11. Willow #2
Despite the warning, I find myself walking closer to the roots. Something deep inside me is drawn to the wild energy pulsing from them. It craves the power, wants to be reunited with it…
I blink, and I’m standing in front of the glowing wall.
My hand is outstretched, fingertips inching toward the gnarled roots, and I can’t stop myself no matter how hard I try.
There’s an eerie, otherworldly whispering in my head—thousands of voices that overlap and meld together in a cacophonous scream.
I touch the roots, and everything goes quiet.
Blinking, I realize I’m no longer standing in the room. I’ve been transported to someplace… other.
The wall of roots is gone, replaced by a huge circular room. The walls and floor are made from a dark gray ice-rock, with veins of neon red pulsing throughout like streaks of lightning.
At the center of the ceiling is a massive tree stretching toward the floor like the most intricate chandelier.
The tree itself looks a bit like a willow tree from back home, but the entire thing is colored stark white, and the leaves look more like frozen icicles.
Thick, gnarled roots weave into the stone ceiling, spreading over the cracked surface like a thousand streaks of lightning—pulsing with angry red light.
Hundreds of ghostly hands reach upward from the leaves, grabbing at a ceiling they will never reach. And the screaming…
I clap my hands over my ears, curling into myself as they become too much for me to bear. I end up lying on the ground in a fetal position, but that only makes me aware of the quaking of the ground.
An unearthly screech rumbles deep underground, rattling me to my core. Whatever monster that lives down there is feeding off the evil energy of the tree. The dark magic is seeping into every inch of this world, disrupting the careful balance. It’s poisoning it.
I don’t know why I seem to know these things inherently, nor can I make sense of the vision. More than anything, I’m disturbed by it. It’s so foreign, yet so eerily familiar, and fills me with a sense of dread.
With all the strength I can muster, I rip my hand away from the root, stumbling backward as the room fades in and out of focus. I take several deep breaths through my nose, closing my eyes tight and focusing on the sway of the floor.
What… the… fuck…
Shaking, I press my palm against the wall, letting the feel of the cool stone ground me. The wall of roots has returned to a soothing blue hue, and the pressure thickening the air just moments before seems to have dissipated, allowing me to take deep, even breaths in through my nose.
I’m okay. It was just a dream. Just a weird, stress-induced daydream.
I’m halfway back to sanity when a low hissing sounds just over my shoulder, and my blood pressure spikes anew.
Whipping around, I come face-to-face with a massive python. It’s colored a beautiful pearlescent gray, but it does nothing to detract from those predatory eyes and needle-like teeth.
“Is this another dream?” I whisper, fear and intrigue rooting me to the spot.
Silently, the creature slithers toward me, individual sections of its body contracting and elongating so it moves along the floor in a straight line. It’s formless and physical at the same time, and as it draws closer, I realize that it is no normal snake. It’s a familiar.
But… where is his demon master?
There’s only one I haven’t met. Cin.
As soon as I think of his name, a cool breeze blows into the room, licking my skin and causing every hair on my body to stand on end. An ominous energy fills the space, sucking the breath from my lungs and filling my blood with a mind-numbing panic.
I blink, and notice a dark mass crouched in the corner of the room. The only thing visible is a set of glowing silver eyes. They pierce through the dark like foglights in a storm, filled with an unsettling hunger and a hint of another emotion I can’t place…
He moves closer to me, no more than a flash of shadow, and I can do nothing but brace for impact.
Instead of pain, there is only a brush of that ice-cold wind, and I gaze up to see the demon hovering over me, caging me to the wall.
His scent is warm and slightly smoky, like dying coals in a fire.
It fills my senses and makes my blood come alive, heating my core and setting each one of my nerve endings alight.
Just like the other three, he’s absolutely massive.
He’s a close second to Dravik in height and brawn, with a body that was chiseled from the finest stone and a face gifted from the gods themselves.
Powerful gray wings flutter at his back, the ends tapering to pointed tips that add to his deadly beauty.
They’re colored the same pearlescent hue as his skin, and his entire body seems to shimmer in the dim light.
I tilt my chin up, up, up, stopping when my gaze lands on his face.
Unlike any of his brothers, Cin is sporting two different pairs of horns.
The front pair lie low on his hairline, thick and short, the tips curved upward and ending in vicious points.
The ones sitting further back are intricate and flame-shaped, winding toward the ceiling in an intricate pattern, like an art piece.
The lower half is concealed by a strange mask. It’s made from the darkest stone, and there are vertical slits in the center where his mouth would be. When I look at just the right angle, I can make out a set of razor-sharp teeth smiling at me from behind the half-mask.
His eyes are the color of the afternoon sky after a storm—so dark blue they are practically gray—with strange, slit-like pupils that are distinctly reptilian. When he blinks, there’s a second pair of eyelids that close in a vertical slit, as if he took too much from the python when they bonded.
Inhuman. Wrong.
This is Cin. The last brother. The unhinged one.
Before I can do or say anything, Cin leans down, stopping when his face is at the level of mine. The corner of his eyes crease in the barest of smiles, and he presses forward, a forked tongue slipping through the slits in the mask.
Before I can react, his tongue lashes out, dragging up my cheek—tasting me.
“Agh!” I try to jump back, but Cin’s arms snap around my waist, holding me in place. He gazes downward, his strange eyes swirling with fascination as he studies my expression.
“Serafyn.”
The sound of his voice makes me freeze. I gaze up at him, my brow furrowing in confusion. What?
His palm reaches up to cup my face, his touch so gentle that I think I might be dreaming.
“My sweet Serafyn.” His voice shivers through the air in a low, sinful rumble. “What are you doing so far from home?”