Chapter 50 #3
It didn’t matter how much he hurt me. It didn’t matter if ending him would mean my end too. All that mattered was Drake’s life. He had to be okay. He had to live on beyond this hellish place.
A blast of raw power slammed through me as Kalir’s screams filled the chamber, and I knew that I was screaming too beneath the force of his attack, but I wouldn’t back down, instead focusing on the one thing now tethering me to this world and refusing to allow myself to be ripped away from him.
With a surge of power, I threw my magic out of myself in a wave, all of it slamming into Kalir’s spirit in a demand for it to pass on into Hellravia where he’d find unending torment at the hands of Herdat and her army of untold monstrous creations.
The blast echoed off of the walls, bones falling from them to hit the ground and the entire temple trembling around us.
Kalir screamed one final time before he was blasted away from me, his spirit shattering and power ripping from him.
The purple smoke reformed into my flesh at the tremendous swell of my power, and I fell from the air, crashing down onto the lid of the stone sarcophagus with such force that the breath crashed from my lungs, and I was left panting and in pain atop it.
Drake leapt up onto the sarcophagus with me, his hand moving to my cheek as he stared down at me with a wild look in his eyes, the tattoos on his skin still glowing with power.
“What did you do?” he demanded, a bite to his tone making me flinch as the agony of my fight with Kalir still drove into every piece of my body.
“We need to go,” I breathed, swallowing against the pain. I fought to push myself upright despite the way my power kept flickering weakly within me and my body felt lined with razor blades every time I moved. “There’s something else here.”
As if my words had called on it, the heavy presence I’d felt earlier began to grow within the room, the temperature dropping all around us as Drake’s tattoos blazed brighter and fear pressed in on me more deeply than any pain I felt.
Drake straightened, looking towards the head of the sarcophagus almost as if someone had called his name, and I hissed through my teeth as I forced myself to sit up, reaching for him as he retreated.
“Don’t listen to it,” I urged, glancing towards the door as the power continued to build around us and I began to fear that we were already too late. “Whatever it’s offering will come at a cost. You have to-”
“Warrior born in sin,” a voice shook the air which was neither masculine or feminine, somehow seeming like a combination of all things and making a whimper pass my lips as memories of my rebirth danced through my mind. “ Born in the age of lies, filled with greed and lust for all things.”
“Drake,” I hissed.
He stepped away from me, his fingers brushing across the stone lid of the sarcophagus as the ink on his skin pulsed with the power of the lost gods, tempting him closer with promises untold, but I knew how the gods liked to play with the lives of Fae.
And I knew of their wrath in the years which had passed since a lie had broken their faith in all of us.
Nothing they offered him now would be a gift, only a curse set to ruin him and all he touched.
“Look at me, Drake,” I begged, and he turned his head, lifting his eyes to meet mine, though what I found looking back at me wasn’t the man I had begun to think I knew.
There was greed and hunger and a want for power I hadn’t seen in him before that moment.
Or perhaps I’d just been denying that it was there, ignoring him when he told me plainly that he was a selfish man with a heart full of sins.
“You can’t trust them. You can’t believe what they say.
The gods are angry, vengeful, please don’t take this gift from them. You can’t-”
“Can’t?” Drake asked me, his tone hard while his palm moved to press down on the white stone lid before him and the tattoos on his skin flared with power. “I’ve never let anyone tell me what I can or can’t take in this life, little goddess.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat as those words struck at me, but I refused to give in.
“Listen to me,” I urged. “You don’t need this. You have me. I can do anything you want, anything you need. You don’t have to-”
“So I’m to become your creature as you are mine?” he asked. “A slave to your power just as you are a slave to my will?”
“I’m not,” I began, shaking my head, but I couldn’t go on with that sentence because I knew as well as he did that that was the truth of me. “Please, Drake,” I begged, the power in the chamber pulsing so heavily that I almost cried out at the weight of it.
“Your destiny holds great power,” the voice spoke again, and I could see a decision forming in Drake’s eyes which he wouldn’t be able to turn back from.
“No,” I begged, lunging forward in desperation, reaching for him even as the power in this place grew so thick that I could scarcely breathe. “Drake, you can’t! You have to-”
“Return to the coin, Kyra,” Drake commanded just as my fingers brushed against his arm.
The darkness in his eyes captivated me entirely and horror radiated through me at the command.
My head shook in disbelief as my body began to fall apart, purple smoke swirling up around me as I shifted out of existence, fear and betrayal colliding within my flesh so potently that I was choking on them.
Drake’s dark eyes met mine, and I found a hardness there which was as unavoidable as the command he’d just given me, his coldness stilling my heart in my chest and tearing away the sense of security which I’d so foolishly begun to rely on while I was with him.
He had sworn never to do this to me. He’d given me his word that I would never have to return to that hell again and yet my body was still falling apart, the seconds between here and there dragging as I tried to cling to this reality with all I had, desperate not to find myself in that prison again.
“You promised,” I gasped.
Pain of a wholly different kind tore through me, cutting into the fabric of the girl who I’d just been starting to remember, forcing me back into the trap of my own addled mind as I was ripped away from reality and banished to my own personal hell.
The screams inside my head blotted out all sounds except Drake’s voice as he spoke one final thing to me. Words that broke his promise and my heart in a single, soul-crushing blow.
“I was a boy born to nothing and I grew into a man dressed in sin, little goddess. There’s only one thing you can ever rely on from me when words pass my lips. And that’s lies.”
I crashed into the middle of the coin as the sound of his voice and the taste of free air were stolen from me entirely, my spine colliding with the pool of tears which marked so many years of my endless solitude that I’d long since lost count of them.
I made no move to stop myself as I began to sink within the evidence of my own sorrow, the saltwater lapping up around me and swallowing me whole while the feeling of my heart shattering into a thousand pieces consumed me and nothing but my own poisonous self-hatred filled my soul.
I had been so very foolish to believe in the sweet promises of a man who owned my power. I had been so fucking stupid. So insane to think any master would see me as more than a tool to grant their wishes.
As I sank to the bottom of the pool of tears, I didn’t do anything to stop myself from drowning because I was drowning already, the nightmares of this place rising up to devour me one by one until there was nothing left of me at all.
But even then, I’d linger. After the monsters of my mind had picked every piece of flesh from my bones with agonising slowness, I’d still be here.
In the dark.
Alone.
Told you so.
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And if you don’t want to leave Osaria just yet, you can read the prequel novella about Kyra’s mysterious past A Kingdom of Gods and Ruin .