man, I would not have been able to carry her from this killing field. If I had been a vampire, I would not have been able to tear away from the grasping thorns. I would have been swallowed whole, Cirri in my arms, both of us to perish on this bloody ground and rot together.
It had taken a monster to save her life.
The thorns hissed behind me, nothing but the wind in their branches, but it sounded almost like a voice, furious that its prey was escaping.
I held her closer, tighter, hearing nothing but the weakened beat of her heart with every step, further diminished with every step, until I finally took the step that led onto solid, unshifting ground and open air.
I exhaled, blinking as I was pulled from my daze of determination.
The open plain before me had been transformed into a camp; the legions had caught up in full. They’d built barricades before the softened earth that hid the wargs, scarred by battle, but still standing.
Knights had gathered behind them, bloody and exhausted, some slumped on the ground, but none of them watched the field.
I turned, and saw nothing but a sea of brambles rising high overhead, and in the distance, the tower stood like a lonely lighthouse on a sea of thorns.
A thousand wargs were pierced on them, dangling and loose, the brambles drinking them dry.
The war was… over.
I cast my eyes back over the camp, looking for one person. Visca was there, a gory sight from head to toe, on her knees as she panted for breath. Andrus, each antler point bloody, clutching his pendant close as his lips moved. Wroth, still pacing, red in tooth and claw. And Voryan, looking all too pleased as he took apart a dead warg, rearranging its limbs as he had the rabbit.
I was glad my brothers had escaped the ravenous thorns, but I needed Wyn…
And there she was, emerging from a tent. The last legion had arrived, and more than half the knights were peering out at the field of brambles with no small amount of alarm.
Wyn herself was a crone, stooped and round-shouldered, and she let out a dusty squawk as I stumbled to her, fumbling several vials.
“Wyn.” Gods, without lips, with several rows of teeth, there was no way to form understandable words. “You must save her. Above all else, save her.”
Wyn peered at the woman in my arms, her eyes colorless and lost in a mass of wrinkles behind her spectacles. “What in all the hells did you do out there?”
She hurried as fast as her newly-old bones would allow, dragging the tent door aside, and my whole body ached with protest as I ducked under and brought Cirri into the dark.
There was a cot for the injured, blessedly empty, and I laid my wife on it. I held a hand over her stomach, feeling for the rise and fall of breath, and there it was—faint, but perceptible.
“It was her.” I touched my wife’s tear-stained cheek, knowing Wyn could not hear me. “It was all her.”
Wyn sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of Cirri’s mutilated hands, the terrible twisted masses of flesh and bone they’d become.
“Take my blood, Wyn. Give it to her and keep her alive.”
The world was becoming darker, too much of me gone into the bellies of wargs and the roots of thorns.
I looked up at Wyn, tapped my bloody wrist, touched Cirri’s soft lips. I couldn’t speak, but I could give everything I was to her. The last bit of life I had left inside me.
“I love you,” I told her again, the truest words I had ever spoken in my life. “Too much to allow death to have you. The ancestors will have to wait for a very, very long time, because you are mine.”
Wyn came to me, a blood-letting blade clutched in ancient hands.
I no longer felt pain. With every drop of my blood she spilled, I felt only the bloom of fresh hope.
With every drop of blood she spilled, Cirri’s heart beat stronger.