Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
“Ferris!” I roared after her into the storm the Dragon had left in their wake, rain crashing down over me and I broke into a run, my only thought to find her, make her listen to me.
She’d seen but a glimpse of my depravity and run as far from me as she could get thanks to it.
The sting was a barb in my chest that buried deeper than I could bear.
I’d known this was coming, but this was nothing.
Nothing at all in the face of my truth. So why not unveil it now? What use was it to hide any longer?
It was inescapable, this tarred soul of mine.
I was the shadow of death upon Rathian and Ferris had feared me long before she had known me.
She just hadn’t realised that yet. And now she was gone.
My spark in the darkness that I’d foolishly convinced myself I could keep for my own, snuffed out just like that.
“Ferris!” I bellowed again, but no answer came as I chased her fruitlessly through the trees, the forest barring my path at every step.
The roots raised and the branches groaned in protest to the swipe of my sword against them, while I fought to cut a trail to the one thing in this forest worth having.
“Let me explain,” I rasped, my chest heaving as I fell still, giving in to the trees as brush and vine bound together in front of me, refusing my passage while she flew with ease ever further away from me.
She could be a mile from here already in any direction, and if she didn’t want to be found, she only need ask the forest to keep me from her. That thought alone carved a fresh wound through my tainted heart.
I eyed the blood on my hands as fat rain drops splashed down to wash them clean, the bright red hue the stain of death upon each finger.
I had killed that male, the Fae who’d come here with reckless abandon and who had cast an arrow at my lightwing.
That had been the reason for his end. The fact that he had dared to threaten her.
I did not regret it. But that was the point, wasn’t it?
I ripped the arrow out of my arm, tossing it aside as blood ran down to my hand and dripped from my fingers. It would heal soon enough. I didn’t care about the wound, I cared that this arrow had been intended for Ferris, not me.
In the quiet that followed Ferris’s departure, a chasm tore apart in my chest. She was gone.
That truth was crushing me and fracturing something in my mind.
I hadn’t even intended to take the Raven from her, but her trust in me had been shattered the day I’d stolen the Wolf.
Perhaps that was when I’d really lost her.
That knowledge was an anvil to my heart.
She who had enraptured me from the moment I’d found her in the forest. She who had drawn me to her more viscerally than all else between these trees.
I’d spent years denying the forest’s call, but perhaps it had been her call instead.
Because there was nowhere on Rathian that felt more like I belonged than at her side.
The roots around my feet were creeping closer, slithering like vipers as if sensing prey within their midst.
I dropped to my knees, hands hitting the soft earth and blood dripping from the wound on my arm to taint the soil as despair unravelled within me. And then I felt it. The darkness unlocking, spilling through me like mist upon a dark sea.
I saw the face of my family in my mind and Ferris joined them there.
Gone. All fucking gone.
But Ferris, she still lived. She was here in this forest, not lost to the grip of death. Which meant I could find her, capture my light in the dark once again. The idea brought on a river of ruin which flowed through my soul as the plague inside me answered the call of my most desperate desire.
The blight inside me spread like a disease, spilling into the earth, unable to be called back.
I couldn’t control it now that it had its grip on me, this roiling power which had once been a part of the Art I’d been gifted with.
It had been twisted by some vile magic in the moment of my family’s deaths and turned me into this bringer of ruin.
“Do you see now?” I growled, a lilt of manic laughter rising in my throat as I turned my gaze up to the canopy. “Do you see what I am?!” I boomed, and a crack of thunder punctuated the words, the heavens still rioting in the wake of the Dragon’s storm.
My desperation to return Ferris to my side sent a fissure cracking down the centre of my soul. I could feel the darkness rising in answer to it, the lull of it a wicked song that hummed through my being.
I couldn’t stand to be lost in these trees without her, I couldn’t bear to think of her roaming the forest without me at her side.
My need for her had burned its way into me far deeper than I had ever admitted to myself, but now that I found her missing, I could no longer deny it.
Ferris Creed had awoken a deep desire in my soul and without her there would be no filling the wound her absence revealed.
I had to find her, had to bring her back to me, had to do whatever it took to return her to my arms.
Death spilled from me into the roots of the trees and the earth blackened where I knelt, every piece of life withering beneath my power. Petals turned black, then crumbled to ash while the roots dried out and the trees – oh how the trees began to scream.
Black veins crawled along my skin, marking me as him. The bane on this land. The Necromancer the Fae and humans feared more than perhaps the Taking Trees themselves. I was the only beast in Rathian that could make the forest shudder so.
It tried to retreat from me, branch and bough bending to escape my wrath, but even I did not know how to stop it now. My power was a plague that drank its fill of death until it was sated, and I couldn’t predict when that would be.
I rose to my feet, baring my teeth at the perishing trees around me, their bark turning black, cracking and splitting up their trunks.
“You will answer to me,” I called out to the forest. “You will bend apart and offer her up to me. Because she is mine!”
The forest howled in agony as the taint of death spread from me and I found my passage no longer barred.
With Ferris firmly in mind and darkness weighing heavily on my wretched soul, I started after her, hellbent on tracking her down.
She may have turned from me, but I was not done with her yet.
I would show her everything. Let her see what I was so that I could watch the truth dawn upon her violet eyes.
A twisted part of me wanted to witness it when she learned of the name I had been gifted when I’d fled from Rivenspire.
Because at least I could watch as she truly saw me, even if all it caused her was terror.
She would perceive all that I was and there would be no more veils between us.
She would be mine once again, and there would be no escaping this time.
Not once she knew my full name. Not once she knew why she should have run from me the very moment I laid eyes on her.
Because that was when my obsession had begun and it had its talons in me now, guiding me to her, and I’d gladly let it take me.
Gaunt faces peered at me between the trees as they were summoned to me by the darkness of my power, and I nodded grimly to the dead ones.
The Hollows had come, drawn to the seed of death I was reaping as they sought out their callous king.
Among them was the fair-haired Fae I’d killed, stirring back to this half-life he was now trapped in and seeing me through the lens of knowledge.
“The Necromancer,” he rasped, his eyes bloodshot and dark.
“Bow to me,” I growled, and he did so, a murmur of terror leaving his pale lips.
He would struggle with this new form, one foot here and one foot in the afterworld, never quite himself and always yearning for an end to his torment.
He would only be gifted it if his heart was destroyed or head severed from his shoulders.
“Come then,” I growled as more of them stepped between the trees, all those whose bodies had been wasted by death here in the forest. The glint of magic in their eyes told of the merciless power that still bound their unfortunate souls to this world.
“Let us follow her into the deep dark wood and show her the king of death. For she will be my queen.”