30 | Yaron
Orias highway line
My mind is clearer than it was, even if my body remains that of my beast. I need him and he allows me to manipulate him as she needs.
I carry her cradled in one of my beastly arms, the other three limbs pounding even louder against the hard-packed earth of the highway line. I’ve done this before and I hate it. Brega’s hooves beat beside me, carrying Sipho who sits stiffly, covered in wounds, Owenna’s unconscious body draped across his lap.
Kiandah’s heartbeat returned to normal with my venom flooding her veins, aided by the copious quantities my body in rut was able to produce. And now her beautiful, wondrous heart pounds as she wakes. She struggles in my arm. She wants to walk, to ride, to see her sister, to check my wounds. She’s been speaking to me the entire time, but I cannot speak to her and not only because I use my beast’s throat.
I could not speak to her in any other form, in any other state. My heart is in my mouth, sitting in the back of my throat. Biting her, injecting my venom into her system, bonding her but only because she said I could…
Everything about the moment was bliss.
Everything about the moment was torture.
Because I had plans…oh the plans I had for her. Plans to lay her across my bed, to worship and be worshipped, to dominate and be dominated, to beg and plead and please her. To take her beneath a cloudless sky underneath a moon that rose red. Instead, my moment was stolen from me by a weak pulse, gushing red blood, a simple, fluttering nod, and fucking Merlin.
I had plans for Merlin, too, all of them intended to last years in the lowest rung of my dungeons. And she spoiled those, too, when she forced my hand. My axe all but cut her in half. She died instantly in rivers of blood that left a bitter taste in my mouth as acrid as the smell of burning garbage. I wanted more. Worse. For her to suffer. But I was even required to abandon the body, which will now never to hang from my gates, in favor of securing Kiandah and getting her back to the keep, just as I had to abandon Freya to the Fates.
Guilt clenches in my gut and I release a low roar. The fucking Fates took fucking Freya, all three of them working together to contain her in the cage that the undead Berserker once occupied. I was powerless to stop them.
They are gone now, fled far if they are smart, and I do believe they are. Things did not work out in their favor entirely, but as I cross Orias Village, finding it successfully cleared, and rise up the hill so that the keep comes into view atop the next hill over, I know that the Fates are smart enough.
The keep is under attack and the undead — thousands of undead — are fighting to gobble it up.