Chapter 22 Abomination
twenty-two
Abomination
Zydar
I hadn’t stepped into that room again. But the memories hadn't faded.
If anything, they'd grown stronger. And now, every time I passed the threshold, I thought of the way Mira's mouth had curled against mine.
How she tasted on my tongue. How her teeth bit down on my shoulder and her hands tangled in my feathers. It was enough to drive me mad.
I could not look at her now. Not like this.
The drowsiness crept through her like a fog that refused to lift, blurring the edges of her words, dulling the spark that had once set entire rooms alight.
I told myself it was the healers and their measures, that it would pass, that the color would return to her cheeks with rest and broth and time.
The lie tasted like old iron on my tongue and still I swallowed it.
So I chose not to see it. I chose steel over skin and storm over scent.
I filled my nights with councils and drills and maps, with the ugly comfort of strategy that asks nothing of the heart.
When court candles guttered and captains dragged themselves to bed, I went to the grounds where no one could follow.
The mountain kept its own counsel, and I let it take mine.
The arena woke as I crossed the threshold.
The floor mirrored the sky, a sheet of dark glass slick with a sheen of rain.
Weapons climbed out of light. A spear with a head like a shard of moon.
A hooked blade that had once belonged to a rain court duelist I had put in the ground.
A broad sword cut in the old style, heavy enough to break a back on the lift.
I let them hover at the edge of reach, then drew none of them.
The arena did not care which of its toys I played with. Only that I chose.
Choose, or the darkness eats you alive. I could almost hear my father hiss into the quiet. He did not haunt me, but his lessons did. The lessons of the dead always do. They have nothing else to leave.
I took a deep breath. Let the mountain's breath fill my lungs. Here, there were no questions. No politics or power plays or treaties to break. Here, I could be exactly what I was, what I had been made into by war and time and blood. What I had always been.
But tonight had different plans. It made that clear by the scream that tore through the silence, shattering it like a hammer to a mirror. I tensed. That sound did not belong here. It was not a sound of the mountain, but of the man, and it came from somewhere deep inside the castle.
It came from the south yard where the mortal quarters huddled beneath the lee of the training terraces, a cluster of roofs and lanterns that never stopped creaking in the wind.
Another scream followed it and cut off with a sound that belonged in a charnel house.
I had heard enough death to know what it was.
My wings stretched out behind me. A single stroke of them carried me from the arena and sent me soaring into the dark.
When I broke into the open the wind hit like a slap and the scent hit harder.
Rot was always a taste for me before it was a smell, a film on the teeth, a sour that sat behind the tongue and roughened speech.
This carried a second note, bright and metallic, like gold melted and poured into a wound. It made me want to spit.
The second scream was already dying when I landed on the edge of the roof and peered into the courtyard below.
It was a narrow, cramped space, with the wall of the training terrace on one side and the back of the barracks on the other.
In the far corner was a door that led into the servant's wing, a door that was currently hanging off its hinges and smoking faintly.
Two figures lay motionless in front of the door. They were both fae, and from the way they were dressed, they were guards. Their bodies were mangled, twisted at impossible angles, and their skin was a sickly shade of gray.
Lanterns swung wild on their chains as the yard below bucked with motion.
A dome I knew well had cracked along its seam, panes pushed outward, ribs bent as if a fist had punched up from the floor.
Mortals spilled into the open in torn shifts and bare feet, half falling, half pulled, the way a tide drags anything not nailed down.
Healers shouted orders that broke into jagged bits and scattered on the flagstones, and guards tried to form ranks where there was no space to stand still. In the center of that chaos, a shape crouched in a crater full of shattered tile and rain.
It should have been a girl. The height was right.
The curve of the shoulders was right. Even the fall of hair at the nape might have fooled the eye for a heartbeat, pale and fine and clotted with wet.
Everything else belonged to a nightmare that had decided to wear a memory for skin.
The spine was wrong, arched and ridged, knobs pushing through flesh like a row of stones under thin ice.
The arms were too long by a hand and a half, one elbow backward, one forward, wrists swollen where veins tried to hold light they were never meant to carry.
The face did not have eyes, only sockets packed with gold that seeped and smoked, running down the cheeks in slow threads that bit the air.
Wings had torn their way out through the back, thin as parchment.
It lifted its head. It was not blind. It sensed heat and motion and power the way a hawk senses a vole under snow. When it found me it stilled and then it smiled. The mouth had too many teeth and all of them were wrong.
The first guard who tried to bar its path died before his spear finished rising.
The creature moved with a lurching grace, as if every limb had to learn its own steps with each yard of ground.
It took the guard by the jaw and pressed until bone gave.
It would have done the same to the next and the next, but I stepped off the walk and fell the distance in a breath, wings cutting the drop into a glide that ended in a spark of lightning where my boots hit stone.
"Enough."
The thing turned toward me with a sound like breaking glass. It leaped.
I met it mid-air, hands slamming into its shoulders, driving it down. Impact cracked stone and threw up granite chips. It writhed beneath me but I grabbed one wing and tore. Membrane parted like wet silk while it opened its mouth in a soundless scream.
Lightning through the throat should have ended it. The bolt severed every nerve that kept it breathing. Its back snapped in convulsion that rattled my wing bones.
It did not die.
Gold poured from the sockets, and where it hit stone, granite bubbled and pitted. I could hear a child crying somewhere in the wreckage. The creature heard it too. Its head swiveled toward the sound with predatory focus.
No.
I launched myself into the air with one wingbeat and came down behind it, both feet driving into its spine with enough force to crater the flagstones.
Vertebrae cracked like dry wood. It spun faster than anything broken should move, claws raking across my ribs, parting leather and finding flesh beneath.
Blood ran hot down my side but I was already moving. I caught its wrist, twisted until bone snapped, and drove my knee up into the elbow joint. The arm folded backward with a wet pop.
It tried to rake me with the other hand. I caught that wrist too, spun the creature around, and slammed it face-first into the courtyard wall. Stone cracked. Its skull held.
The thing pushed back against the wall and launched itself at me again, moving with broken-doll jerks. I sidestepped, grabbed it by the back of the neck, and hurled it across the courtyard. It hit the opposite wall with a wet thud and slid down, leaving a smear of gold and something darker.
Still it climbed to its feet.
Thunder loves weight more than lightning loves precision.
I called down the storm that had been building above us, not as a bolt but as a hammer of compressed air and sound.
It hit the creature square in the chest and drove it through the stone wall behind it.
Granite blocks tumbled and dust rose in choking clouds.
In the sudden quiet, I heard it trying to speak from the rubble. Its mouth worked through shapes that meant nothing until one word came clear.
"Miralyte."
I let the next bolt rise with no restraint. The sky above the dome had been hoarding white fire, and I called it down with a flick of thought that tasted like copper. It struck the creature clean through the sternum and opened a hole in the chest big enough to put a fist through.
It climbed back to its knees. I had broken the body but not the will, and the will here was not human, not fae, not anything.
I changed the angle. Lightning loves distance and straight lines, but thunder loves weight. The next strike hit its temple in a wave of force that broke the skull and drove it back to the ground. The mouth had not stopped moving, even when the jaw was shattered and the tongue was split.
"I'm sorry," I said, as I drove my foot down on the head and crushed it. The body twitched once and went still. The flesh fell off the bones in long strips that flared and died.
When the body finally crumpled, there was nothing left of it. No blood. No meat. Not even ash. The last traces of the creature burned to a fine powder that blew away like a cloud of silver flecks on the night air. I stood there for a moment, my breathing heavy, my hands clenched at my sides.
Healers edged closer when they saw that I was not moving. One bowed so low her forehead nearly touched the stone. Another could not stop staring at my hands. A third signaled to the guards to lift the bodies and carry the living inside.
“Quarantine this yard,” I said, and my voice felt like it had to travel up out of a well to be heard.
“No one in. No one out. Runners to the domes. All patients treated with sun touched blood are to be kept under warded lock.” I pointed to the body.
“Wrap it in cold iron weave. I want it sealed so tight its shadow cannot find a gap.”
The smell sharpened as they lifted the dead.
I inhaled through my teeth and tasted the truth that had been chewing at the edges of my mind since I saw the first glow in those corrupted veins.
Mira’s blood had bought hours and days and a handful of nights where there would have been none.
It had also fed a fire that did not belong in this world and should never have found a spark here.