Chapter 46 #2
I press my forehead to his, ignoring the prickle of scales, the way his fangs have split his mouth into a snarl.
“You’re not their monster,” I assure him. “You’re mine.”
Ember shrieks her protest inside my skull, but I hold fast, refusing to let her lock the door on me again. She howls, a wildcat in a cage, but my will is sharper than nether drake fangs.
I’m not mending Falcen. I’m not fighting the corruption. Every effort tears through me. My jaw aches, my joints scrape together as if I’m hauling my soul out of its cage to meet his halfway.
But I cradle his ruin. I hold him so he doesn’t have to die alone in the dark.
The gold essence inside me doesn’t stitch or soothe. It latches. It drags. It finds the thin cord between his body and his soul and strains to snap it.
My tears sting as they slip down and catch in the cracks between Falcen’s scales. I bury my face against his neck and wrap my arms around his body.
A haze fills my vision, bright as a star going nova. The gold in my blood boils up, out, through. It floods my hand, chasing along the seam where Falcen’s skin has split into scales and claws, hunting the black rot that writhes under his hide. My thoughts grind. My teeth ache with the effort.
I raise my head anyway, my lips brushing the sharp edge of his mouth.
He tastes of brine and iron, and an impossible sweetness threaded through the rot. Gold leaps from my mouth to his, a wordless promise, and for a single, trembling instant, the blue in his eye drowns the black.
“I … love…” he rasps with a thickened tongue, his voice a tangle of avowal and longing.
I press harder, both with my mouth and my will. The gold in me surges along the seam of our touch, burrowing past the crusted blood, latching onto the core of him that refuses to die. Ember howls in protest—
Do not do this. It will not go the way you want.
—but she is nothing compared to the need that rips through me now, frantic to release him from pain.
“Wait, what the fuck?” Davrin’s question rises in pitch. “Keeper, she’s not draining him. She isn’t feeding on his soul. What is she doing!?”
“Just wait, boy.”
Malakai’s flat, emotionless tone graduates him from meaningless insect to a potential concern, but I’m too far gone to care.
My gold scorches through Falcen, pulse after pulse, a fountain of light bleeding into his rotted marrow. Ember howls, but I wring her out like a rag, stripping every drop I can muster. I’ll break the realm in two if it means Falcen doesn’t go into oblivion alone.
Falcen groans, using one last jolt of his diminishing Soulren magick to force the blue in his eyes to smother the black so that I can see him once more. Then the corruption surges and the blue swells with blood before being devoured again. He sags into me, talons curling into my back.
Not to hurt, but to die.
For a split instant, Falcen’s face is his own. Not the beast, not the weapon, not the ruined prize of Malakai’s little presentation tonight. He’s just a man, broken and beloved, clinging to the only thing left that belongs to him.
I feel him leaving, piece by piece, the soul inside him guttering. I pour every drop I have left into him, gold light flooding from my hands, my mouth, my chest until it burns out in flashes, and then fades, leaving only cold.
A ragged gasp tears from me, terrible and keening. Falcen sags forward, head dropping onto my shoulder, his mutated hands falling on either side of my knees as he takes his last breath.
I sob into his neck. I knew what I was doing, but it doesn’t make it easier. A scream rips out of me. I clutch him tighter, nails biting into lifeless scale.
I cradle his ruined body, rocking in the sand, my tears mixing with the black blood that pools beneath us. Even Davrin stands frozen, mouth open. He stares at the two of us, sprawled in the sand, then at Malakai, as if seeking an explanation.
“You said he couldn’t be killed,” Davrin says to Malakai.
Malakai doesn’t answer. His lips curl up in a smile that isn’t meant for anyone but himself. He studies the ruins of Falcen’s body and me, sobbing and hunched over Falcen, as if this is a painting he’s waited years to see finished.
“You pried his soul free without consuming it,” he muses. “I thought it impossible…”
I barely register Malakai’s wonder, uncaring of what my resonance does. Not when I’m staring at Falcen, slumped in my arms, his body still leaking black fluid onto the sand.
He doesn’t move. There’s no more heartbeat.
I choke on a sob.
Davrin backs away, horror and outrage twisting his features as he stares at Falcen, then at me.
“He was supposed to be mine. All that shit I endured, and Reaves was supposed to be my creature to wield! And instead you kill him, not even to make yourself stronger like any intelligent Soulren would when faced with a corrupted Elite—you fucking flung his soul out! To where?” Davrin throws out his arms, his glowing veins contracting and expanding.
“Where the fuck did you put my dragon, Verily?”
His questions are enough to draw my head up and say tonelessly, “I don’t have a clue about anything you’re saying, Davrin. Leave us in peace.”
“Death is such a simple concept,” Malakai says behind me.
“It disappoints me that you assume this is Reaves’s end, Rider Koll.
Yet it all makes perfect sense to me. This is what we could never achieve with Soulren methods alone.
Initiate Holbrook took his entire soul. No consumption.
No soul residue left behind. Only vacancy. ”
Slowly, I turn my head to Malakai, my heart slowing almost to the dead point of Falcen’s.
“Davrin’s right,” I say to Malakai with the same dull tone. “Falcen is dead.”
Speaking it out loud is as bad as the experience of it. My lower lip trembles.
Malakai grins.
It’s at that moment that I realize Falcen hasn’t gone entirely limp. He’s slumped over, yes, the weight of him pressing me into the sand, but the tension never left his muscles. Falcen’s not breathing until his wings twitch.
I suck in a gasp, expecting a shudder, one last exhale, or a death rattle now that the essence of him is gone, some sign that I succeeded in freeing him … but his chest starts moving.
Not steady, not even, but spasmodic, as if something inside is fighting to remember how.
A ripple runs beneath my hands, starting at his sternum and crawling outward, scale by scale.
I blink through my tears, reaching for his ruined jaw and turning it toward me, waiting for the empty hush of death.
But instead, a convulsion rakes through his body, every muscle locking.
The black in his veins surges, blotting out the blue in a single, greedy flood.
Ember moans in my head. Verily. Back away. Back away NOW.
Sheer befuddlement keeps me from moving. Falcen’s soul is gone. Torn free, released, whatever definition fits the violence I just inflicted, but his body remains, twitching, spasming, refusing to die.
Noxie.
I’m back at his tiny gravesite, shocked and appalled that I could do something so unnatural.
The scales along Falcen’s spine twitch, then spear upward, blood spraying as more sharp ridges burst from his back. His wings snap wide, knocking me backward.
I catch myself mid-tumble, sand grinding into the open wounds of my palms, and scramble upright. “Falcen?”
Falcen’s corpse shudders once, twice, then arches off the ground.
His body shouldn’t be moving. I felt his soul leave. I helped it go. I broke whatever chains bound him to this corrupted flesh.
But his limbs jerk wide, human flesh falling off his body in wet chunks. His head snaps up, and when his eyelids fly open, I see nothing but void-black where blue once lived.
No recognition. No humanity. No Falcen.
“What’s happening?” I scream at Malakai, who watches with shining, wide eyes. “I freed him! His soul is gone!”
“Precisely,” Malakai murmurs, satisfaction dripping from each syllable. “And now there’s room.”
A black fissure rips across the center of Falcen’s chest, splitting scales like a wound tearing itself wider. His head snaps back at an impossible angle, neck cracking with a sound so loud I cover my ears. His maw opens, stretching beyond human limits, jaw unhinging.
Falcen’s body rises, suspended by wings no longer broken but fully unfurled, stretching twenty feet across the arena. His limbs hang limp for a moment before snapping rigid, bones realigning with wet cracks. The sound of cartilage and tendon rearranging themselves fills the air.
I moan, reaching for him. “Oh gods, no…”
Davrin grabs me from behind, yanking me back. “I wouldn’t if I were you. Unless you want to be your new, improved boyfriend’s lunch.”
I struggle against his hold, watching in horror as Falcen’s body continues its grotesque metamorphosis. His spine elongates, cracking vertebra by vertebra. Black fluid pours from his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils. Every orifice leaks darkness.
“Make it stop!” I plead to anyone listening.
Ember stirs inside me. Do you recognize what you’ve done yet?
Falcen’s body bulges at the joints. Scales grow over scales, a riot of oil-slick black and bruised blue.
His wings stretch again, joints popping, then double in size, membranes rippling with new, awful power.
I think I hear myself screaming as Falcen’s form swells, bones rearranging with grotesque efficiency.
The body I cradled is no longer even a cousin to human.
His maw mouth wider, fangs elongating in brutal rows, tail lashing black ichor onto the sand.
A hissing, wet wind follows each exhale, strong enough to blow Davrin and me back.
I’m shrieking in panic. But I’m mesmerized.
Falcen rises, ten times my size now, and not on two legs, but four.