Chapter 15 #3
In a rage Bodach tore the viewing scroll down from the wall, casting it into the brazier, where it turned the flames bright gold before dissolving into ash.
The spider and the enslaving poison had failed him.
Now that the spell trap was collapsing, he had run out of time.
After a thousand years of effort with no results, it seemed obvious that he would never possess Torra MacBren’s power to transfer his spirit into other bodies.
Revenge against all those in Elphyne who had conspired against him and cast him into exile would never be his.
He’d nearly been killed by the backlash from Mirry’s magic which was nothing compared to the melia magic of the spell trap.
When that collapsed entirely, the backlash would make this experience seem like a brief tumble with an over-eager lover.
It wasn’t fair. He’d worked for centuries to get his treasure, and he deserved his vengeance. He was supposed to become the most powerful Fae king that had ever ruled, not die like a forgotten worm in this wretched realm.
Slowly he walked upstairs and wandered through the passages of the castle.
When he saw Dax Ballar’s badly burned corpse just outside the spell trap, he paused.
Although he tried to draw some satisfaction from the idiot’s end, even that didn’t brighten his mood.
Instead of ruling over the light and dark courts he instead faced a collapsing spell trap that would blast him with a thousand years of backlash.
No Fae had ever been subjected to that, and he had no idea how it would manifest, or what it would do to him.
Not knowing made him kick Ballar in the head, caving in his charred skull and separating it from his neck.
“Fool. Did you really think you could prevail over me?” He lifted his foot to stomp on the dead man’s blackened face.
Something came flying out of the spell trap’s barrier, and landed next to the corpse.
Bodach reached down to pick up the small notebook, which had the words READ THIS PLEASE written in bold on the front cover. When he opened it he saw a page clipped to the inside with a brief message in the same handwriting.
To whoever finds this notebook:
I am trapped in another world inside McKeran’s Castle along with hundreds of other people.
Everything we’ve tried hasn’t worked to release us from this prison in time.
Things are becoming very bad here now, and we believe the destruction of this world is coming.
Please use my notes about what I’ve observed to see if there is any way you can rescue us from your side.
-- Esme Martinez, Monterey Today journalist
“So you were the one who wandered inside,” Bodach muttered. Idly he considered flinging the notebook back through the barrier, but knew it would only be thrown back out again. “Stupid bitch. Did you think I’d let anybody read this?”
Drawing back his foot, he kicked Ballar’s burned skull through the entry, hoping to see it smash to pieces. Instead it glittered with red lights as it bounced against the stone wall and came back through the barrier, rolling to a stop at Bodach’s feet.
Ballar’s eyelids lifted, and his desiccated eyes plumped up as they looked at him. His lips began moving, but because he had no larynx no sound came from his mouth.
How may I serve, Master?
Disgusted, Bodach took down a torch and set fire to the animated head, which burned bright scarlet like the viewing scroll before collapsing into a pile of ash.
Ballar had been worse than useless to him; he and his idiot coven had been an unwanted distraction.
Putting the rest of his remains to the torch, he left him to burn and walked away.
He would have to dispose of all the bodies, and soon.
He considered burning them all, but to keep the police from finding proof of what he’d done, he would do better to bury them far from the castle.
Perhaps in that prison cemetery where he had left the remains of a changeling who had briefly served him before turning traitor and trying to steal his power–
He stopped in his tracks as he looked back at Ballar’s burning corpse.
The skull he had kicked through the barrier had come back to life after bouncing back through it.
Yet the dark druid’s body had not come back to life.
Living flesh could not pass through the barrier and escape the spell trap, so that made no sense.
Even as just a head, he should have been thrown back away from the barrier just as everyone else who tried to escape.
Instead he had bounced back through it after hitting the wall and landed on the other side. A decapitated head. A dead mortal.
Alive but not alive. Like a zed but dead. A revenant.
Bodach had never been grateful to any mortal, as all they had ever caused him had been trouble. In death Dax Ballar had given him the answer that had so long eluded him. If his skull had remained intact, he would have picked it up and kissed it.
All that truly mattered was that he had at long last solved the problem with the spell trap. Soon Torra MacBren would be his, and there was nothing the McKeran could do to stop him.