Chapter 15
The most powerful sorcerers, with mana so potent they can master the greatest curses, live nearly immortally, yet… they find themselves powerless against the one thing magic cannot give them—a form of love.
ARAWN
The enchanted wheels of the stall clattered one last time before the forest swallowed it whole.
I narrowed my eyes. The candles. She left them burning again. Reckless. One spark too many, and everything would go up in flames. The scent of melted butter and caramelized sugar clung to the air. Growling under my breath, I let the trail guide me to the kitchen, ready to loose a biting remark.
But the words died in my throat the moment I opened the door.
She was slumped against the counter, folded in on herself, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
The flickering glow of the candles licked her skin, lingering on every curve, every fracture.
Her crystallized flesh shimmered with golden shards, fragile as blown glass, ready to shatter.
Beside her, an open grimoire, its pages smeared with flour and sugar.
I stepped closer, my shadow sliding across her.
Her wrist was bound in Yeun’s wing. My jaw clenched.
A cold irritation gnawed at my gut. I could do nothing.
Not without the risk of making it worse.
“You’re burning yourself out, little fool,” I murmured.
Her hands told the rest: raw, blistered, palms worn nearly to the bone. Even in sleep, her breathing came in ragged gasps, as if her own body no longer remembered how to rest.
My eyes swept the room. Everything had changed.
Bouquets of dried flowers hung from the beams. Ivy twined around drawer handles.
Her apron lay folded over a chair. Every corner sang of her presence.
Why was she doing this? Why insist on making this place livable and beautiful when she was only passing through?
My gaze fell on a green pastry on the table. Beside it, a hastily scribbled note:
I had to fight to keep this one hidden from the Cursed, so you’d better eat it! P.S. If it’s bad, don’t bother telling me! And if you find me collapsed, that’s normal, I’m perfectly fine, my crystallized body can’t break (not that you’d care anyway).
My lips twitched—barely. In her sleep, she almost looked human. I reached for the pastry, its crust warm and crisp beneath my fingers, and bit into it. The shell cracked beneath my teeth, releasing a pistachio cream that instantly melted on my tongue.
“Hmm.”
I swallowed it in a single mouthful. Delicious.
I wanted more. A shiver shot through me, raising every hair on my skin.
For the first time in an eternity, I was cold.
A cold I knew: the crunch of snow underfoot, the sting of frost against skin.
A sharp ache cut through my chest, worse than any blade to the heart.
Rustling leaves. The biting air of an endless winter.
A massive tree, taller than a castle, crowned with apples, purple and dark.
Something shifted on the windowsill. A frog stared at me, its eyes glinting in the dark. The strange sensation vanished at once, swept away like dust on the wind. I straightened abruptly, closing my gloved fingers around its throat.
“An enchanted frog. Always predictable.”
Of course she would send a creature to spy on me or on her. My wards would never register something so harmless. And I had allowed a magical stall to appear here. The thing must have slipped inside to bypass my defenses.
I stared into its damp eyes. Behind their glassy sheen, I saw Zelda, draped in her eternal black lamb’s blanket, a cigar wedged between her teeth.
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” she purred, her voice spilling from the frog, languid and smooth. “I only wanted to see how you were faring.”
The ember bit lazily into the rug beneath her feet, and on the table, laid with insulting carelessness, my black beating heart, fragile and insolent. Like a trinket. Like a damned puppet whose strings she fondled at will.
“You and I are bound, my dear Arawn. You cannot flee any more than you can flee your true nature. All I want is for you to return to me and end this ridiculous rebellion.” With a lacquered finger, she slid my heart a little closer to herself.
“I’m even willing to give it back. To work on your curse…
together. To forget your betrayal. I need you. They’re all incompetent, except you.”
I let out a weary sigh, the ghost of a twisted smile tugging at my lips. Zelda had never been able to fight. With such magic, her body had only grown weaker. The most powerful witch in the world was nothing more than a wretched fly without it, and without the souls she had shackled to herself.
Every magic bore a flaw, and I was the weapon to fill hers.
My fist closed slowly around the frog, pinning it hard against the sill. Its tiny chest fluttered beneath the pressure.
“Tempting,” I hissed, tilting my head. “But I’ll take it back without your blackmail.”
Zelda’s laugh rippled, soft and mocking, as she drew a long drag from her cigar and exhaled a plume of black ash. “You put too much faith in yourself, Arawn. You’ve gone soft these past years, hiding in your little hovel, surrounded by the pitiful.”
“You forget what I’m capable of.”
Her eyes gleamed with hunger. “That’s all I ask. That you become the sorcerer you once were.”
With idle cruelty, she ground the tip of her cigar into the pulsing surface of my black heart. The stench of scorched flesh hit me, acrid and clinging. I didn’t move. I would show her nothing. Only a faint tremor coursed through me as I hid my hand behind my back, every muscle taut as a bowstring.
“Your heart still resists me,” she crooned. “But the more you use your magic, the more you belong to me. And if you think to find your humanity with that confectioner unworthy of you, you will lose… everything.”
I knew it. If I felt too much, Zelda would use my heart against me. But if I gave in to my Cursed form, then I would be nothing but a puppet.
A weapon. A tool. Nothing more.
“She’s only a necessity. You didn’t hold back with her curse.”
Zelda’s lips twisted in a cruel smile. “Kill her, and come to my realm. I’ll offer you the finest confectioners in the world.”
A harsh, joyless laugh tore from my throat. “You’re insatiable, Zelda. Perhaps it’s the last human thing left in you—that inability to endure solitude. You always want what you cannot have, a—”
Zelda squeezed her cigar into her fist and clutched my black heart tighter, making it bleed onto the ash-covered rug. It was as if invisible claws tore through my flesh, crushing my insides. My muscles seized, useless, like cut tendons.
“We’ll see if that confectioner means nothing to you!”
In a blink, her reflection vanished. The frog still quivered between my fingers, its bulging eyes fixed on me. I narrowed mine.
“Prepare yourself,” I said, low and merciless.
With one clean, unflinching motion, I ended it. The frog burst in a spray of viscous juices and green larvae. My nerves ignited. A blazing wave surged through my veins. My horns ripped through skin. My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ground.
I threw my head back, battling the bestial surge threatening to engulf me. I forced the monstrous form down and, for the span of a breath, was nearly human again—save for the damned horns.
My gaze fell on the smoking remains of the frog. Barely a heap of flesh. It would have died anyway, poisoned by Zelda’s black magic. At least its soul remained intact. This was not the first life I had ended. It would not be the last.
Movement stirred at the edge of my vision. The confectioner’s Cursed pet was waking. Its many tails twitched faintly before it leaped, sinking its teeth into my glove.
“What do you want?”
I raised my arm, letting the creature dangle from my sleeve like a rag on a line. Then it sprang onto the counter, gently tapping Lempicka’s head with its tail tip. I crouched, locking eyes with its yellow gaze. This thing was nothing like the monster it had been when I first found it.
“I’ll take her back to her room. If she asks, tell her she walked there in her sleep.”
She’d believe it. Worse, she’d congratulate herself, as if it were some rare talent.
I hated how easily I could read her.
Sliding an arm beneath her knees and the other around her back, I lifted her effortlessly.
As long as our skins didn’t touch, I wouldn’t worsen her curse.
She was lighter than I expected, not that I had any real reference to compare.
Her head lolled weakly against my chest, her warm breath brushing the fabric of my coat.
A faint, irregular beat echoed against my rib cage.
My jaw clenched. I shouldn’t have noticed it. I shouldn’t have cared. Yet, I counted the pulses, just like I noticed her skin seemed less crystallized. More human. Her curse was alive. It was responding. The beams above groaned. Red eyes glared at me from a crack in the ceiling.
“You’re there,” I said.
The cowardly Spirit fled at once. But its voice hissed through the pipes. “You’ll hurt her. She doesn’t belong here.”
I slammed the kitchen door shut, smothering the whisper like a flame snuffed out with a backhand. Then I climbed the stairs and walked down the corridor to her chamber, failing miserably to keep my gaze from lingering on the fragile human in my arms.
Reckless. Stubborn. Foolish.
Somewhere—without me knowing when or how—she had become something I still wanted to protect. Though I couldn’t trust my own feelings. If I had any left at all. They weren’t mine. They belonged to the bond between confectioner and sorcerer.
Yet Lempicka had become my fool to protect. And perhaps, just perhaps, the kind of fool this world needed.
“You have horns,” murmured the fool in question, eyes half-lidded.
“They always grow back, even if I cut them each time,” I said, knowing full well how monstrous, how abnormal it was, that with every transformation, I had to rip them off. “Go back to sleep. You’re having a nightmare.”
“Oh, all right… but they’re so pretty.” She lifted her hand toward me, fingers wavering, cheeks flushed. “You’ll let me touch them one day?”
My chest tightened. So did my grip on her.
Two heartbeats thundered inside me.
“Out of the question.”
I froze. Pain struck like a sprung trap. Needles. Thousands, burrowing beneath my skull. With a snap of my fingers, I summoned the broom.
“Take her,” I ordered.
It lifted her, still curled in her sleep, carrying her to her room.
It was starting again. The voices.
You are unworthy.
Arawn, you belong to me.
Monster.
Kill them.
You will become what you always fought.
You cannot escape me. Do you hear?
You are only a weapon.
You deserve NOTHING.
My knee hit the floor. The manor rumbled in echo, as if it wanted to scream in my place. I hadn’t heard the voices in an eternity. I thought I’d silenced them. Zelda didn’t need to knock on the door—she walked straight into my skull.
All it had taken was a damned beat of my human heart.
The instant I lowered my guard, my heart spat every memory back at me like poison. Every emotion. Every flaw. Exploited.
Remember. What they did to you. What they destroyed. What your parents—
I shifted into my Cursed form and shattered the window to escape.
When I was a monster, I didn’t hear them anymore. The void had that advantage: it felt nothing. Unlike a heart that had only suffering to share.
A heart that was nothing but sucremort.