Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The dark consumed us but it had nothing on the oppression caused by the weighted power in the heart of the mountain.
Vesper led the way onward through the endless tunnels. We had to have been trailing through them for hours already and I could tell the caverns made her uncomfortable.
But for me, being beneath the ground was as natural as breathing.
My home had been carved into rock and soil, my childhood memories rife with explorations of tunnels not unlike these.
Though of course my years of captivity beneath the ground had tainted the comforting feeling I’d once found in places such as this.
Not that I thought this particular cavern could have been considered homely under any circumstance.
It was dank, and the stench of dark magic fouled the air even if I couldn’t communicate with it the way my dark-hearted companion did.
The Faelights we’d cast to allow us to see showed little beyond the slate-grey walls around us, so my focus fell all too often on the way my sweet spectre moved.
She was a born seductress but it wasn’t simply the sway of her hips or the curves of her body which held my attention. It was the way she prowled towards danger without so much as flinching.
“Were you born without fear or was it beaten out of you?” I asked her, though the answer was likely to deepen my hatred for the people she claimed as her own.
“Fear is a pointless emotion unless being actively used to avoid death,” she murmured, not looking back at me, her pale pink hair brushing the base of her spine as she tilted her head to look up at the tunnel’s roof.
It was more words than I’d gotten out of her in the last hour and I knew it was because the cries of the ether were close to deafening her, even if she hadn’t spoken of them.
They were calling out to her so powerfully that I could have sworn I heard them myself now, even without my magic connecting to hers.
“You’re certain this is the right thing to do?” I asked, not for the first time and she ignored me, not for the first time either.
“You should stay here.”
Vesper didn’t so much as glance at me as she strode around a corner and out of sight, leaving me to slam into the air shield she’d erected to stop me from following.
Bitch.
“I thought we were in this together?” I yelled, my voice echoing through the caves and hiding the sound of her footsteps as they disappeared ahead of me. By the time the echoes had faded, so too had any further sign of her.
I cursed her, slamming my fist against the unrelenting air shield, wondering why the fuck she’d just abandoned me here after bringing me so far.
There was only one answer which came to me and I snarled at the thought. Was she trying to protect me? After everything that had led us to this place, was she truly choosing this moment to attempt self-sacrifice in place of following her own selfish desires?
I snarled, striking the shield once more before turning my focus to the wall at my right and placing my palm against it. Magic poured from my fingertips and the stone sighed as it melted beneath my touch, becoming sand which spilled down to the ground, creating a path for me to follow.
Except, when I took a step closer to it, I struck solid air again, Vesper’s shield tightening like a snare as if she’d known what I would do and had already instructed her magic to thwart me.
The mountain groaned, rocks shifting and re-settling, the change I’d made to this ancient infrastructure causing unknown stress to the make-up of this entire place. It had been foolish to do such a thing but I’d long since accepted that this woman made a fool of me regularly.
I considered my options. I was powerful, but even my own ego had limits and I could admit that I would burn out very quickly if I tried to wield my earth magic over an entire mountain. And the both of us would be crushed down here long before I could get us free of it.
I dropped to one knee, placing a palm to the ground, reaching out with my magic to–
Vesper screamed somewhere in the tunnels ahead and I shoved myself upright, her name tearing from my lips.
I threw my weight at the air shield then threw my magic at it when it failed to shatter.
Vines slammed into the invisible wall, pounding on it with the full force of all I was, cracks forming across its surface as I yelled her name again.
The sound of her voice echoed away from me through the tunnels and her scream was cut short abruptly.
The air shield shattered but not because of me. Her hold on the magic had been fractured.
“Vesper!” I roared, breaking into a sprint, diving around the turn she’d taken and only stalling for a moment as I found two more paths awaiting me.
I didn’t know which she’d taken but my magic was roaring beneath my skin and I only had to brush my fingers against the closest wall to feel the echoes of her passage and know she’d taken the righthand path.
I ran down it, my boots a continuous thunderclap which resounded off of every wall.
I took turn after turn, my Faelight barely keeping pace with me, my shadow lengthening to the point where I could hardly see the path within it, but I didn’t slow.
I stumbled out into a cavern with the keystone at its heart, the stone pillar carved with the faces of Gemini on one of its three sides, the scales of Libra on the next and Aquarius presumably on its rear.
But I only had eyes for the woman bleeding on the floor, crushed herbs scattered beside her. Vesper’s pink hair pooled around her, stained with blood from a wound at her temple which was bleeding too much, her skin paling unnaturally.
I ran to her, dropping to my knees and hauling her into my arms.
“Can you hear me?” I demanded though she lolled unresponsively in my grasp.
I tore a strip of cloth from my shirt and pressed it firmly to the bleeding wound on her temple then sealed it firmly in place with my magic, making a clay which dried against her skin.
“Vesper,” I snarled, gripping her jaw as her head rolled aside. “Open your eyes.”
My heart was racing to a frenzied pace, panic rushing for me as I gripped her more tightly, all the things which lay unsaid between us simmering in the air.
All the reasons I had to despise her, the truth of my infatuation with her, all of it caught in my throat and threatened to choke the life out of me.
I grasped the collar of her fighting leathers and jerked them open, pressing my fingers to her throat, feeling for a pulse which came all too faintly when I finally located it.
“I’ll get you back to Stormfell,” I told her, drawing my hand away but it caught on a chain around her throat, the vial of blood which hung from it falling against my fingertips.
Power slammed into me at the contact, a rich and violent power which spoke to some deep part of my soul but was nothing like the magic of my element.
Without thinking, I took a dagger from my belt, my hand seeming to know what to do, that power guiding my actions while I fought to understand them.
I cut into the pad of my own thumb, blood welling and dripping onto the little vial then spilling onto her throat.
I watched transfixed as it raced across her tanned skin, rolling up to her jaw before dropping from her neck and into the tangles of her hair where it met with the blood that had risen from her wound.
I jerked upright, my spine straightening, my head snapping back, my hold on Vesper almost failing as a rush of power swept into me.
I gasped as it flooded my mind, the roiling intensity of it so potent I could hardly remember who or what I was.
But the weight of her body laying too still in my arms brought some semblance of what was happening back to me and a simple word clawed its way free of my throat.
“Please.”
Power roared around me, through me, consuming everything, my vision blurring, muscles tensing. It was ecstasy unlike any other, it was sinful and punishing and achingly beautiful and it had taken possession of my soul.
I felt myself falling into the endless well of it, the draw so intoxicating that I didn’t once consider trying to refuse its call.
The crash of a fist striking my jaw sent me tumbling back into myself. Not all the way, but enough for me to look into a pair of storm grey eyes which were wild with furious terror.
“Let go!” she shouted, her bloodied fist ready to strike me again.
My lips parted but no reply came. The power calling me back to it, the oblivion it promised tempting me away. I so wanted to lose myself to it, wanted to let it have me and be done with the world and all the suffering it had offered me.
Vesper hit me again but I hardly felt it. I wasn’t there anymore. I was drifting away on a current which led to nirvana.
The rush of dark magic dragged me deeper, claws which should have been painful sinking into my soul inch by inch but leaving bliss in place of agony. I would never return from this. I never wanted to return from this.
Onward the magic raced, with me its willing prey, dark pressing in all around me, a silence so thick it held weight over me.
A deep growl summoned my attention and from the lost confines of myself I spied something shifting in the dark, something foul and ancient, something hungry and desperate and utterly insatiable.
A pair of bright and piercing eyes flashed open, spearing me in their gaze, promising my annihilation. I was trapped before a beast of myth and magic so terrible the sight of it anchored me in horror, unable to run or fight or so much as yell a plea for my worthless life to go on.
“I see you,” the voice of chaos snarled, its words ricocheting through every piece of me. It spoke no language I knew but somehow I understood it, the voice resounding through the fibres of my being.
Cold lips snapped me out of the dark a heartbeat before I could be consumed by it.
The world rushed in on me as Vesper kissed me harder, her hands clasping my face, nails biting into my jaw, teeth taking hold of my bottom lip.