Chapter 10
ALARYK
The intoxicating problem with rage was that sometimes I could sink into it so deep and never want to surface. For me, rage was like pain. And pain centered me. It gave me something to focus on when I felt like I was out of control of a circumstance.
Pain was my oldest and most reliable companion. And rage fed it.
So, while I felt the fury whipping through me, manifesting my magic quickly, I also felt in control. A calm in the maelstrom of my anger. I wasn’t like others. I didn’t yell or grow violent when I was angered.
I punished quietly, feeling a swell of malicious pleasure in its wake.
“What did you do?” I asked again, my voice low. I felt a touch in the back of my mind. Samryn. Trying to break my attention…but once I latched onto something, it was difficult to let go, and so I ignored him, shutting off the bond with a firm rejection.
“N-Nothing,” the Dakkari girl gasped out, struggling in the grip of my own magic, while her own eyes glowed with the remnants of hers. “He…he fell. I saw him. I—”
She gasped when I delved deeper. Thoughts were not always clear.
They were more like impressions, like footsteps in the earth after it rained, but I’d learned to read them.
To fill in the gaps, to bend the mind to my own will.
Sometimes I took it upon myself to fill in those empty places with my own wants and desires. Like filling a mold.
And I did it right then, urging the truth to fall from her lips.
“He fell,” she whispered again, staring up at me with pretty, glassy eyes that reflected a withering moon behind the clouds. “He’s hurt. I can feel it. Like rot.”
My stomach clenched. She was telling the truth.
I released her from my power, wrenching it away, and she fell to the earth, struggling to breathe.
I whipped around to look at Samryn. I could still feel the touch of her magic along his jaw, the crawling warmth of it. He’d allowed her to touch him?
Opening the connection, I felt how weak he was. I felt the surge of my own guilt mingle with it. He’d hid this from me until he couldn’t any longer?
I’d pushed him too hard, I knew. We’d been on patrol for days in Harta, and then we’d come to the Arsadia. He’d done so willingly. He’d never given me any indication of his growing weakness.
And yet…I should have known better. I knew from last time how quickly the curse spread once it gathered its strength. Exponentially. Just this morning, we’d flown over the Arsadia.
And by nightfall, Samryn could hardly raise his head from the earth.
I’d been roused from a restless sleep, fueled partially by my lust but mostly by my dissatisfaction from my encounter with Rivenna.
I took her as my lover in Grymia because she shared certain proclivities when it came to sex.
But even still, I was growing more and more restless, the anger coming quick and hard and merciless.
And when I spent it inside her body, I didn’t feel the relief I usually did.
I’d stumbled from Rivenna’s home, leaving her sprawled on her bed where I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, lacing up my trews as I’d sprinted toward Samryn’s call. I’d left my tunic behind in my haste.
Rot, the Dakkari girl had said. A peculiar word that had me rounding back on her, stalking to where she was sprawled.
“What did you feel?” I asked, crouching down to meet her eyes, only feeling marginally guilty for unleashing the full force of my magic on her. It must have been…shocking.
“Don’t,” she whispered, having the audacity to glare up at me, her finger pointing in accusation, even though it trembled. “Don’t do that again.”
“I will do whatever I please,” I hissed softly, “if I think my Elthika is being threatened.”
I thought my eyes might’ve flickered with heartstone energy because hers went wide. “I’m telling you the truth. I would never hurt him! I was trying to help him, you bastard.”
My nostrils flared.
“What did you feel?” I growled, repeating the question, feeling my frustration finally snap. A rare moment of lost patience.
“Rot,” she growled right back, making me still. “Sickness. Disease. Pain and waste. He’s dying.”
The forest floor met my backside when I fell, untrusting of my own legs to keep me steady. The words weren’t anything I didn’t already know.
But…hearing them spoken from another’s lips…it felt final. It felt certain.
And I felt the grief. Riding me hard, sitting on my chest until I felt like my lungs had collapsed and I couldn’t find the air.
“But I can help him,” came her voice.
My head snapped up as I trained my gaze on her.
“I can try,” she amended, raising her chin. She didn’t want to meet my eyes, I could discern that clearly. But she did, bravely, though it was tinged with her righteous anger.
“How?” I rasped, grasping onto a small, slippery thread of hope I didn’t dare feel.
“He’s in a lot of pain,” she told me. It felt like a blade to my own chest. “I tried to root out what’s causing him so much of it, but he’s fighting me, using me to help find relief. It feels like a dam of a river. And now that I’ve unblocked some of it, he’s desperate to find a pathway out.”
What she described…how could I have been so blind to it?
Because the proud creature wouldn’t have let you see it, I knew. For him to get to this state, to finally expose his pain…he couldn’t bear it anymore. Perhaps it had been exacerbated by how hard I’d been pushing him, with very little rest.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I want to help him,” she said, rising to her feet.
Her eyes were still a little glassy, perhaps from the wine I’d seen her drink at the feast. I remembered her wide smile as she’d danced, remembered thinking that she had a special talent for making strangers like her.
She’d had no problem fitting in at a feast full of them.
And I had envied her for that gift as I’d watched her dance and sway in the crowd.
I’d been…enthralled, though I’d never admit it.
“What do you want really?” I asked her, standing to meet her, to gaze down into those eyes so she wouldn’t misunderstand my meaning. “Because nothing is freely given.”
“Your Elthika is suffering, and you want to talk about payment?” She glared, her eyes like ice. “Get out of my way.”
I was too surprised to respond as she pushed past me. I felt the shocking heat of her shoulder against the bare skin of my chest as she nudged me back, perhaps purposefully and with intended force.
I trapped any hope I felt in a fist as I watched her approach Samryn. I could feel the magic radiate off her like a hum. The energy made my flesh prickle uncomfortably, my own power beating at my bones to be let out…but I didn’t want to dare risk her helping my Elthika.
Blue light glowed off Samryn’s scales. The hair on the back of my neck rose. Where Rivenna had bitten me, on my shoulder, hard enough to draw blood, ached as my heart pounded. The base of my spine, where my tail had once been, tingled, making my flesh itch.
The forest grew quiet. Still. Like the life had been sucked out of it.
I heard the exhale of my own breath, loud. I didn’t have to open up my own magic to know Amaia’s was a powerful thing. I hadn’t felt power like hers in a long, long time.
Samryn made the first sound, a loud cry I’d never heard before, aching and raw, just as her back bowed. An unseen wind rose in the clearing, whipping her hair around her face, but when I strode toward her side, I knew her eyes were unseeing.
“So much,” she whispered, tears beginning to drip from her eyes, tracking down her cheeks in little rivers. “I can take it. Give some to me. Let me help you.”
A guttural sound left my throat as I rounded to Samryn, looking into his eyes even as his head thrashed. His pupils were blown wide, reflecting the glow of her own magic.
I couldn’t help it. I unspooled my power. If I could take some of the pain for the both of them, maybe it would help her.
I opened the flood of my magic.
I heard her scream. I felt the flood of aching muck infuse itself into my own veins. And I felt her, a pure river of heartstone energy sweeping through.
It was building. Building. The pain came. Searing. Like it was slowly eating my body from the inside out. I wanted to bellow with the suffering that Samryn was experiencing. I wanted to marvel at the pain that Amaia was taking on for him.
It seized up every part of my body, making my jaw grit tight. I couldn’t help him. But maybe I could help her.
If only a little.
Her magic might’ve been pure, but it was also a wild thing. Untamed. Untrained. I felt it begin to falter against the mightiness of this…almost certain death.
All the while, Samryn’s groans began to quiet. I felt a strange sense of relief, felt the rise and fall of his breath in my own chest.
Amaia’s tears turned to blood.
And when I saw her sway, I broke the connection to catch her. She fell limp in my arms, her eyes closed, cheeks stained in red.
Samryn collapsed too, his mighty body rumbling the earth.
Only when I saw both their chests rise and fall could I breathe again too.