Chapter 38 #2
Emboldened, I slip inside and push the door back into place. The lock clicks on its own. The room swallows the corridor’s light, and my eyes strain until the darkness makes sense.
Inside, the air is as thick as resin. The stone walls absorb sound, leaving only the persistent hum of Falcen’s voice as he kneels on the cold flagstones, his back to me, his head bowed.
No candles burn. The only illumination comes from the lines of magick threading his forearms and collarbone, flickering in time with his words like a heart in arrhythmia.
The rest of him is a silhouette, sharply edged, every tendon and muscle in his bared torso straining as if he’s trying to keep himself from coming unstitched.
It is the most terrifying and beautiful thing I have ever seen.
The magick crawling over his skin is undomesticated tonight, none of the usual stoic discipline, no trace of the man who holds himself rigid in the face of every indignity the academy can devise.
Tonight, Falcen looks like something half-drowned and fighting the sea itself.
His breath tears in and out, each inhale a struggle.
The syllables scrape, layered, as if two voices speak through one throat.
A pressure builds in the room with each utterance, the hairs on my arms rising, my teeth aching.
My stomach flips, the taste of iron rising in my mouth as the language sinks its fangs into the air.
“Falcen,” I whisper, careful. “It’s me. Verily.”
Falcen’s head snaps up, and I glimpse the side-slung profile of his face with his jaw clenched, mouth twisted, sweat beading silver at his temple.
His eyes, shot through with gold, are unfocused.
He’s somewhere else. The language seethes out of him, and with every word, the air in the room thickens, presses in.
I can feel it on my tongue, taste the iron in it, as if the words are meant to draw blood.
He doesn’t see me. Not yet.
I try again, softer this time, fearful of jarring him. “Falcen. It’s Verily. When did you get back?”
His room smells like him, fresh air and leather and mint. But beneath that familiar balm runs a colder thread, a brine-rot scent that doesn’t belong here. That scent curls at the back of my tongue, but I swallow it down and keep moving.
Falcen’s shirt lies in a heap at his feet.
The muscles of his back flex under skin that is not entirely skin.
The dim glow from his tattoos shows scales climbing over one shoulder, across his spine, black at first glance, then the green-blue of oil when the faint light hits them.
Each one is fitted to the next, like armor grown from within.
The ones near his neck are small, fine as ash, while the plates down his shoulder blade lengthen and sharpen, edged like knives.
My gasp betrays my proximity. Falcen’s head snaps toward me.
His spine arches, scales flashing, the tattoos on his forearms blazing.
A familiar gold rims his irises, but then the gold is eaten by black.
He brings a hand to his throat, nails biting so hard into his skin that they leave crescent moons.
Then he drags that hand down, and when it falls away, I see the dark fluid smeared along his jaw.
Not blood, but something thicker, inkier.
The scent is unmistakable. Rot. The same as the halflings.
I drop to my knees behind him and set my palms on his spine. My touch lands on the border between skin and scale.
His words falter. The chanting stops.
“Falcen,” I say again. “Look at me.”
His muscles tighten. Falcen braces, fingers splayed against the floor, the tendons in his forearms pulling his tattoos taut.
Bravery is a trait I’ve learned is always laced with fear. So I cup the back of his neck, drawing his attention. The heat there is worse. Not a fever, but a furnace.
He snarls, not quite human. “Don’t touch me.”
I cling to my courage and lean closer. My lips brush the hinge of his jaw. “Either you let me touch you or you watch me pitch a tent in your doorway and narrate your decline until the academy is my audience.”
A ragged breath rakes out of him that might be a laugh and might be a death rattle.
His shoulders shake. The soul-glyph tattoos flare, and a lick of black flame blooms across his palm where it braces on the floor, his magick without the blue energy of a soul, threads of frost racing along the stone.
My breath fogs in the air. His throat works. He is unraveling, right here in front of me, and no oath or lecture will knit him back together.
So I move to his front, closer to his mouth, which looks more like a jaw with sharp, vicious fangs.
I sidle closer, my knees between his thighs. My hands slide over the ridged map of his back, cruising from skin to scale and back to skin. I rest my cheek on his shoulder. The scales there don’t cut, though the edges threaten.
Falcen breathes, shallow and fast.
He doesn’t resist when I wrap my arms around his torso and pull, drawing him in, or when I fold my body into his.
Falcen’s heavy with muscle, with exhaustion, with a weight that feels older than he is.
I shift, slipping one leg over his lap, settling in, straddling him. This is bolder than I’d planned. But it also feels exactly right.
My thighs lock on either side of his as his breath rakes across my throat. Sounds I don’t understand escape him, a kind of Void-tongue that burrows under my skin.
I put my mouth to his ear. “Come back.” I can barely hold my voice together. “Find me, Falcen.”
The black veins creeping up his throat twitch at the sound of my voice but do not stop. Falcen shudders, caught in some agony he can’t escape this time. My heart stutters with him, a matching rhythm of collapse.
He shivers. His head jerks, and a low growl scalds my neck. Teeth catch a fraction too close to my throat. A lick of cold chases the heat, a cruel whiplash that tells me his soul-magick is misfiring, freezing as it burns.
“Come back,” I repeat, then I turn his face toward me and kiss him.
It’s reckless and stupid. But it’s necessary.
No, Ember practically shouts, her denial pulsing through my skull. You can’t save him.
My answer is swift. I refuse to leave him like this.
Falcen’s lips are fever-hot, dry, and split, tasting of blood and him. His magick flicks against my tongue, a bitter fire that sparks through my mouth and down my spine until my knees threaten to melt.
Falcen inhales like he’s drowning and fists the front of my uniform, hauling me closer, his mouth opening, kiss deepening, desperate as if he intends to consume until he chokes.
I press my palms flat to his chest, right over his sternum, and a beat rises under my skin that’s not my pulse. Gold flares from my fingertips, faint and trembling, and the black edging his veins pauses. Not recedes. Pauses, as if held back by a rivulet of light no wider than a hair.
NO.
Ember isn’t a whisper now. She’s a blade laid flat against the inside of my ribs, cold with purpose.
You’ve already poured fragments of your soul into him.
When the hounds tore at you, you bound him back from collapse.
In the Void, you gave again, and the black veins in his skin receded.
Twice you’ve stripped yourself to keep him standing.
Do you not feel the thinning? How much must you give to a man who’s doomed?
Ignoring her, I curl into his body until my forehead presses to his, until I can feel the heat of his breath searing my lips. “You don’t get to leave me like this. I missed you. I’ve missed you every day since you’ve left, and you cannot turn the moment I see you again into the last.”
Gold sparks at my fingertips. Thin rivulets of light chase along his skin, weaving into the cracks of black corruption. The darkness slows, arrested by the glow.
For one aching moment, I believe it’ll work.
Falcen trembles. He groans against my mouth and shudders, then the sound roughens toward pain. My name mists out of him. “Verily.”
“I’m here,” I whisper against his lower lip.
You don’t understand. Ember’s voice fractures, frantic, no longer cryptic but desperate. If you rise brightly enough, the Master Keeper will taste the shape of you. He will know what you are, and he will come for you. I swore I would not let them see you.
Light erupts, flooding Falcen, wrapping him, holding the rot back by a hair’s breadth.
Ember’s roar cuts through the blaze. ENOUGH.
I have hidden every gift you were born with from your own marrow.
I scraped your light off walls. I drank the shine from the air and made it dull.
I lied to wards. I made you small. I swore I would.
I swore on the first breath you took. I will not allow your true soul to be squandered for him.
Pain sears my hand. My connection to Falcen is wrenched away, ripped out of me so violently I cry out.
My back slams into the opposite wall, chest heaving, palms blistered from the gold fire Ember just extinguished.
My vision reels, my body emptier than it’s ever been.
Ember unfurls inside me, snarling, warding, closing every door I tried to open.
Falcen sags where I left him. His shoulders quake, the remaining scales glittering. His breath comes shallow, his eyes shuttered.
But he’s alive.
I slide down the wall, shaking, tears hot and unbidden. I could have saved him. I felt it. Falcen was mine to pull back. And Ember tore him from me.
“No,” I whisper to the floor, to her, to myself. “No, no, no.”
You would have doomed us all, Ember hisses, still furious. This is mercy. For him. For you.
“Verily,” Falcen chokes out, his hands finding my wrists once he crawls the rest of the way to me. He looks at my glowing fingers, and the light reflected on his bare chest. Fear flashes in those ringed eyes, and it kills me, because it is not fear for himself.
It’s fear for me.
“What have you done?” he rasps.