Chapter 22
Evie
Reality reshaped itself, and I opened my eyes. Kael held me close, his fingers threading through my hair with unusual care.
“There she is,” he murmured against my ear. “You are breathtaking when you faint on my cock.”
Heat rose to my cheeks. Had I just fainted?
I didn’t know it was possible to be undone so utterly that breath and soul both fled me. Kael could channel the deepest echoes, the purest release, and take my breath away until the world collapsed into stars and shadow all at once.
I found solace in that surrender, in the fragile balance between life and oblivion. It was both thrilling and terrifying. My body had learned a secret language, one only Kael could speak, and only I could understand.
His eyes—dark, fathomless, and unguarded—held a knowing that sent a shiver down my spine.
He understood the confession I had just bared to him, and for the first time since I had known him, the storm within him had stilled.
He was quiet. At a semblance of peace, though the world outside remained in chaos.
“Kael,” I whispered, my voice trembling with all I could not say. “I… I never knew it could be like this.”
He smiled, a slow, knowing curve that promised both danger and delight. “There is far more I can make you feel, beautiful,” he said, his voice a low, soothing rumble. “I will explore every shadow you crave, and listen to every whisper of pleasure and pain your body makes.”
It was fortunate that my fertile days lay weeks ahead. We had ample time to test his words, to learn all he meant by them.
He took me again that night, gentler this time. He let me ride him while his hands, lips, tongue, and teeth mapped every inch of me. I let him pour his power into me, impossibly, wondrously so, and each time the lightning struck him back, I felt the broken pieces of him knit closer together.
I fell asleep in his arms, lulled by the slow rhythm of his breathing, and for once, everything felt right. Because for once, my power had gone quiet, too.
We left Stenhalla before dawn, when the air was still bruised with night and the peaks above us wore thin crowns of cloud. Grison stayed behind in the stables. The trail to the summit was too steep and broken for hooves, and we would make better time on foot.
We ascended the narrow path that clung to the valley’s cliffs, each step bringing colder air from the heights.
My breath steamed in pale plumes, curling and fading like ghosts in the wind.
The wood elves had mended my torn clothes and left me a wool jacket, thick as a pelt.
Now, high on the trail where the wind cut like glass, I was glad for their kindness.
The mountain loomed above us, quiet and listening, its bones jutting through the soil like the ribs of a buried god. Soon we rejoined the trail winding toward the summit, its curves carved by centuries of wind and rain.
We circled the tainted ruins of Vall?ne without a glance.
A blackness seeped through the grass, spreading like rot beneath the morning dew.
We climbed among scattered boulders, victims of some ancient rockslide, and marked every place where coils of tar pulsed faintly between the stones, the mountain itself bleeding slow poison.
Kael said nothing. He moved with a hunter’s precision, silent and sure, an elven sword strapped across his back catching the pale light.
He led without looking back, though I knew he counted every one of my steps.
I paused often, feigning interest in the terrain while my legs trembled from the climb and from what they remembered of last night.
I told myself it was only fatigue. He simply had greater endurance.
For a mage, he was stronger, steadier, than any Befest guard I’d ever met.
By the time the sun reached its zenith, the path ahead was drowned in blackness.
We’d gone beyond the tree line, where the last stunted pines clung to the stone like beggars to warmth.
The rocks were veined with tar, and the air hung heavy with the scent of damp earth and rot.
Even the sky seemed dimmed, thin flakes of ash drifting through the air like pale insects.
Before us, the trail climbed steeply among boulders and patches of melting snow. The summit loomed close now, half-hidden behind a colossal rock chipped and weathered by centuries of ice and snow.
When I turned, the world below looked impossibly small. The forest stretched like a dark sea, the tainted village no more than a blemish among the trees. Farther still, Befest melted into the horizon, devoured by haze and the shimmer of the distant ocean.
I stopped, breath uneven, watching the valley below. An itch crawled between my shoulder blades, the sense of being seen. Kael stood beside me, silent as ever, so it wasn’t him. Maybe it was whatever waited at the summit. Whatever root of corruption had taken hold of the mountain’s heart.
I thought of the visions I’d had so far.
The tower at the summit. The magi. Kael.
I hadn’t gathered the courage to tell him, partly because I feared what I’d learn, how deep his part in it ran.
Yet the time was coming when I would have to ask, and his silence pressed on me like a weight I couldn’t shake.
“What’s up there?” I asked, voice thin and uneven, still catching my breath.
He frowned, caught off guard, but the expression eased quickly. “Drachenfels Keep.”
The name meant nothing to me, but the way he said it told me everything. He knew that place. He’d been there.
“What is that?” I pressed.
“An old mage spire,” he said after a moment. “Built centuries ago by an archmage obsessed with weather magic.”
I hesitated, words caught behind my teeth. I could feel the question forming like a bruise in my throat, but I wasn’t sure I wanted his answer.
Something terrible had happened up there, something foul enough to stain the mountain black. I could feel it in the stones, in the vines, in the silence between us. And somehow Kael, and maybe the other magisters, had been part of it.
It had to be tied to the Breath of Death.
“What happened up there, Kael?” My voice carried the accusation I couldn’t quite hide.
He looked at me then, eyes unreadable, as if to ask whether I truly wished to know.
“You will have to tell me at some point,” I said after a breath. “We’re going up there, and I will find out.”
He took a step closer, but before he could answer, something above us screamed and roared at once. The same metallic howl we’d heard in Vall?ne.
Both our heads snapped toward the sound.
The ground shuddered. Rocks shifted like restless waves, pushed by something buried beneath. Black vines burst from the cracks, writhing together, twisting into the shape of another vine blight creature.
Kael moved instantly, blade drawn, steel meeting root with a sound halfway between a clash and a wet tear.
The creature lunged, vines striking for his throat, but Kael caught one in his hand and sent a pulse of power through it.
The jolt rippled through the whole mass, tearing it apart and scattering its remains across the stones.
But like before, in the tainted village, the vines gathered again. They slithered under the rocks, pooling, reforming into not one but two of those feral, man-shaped horrors.
I stood frozen, useless, while Kael fought. Storm clouds thickened overhead, drawn by his fury. Lightning cracked the sky and struck where his sword fell. I shut my eyes, hands over my ears, as the world split open with thunder.
When the flashes faded, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Kael’s touch, his first since last night.
“Are you alright?” His voice had softened, concern smoothing the edge that usually cut through every word.
I nodded, though my heart still thrashed. He had turned the creatures to ash in seconds. I’d done nothing—
A sudden hiss. A vine shot from the ground, streaking toward him.
“Watch out!” I screamed, thrusting out my hand without thinking.
It happened all at once. Power flared through me, from the mark on my shoulder to the tips of my fingers. Lightning coursed through my veins, searing bright, and a bolt split the air. It struck the vine mid-lunge, shattering it into burning fragments.
Kael stared at me, eyes wide, lips parted in disbelief. I stared back at my hand, trembling, still crackling faintly with light.
Had I just done that?
Another impossible thing.
“Not only do you mirror my power,” Kael murmured, as if to himself, studying me like an unsolvable spell, “but you can wield it.”
I looked to the ash on the ground, to the vines that hissed and slithered back toward the summit. “Why are vine blights infesting these lands? What are they doing at the summit?”
Kael didn’t answer.
I stepped toward him, forcing him to meet my gaze. “Why, Kael, do I keep seeing you in echoes, at the keep, surrounded by storms?”
“These creatures are blightborn,” he said at last, his tone carrying the weight of a confession. “They sprout from deep-rooted evil. And yes, Evangelina, something happened up there. And it is best if I show you.”
He brushed past me, striding toward the trail, expecting me to follow. And I did, because I knew Kael wouldn’t tell me in words.
We climbed higher through sliding rock and crooked black vines.
When I stumbled, he caught my hand and didn’t let go.
His grip was firm, grounding, the only warm thing left in the mountain’s breath.
We climbed the final stretch together until the path widened into a hollow among jagged stones shaped like broken teeth.
There, the summit leveled out. And carved from the mountain itself, Drachenfels Keep rose before us.
It was drowning in blackness.
A circular tower of stone, nine stories high, its metal gate corroded and half torn from its hinges. Through the gaping arch, vines coiled and writhed, choking the stones, swallowing the summit whole. It looked less like something overgrown than something vomited up from the mountain’s depths.
It was alive. The oozing tar pulsed through the mass, a slow heartbeat beneath the rock. The stench hit suddenly, sweet and foul, and I gagged, covering my mouth.
Kael didn’t flinch. He breathed it like air, as though the rot had become part of him, as though he’d lived with it for years.
He stepped forward, and the vines recoiled, curling away from his boots. They parted for him, like beasts recognizing their master.
Then he turned to me, his eyes shadowed with guilt and something darker. “Do you hear them?” he asked softly.
I shook my head. All I heard was the squelch of shifting roots.
“Their groans,” he whispered. “Their anguish and agony… Or is it just in my head?”
I steadied my breath, closing my eyes against the reek. My power, quiet now after last night, stirred faintly beneath my skin. It needed awakening, so I reached for it. The air changed when I did.
And then I heard it too.
Time stuttered. The air itself keened, a muffled chorus of voices strangled, unallowed to speak. The silence was not empty. It was suffocating, full of abandoned ghosts too weary to wail.
Kael walked on, and I followed. Together we approached the corroded gates.
The walls pulsed with tar and shadow. Vines slithered along the stone, uncovering narrow windows, arrow slits, and broken cracks where thin blades of light cut through the dark. The tower’s heart was hollow, a spiral of shattered stairs winding upward into unseen chambers.
Then, without warning, the ruin flared with sunlight.
The hall revealed itself, tables blackened by fire, shelves collapsed beneath the weight of ash.
Torn books and splintered tools lay scattered like bones.
A staircase gaped open into the darkness below, where the vines grew black and thick, crawling outward from the depths like something long starved and sickened.
Kael exhaled slowly, his gaze fixed on the staircase diving into the dark below. Then he turned to me. He looked both ready to speak and terrified of what his own words might unleash.
I waited. I would let him tell me, though now I could hear what he heard, the anguish that haunted these walls, echoing through stone and shadow. Their groans…
And with all the fragments the echoes had shown me, I could begin to piece together the story.
A story Kael and the Court had buried deep beneath the mountain.
“You won’t see me the same after I tell you,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard his voice tremble.
“I’ll see you as someone who told me the truth.” And that was all that mattered.
The truth Kael had buried.
The truth that gnawed at his bones each night.
The truth behind how the cure to the Breath of Death had been made.