Nineteen #3
“Trust is irrelevant,” he says eventually. “It’s not required.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“He knows what I am,” Nyxen says. “That’s enough.”
“Which is?”
There is another pause. Longer this time.
Then, quieter. “Someone who doesn’t leave.”
I frown. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
We walk in silence for a few steps, and the sound of water grows louder.
I can’t let it go. “Please,” I say. “I want to understand him.”
Nyxen exhales sharply through his nose. Not quite anger. Not quite restraint. “It is not only my story to tell.”
“You said you would die for him.”
Something shifts in his voice. “I almost did, once.”
“Tell me,” I say again, not sure why I need to know.
He doesn’t argue. “When he was a child, the Crown—Kael’s father—sent him to be trained by the Blessed. No heir had been sent to them before. But Kael was soft then. Too soft for the Crown’s liking. He barely survived.”
“Why would his own father do that to him?”
“It’s hard to say.” He exhales. “Do you know of the Withering?” he asks.
“No,” I answer.
“It’s what happens to a Crown when they’ve been in power too long. The magic addles their mind. Makes them angry, volatile—different.”
An image of the Crown of Light comes to mind. A barely-there puppet, collapsed on his throne. The Withering, he called it. That’s not what I know it as.
“We call it the Unravelling in the Light Dominion,” I interrupt. “But our Crown is not cruel. He’s barely present, sitting on his throne like a broken doll.”
“I see,” Nyxen says. “The Light Crown has been in power for many centuries. No one from the Light Dominion has ever won the Blood Rites. Not in any record I’ve seen. Kael’s father, by comparison, won his Rites only a century ago.”
I huff in disbelief. “Kael’s father is over a hundred years old?”
“The Shadow Crown is ageless. He looks no older than me. The magic of the Crown grants eternal life... at the cost of your sanity.”
“Winning doesn’t sound much better than losing, to be honest,” I spit.
“Kael is not the first prince to be sent to the Blood Rites, you understand.”
My stomach clenches. What kind of person sends their own children to die? Obviously, the kind so warped by power they’ve lost all sense.
The sound of the water is overwhelming now, making it difficult to hear, but I want more answers while he is still willing to give them. “So, what happened to Kael, then?”
“The Blessed...” He stops. “They called it training. But they were poisoning him,” he says.
“What?”
“Small amounts. At first.”
“Why would they—”
“To see what would happen. They treated him like an experiment,” Nyxen says.
His fist hits the stone wall before I realise he’s moved.
“Did you protect him, then?” I ask.
“I was forbidden. I was only there to observe. The test was to see if he could survive.”
Nyxen’s hand lands on my shoulder. “He did,” Nyxen says. “But what survived was not what went in.”
His fingers tighten once, then loosen. “He couldn't move. For weeks.”
The water roars somewhere ahead of us. “What did they do?”
Nyxen’s breath catches, so faintly I almost miss it. “They fed it to him.”
“Fed him what?” I ask.
“Inhibitium,” he murmurs. “They put it in his food. They wanted to see how much he could take.”
My stomach turns cold. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
“I tried,” he says, and the words come out wrong. “They didn’t stop.”
The darkness presses closer. “What did they do to him?”
“Whatever they wanted.” The answer is too quiet. Too flat.
“They beat him,” he says. “Whipped him.”
The water pounds against stone.
“Cut him.”
His hand leaves my shoulder. “His father didn’t care,” he says. “Whether it was the Withering or not...”
The silence after that is worse than the dark.
“He let it happen.”
Nyxen’s voice becomes a whisper. “I was beaten within an inch of my life after I got him out.”
I want to tell him that it’s monstrous, but it’s pointless. Maybe that was when cruelty learned to call itself duty.
“You think it’s cruelty,” Nyxen says, like he’s heard the thought anyway. “It isn’t. Shadow Dominion life is hard. It requires resilience. But they went too far.”
I can’t even speak. Too far? It’s sadistic.
“When Kael recovered, he was changed. Some say broken. All his scars are from that time.”
I picture the way Kael’s tattoos writhe over his skin, the places where the ink looks like it’s crawling out of old wounds. It makes me sick. I have never hated the Crowns, or what they represent, more.
“Kael told me his father forced him to kill another boy when he was just a child.”
Nyxen says nothing for a while. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “Kael has seen no shortage of evil.”
The tunnel opens abruptly into a wide chamber, and I summon my light, an orb glowing softly in my palm. The ceiling is lost in shadow, the walls glistening with wetness. At the centre lies a black, rippling pool, fed by a waterfall cascading from somewhere high above and churning the water below.
We skirt the edge of the pool, our reflections warping and hollowing in the light as it fights against the dark.
“Are you afraid?” Nyxen asks, out of nowhere.
I start to say no, but the truth won’t let me. Lies are getting harder these days. “Yes,” I say. “Always.”
He gives a short nod. “Good. Survival depends on fear.”
We keep moving. The cave narrows again, and I lose track of how far we’ve gone, how long we’ve been underground.
After a while, Nyxen says, “If I die—”
He stops. Like he didn’t mean to say it.
“Stay with him,” he says.
The request stops me dead. “What?”
“With Kael,” he says. “He won’t—” He exhales. “Just... don’t let him be alone.”
“I don’t think I’m strong enough,” I say, and my voice cracks.
“No one ever is,” he says. “That doesn’t absolve you.”
Nyxen’s hand is on my shoulder again, and this time it doesn’t feel like a threat. “Don’t let him lose himself.”
I want to promise, but the words catch in my throat.
The ground trembles. At first, it’s so subtle I think I imagined it. Then a low rumble rolls through the cave, and pebbles start to rain from the ceiling.
“Move,” Nyxen commands, voice sharp.
We run, stumbling through the dark. The tremor worsens, stone cracking overhead. I hear the roar of water behind us—the pool must have overflowed. Nyxen is ahead, running with a speed I can barely match.
The cave narrows so tight I have to turn sideways to fit. My shirt snags on a jagged rock, ripping open the side. Blood beads and drips down my ribs, hot and sticky.
I hear Nyxen shout from ahead, then nothing.
I crawl through the pinch-point, scraping the skin off my arms. On the other side, the tunnel opens up again. Nyxen is there, but he’s trapped beneath a slab of stone that must have fallen from the ceiling. He isn’t moving.
I rush to him. He’s breathing, at least, though his face is twisted in pain.
“Can you move?” I ask, panic tearing through my voice. “Can you channel?”
He shakes his head. “My arms are pinned. Get out,” he orders. “Go!”
“I won’t leave you.”
He grits his teeth. “If you stay, you’ll die too. It’s pointless.”