Chapter 11
Lyall
Anger, helplessness, and an endless death of self-loathing burned my gut.
My wretched arrogance had put my soulmate in danger.
No words could describe how hard I had already fallen for her.
Losing Eleni would destroy half of me. As no one ever came after me, I had expected to trample anyone foolish enough to stand in my path.
Never in a million years would I have expected a trap.
The worst part was that Eleni had wondered about that possibility. But once again, my thrice damned ego had dismissed her concerns. And now they were tearing her soul right out of her body.
Can it even be reversed?
The Oracle stated that she might return Eleni to her body once she had a new and even better upgrade, thanks to my seed. That had to mean we could fix it somehow. But first, I needed to free myself.
Pain didn’t bother me. In fact, I actually enjoyed it at times.
I just needed to be strategic. The more they broke my limbs, the longer it would take for me to regenerate.
I had to launch my attack quickly enough before they could retaliate.
Then, I would use the staff upon which sat the medallion sucking in Eleni’s soul and throw it as a spear to kill the priestess.
No, not kill her. Incapacitate only. I will see her suffer endlessly before she dies.
The Manacles of Oblivion around my wrists and ankles were meant to quell the powers of extremely high-ranking demons.
As such, it should have completely muted my ability to invoke my magic.
And yet, my skin still flared with surges of energy when it should have fizzled before it could even light up.
More importantly, instead of the punishment growing in intensity, each time I attempted to invoke my powers, the pain not only decreased, but a foreign energy also seemed to grow within me.
I didn’t understand what was happening as I had never felt this before.
Then again, I had never found myself in such a vulnerable position.
Whatever it was, my body was reacting to the Manacles in an unexpected fashion that I fully intended to exploit.
That the Oracle thought me stupid to continue to attempt to use it served my purpose.
I needed to remain inconspicuous and let them believe that I was getting weaker due to my stubbornness so that they would never see the attack coming.
Remembering how the foul woman touched me had my stomach roiling with nausea. She would pay dearly for that violation and for thinking she could take what belonged exclusively to my Eleni.
I made my powers flare twice more, wishing the energy growing within me would build faster.
I couldn’t delay it much further. The witches were draining my mate’s soul much too fast. I didn’t want to even contemplate the possibility that it couldn’t be reversed, or what would happen to her body if they completed their task first.
If—or rather as soon as—I managed to break free, I needed to take out the Oracle to cause enough panic so that I could rescue Eleni.
Anger filled my heart as I glanced at the so-called mages who had summoned the Honghadda witches.
From Eleni’s memories, I had seen the depth of paternal love she felt towards Father Paulus.
How could he have betrayed her like this?
He will suffer, too.
One look at my mate made it clear time was running out.
I would have preferred to do a couple more flare ups first and give my bones a bit more time to heal, but I couldn’t risk waiting any longer.
Just as I was gathering all that foreign energy lurking inside me to blast it outwards and shatter my shackles, a powerful wave of magic rippled through the room.
It emanated directly from Eleni.
The Oracle’s victorious shout confirmed my woman had finally unlocked the darkness that dwelled within her.
The foolish female didn’t realize what she had done.
Even I, a demigod, felt fear for the first time.
The magic that radiated from Eleni reeked of pure evil.
Or at least of extreme hatred and bloodthirst.
I stared in shock as my soulmate’s skin glowed, as if a brasier raged just below the surface, ready to erupt.
Her pupils dilated impossibly wide, swallowing her beautiful green eyes and her sclera.
Eleni’s shackles melted right off her wrists and ankles before turning into ashes.
The bluish-white stream of light of her soul flowing out of her mouth into the witch’s own gaping maw suddenly turned red.
It took me a second to realize that it was instead a stream of fire that my woman was spitting out like a dragon.
The summoning circle surrounding the witches stopped the flames, which hit an invisible wall. But less than a heartbeat later, the fire poured into the circle. I nearly missed the discreet gesture performed by Father Paulus.
He had broken the circle.
As one, the attendees gasped—some of them shouting in fear—when a fire vortex swarmed the circle, engulfing the witches. They screeched in agony, thus ending their fiendish attack against Eleni.
Without hesitation, I blasted the energy that had been building inside me as far and wide as I could.
To my shock, a blinding light emanated from me.
The stone altar beneath me cracked with a loud snapping sound.
The Manacles of Oblivion binding me shattered like so much glass struck by a hammer.
But the blades in my shoulders remained unscathed.
The constructs attempted to smash my limbs again.
However, the light radiating from me blinded them.
Moving at lightning speed, I jumped off the altar and invoked my lightning.
It struck all four constructs at once. I’d hoped it would stun them for a few seconds, giving me the opportunity to behead them or bust their kneecaps to impede their ability to pursue me.
Instead, it shattered them the same way I’d obliterated the Manacles.
What in the Nine Hells is going on?
“Seize them!” the Oracle shouted, forcing me to cast aside my confusion at this unusual new power I possessed.
Chaos ensued.
In the summoning circle, the Honghadda witches vanished in a puff of smoke. I couldn’t tell whether they’d been incinerated or escaped through the Veil. I only saw severe burns around their entire faces before the fire took over their enclosure.
Paulus and the mage to his left turned and cast a paralysis spell on the other two mages who had helped them summon the witches.
They then turned towards the attendees and shouted a string of words of power.
Too late, the cultists realized that it wasn’t a protection spell but a deactivation one.
The magic circles beneath them vanished.
Paulus didn’t betray Eleni. He was a mole!
But I couldn’t dwell on that for now. Even as I pulled out the daggers from my shoulders, I unleashed a nightmare on all the cultists aside from Paulus and his acolyte.
I had assumed that the circlets they donned before they sprung their trap on us were meant to shield them from my mystifying powers.
But despite the cultists still wearing them, I ensnared the fools effortlessly, now that my ability no longer bounced off the protection of the magic circles.
The cultists screamed, tearing their masks off before gouging their own eyes out. They clawed at their faces, tearing their skins off in a vain effort to remove the putrid parasites they believed to be crawling all over them, eating their flesh alive.
The Oracle and the twelve Elders by her side somehow managed to resist my compulsion, but barely.
A handful of them were casting spells—I couldn’t say whether offensive or protective—while a few others were attempting to flee.
Only then did I notice a different set of wards surrounding the area around the throne.
They would dampen or flat out block certain types of magic, but not physical objects.
I tore the obsidian daggers out of my shoulders and threw them at the priestess.
They flew unimpeded past the protective wards.
One embedded itself just above her left breast, and the other found its mark in her belly, a few inches right of her navel.
The Oracle’s scream of pain shifted into a screech when her skin erupted in huge blisters and boils.
I blinked, confused as to how those magic dampening blades could cause such a violent adverse reaction.
But I quickly realized my error when her skin started melting off her body like wax, leaving her muscles and ligaments exposed.
Although barely a minute had elapsed since Eleni had released her inner darkness, time appeared to move in slow motion with so many things happening simultaneously.
Before I could shift my attack to the Elders, my mate emitted a feral roar before charging the throne.
My initial fear upon seeing her hair ablaze abated when I saw flames erupt around her hands.
She raised them in front of her, and an inferno shot out of them.
She didn’t aim at the Elders but directly at the stone floor.
The flames appeared to sink into and under the stone tiles, racing at dizzying speed towards the throne.
The remaining Elders ran in fear, two of them attempting to drag their flayed high priestess. But they never got a chance.
Eleni’s fire ran beneath the tile, past the wards, before exploding outward.
It was like watching a volcano erupt, except it was burning spikes that shot out of the ground, impaling the Oracle, and the two Elders who were trying to save her.
The spikes lifted high enough that their feet no longer touched the ground.
They looked like cooled lava, even though red embers still glowed between the creases.