Chapter 13 Lord Imas
LORD IMAS
Consciousness returns like a drowning man breaking the surface of a frozen lake—gasping, violent, and painfully cold.
I am lying on the stone floor of my library. The fire is dead. The room smells of ancient dust and the sharp, coppery tang of fresh blood.
A hand touches my forehead. It is small, warm, and terrifyingly gentle.
I recoil.
My body reacts before my mind can catch up. I scramble backward, my boots scraping against the flagstones, until my spine hits the leg of a heavy reading table. I gasp, the air sawing in and out of my lungs, tasting of sulfur and my own bile.
"My Lord," Leora whispers. She is kneeling where I fell, her hands hovering in the air, uncertain. Her eyes—those damnable sapphire eyes—are wide with concern.
Not fear. Concern.
It makes me sick. A wave of nausea rolls through my gut, hot and oily. I am a Khuzuth Lord. I am the Master of this House. And I am cowering on the floor like a beaten dog before a human slave.
"Do not touch me," I snarl. My voice is a ruin, cracked and bleeding. "Do not ever touch me with those hands."
She flinches, withdrawing her hands to her chest. She clutches a scrap of charred leather—the remains of the book I burned. She knows.
"You're bleeding," she says softly.
I look down at myself. My tunic is stiff with it. Dark, drying stains map a geography of violence across my chest and sleeves. My hands are coated in crimson, the substance tacky between my fingers.
It is not my blood.
I stare at the red smear on my palm, and the memory of the last hour crashes into me with the force of a falling portcullis.
The Temple.
I close my eyes, but the darkness behind my eyelids offers no sanctuary. It only brings the image of the High Priest’s face into sharper focus.
The memory rises, dragging me back.
I remember riding the black stallion through the weeping streets of Lliandor, driving the beast until its flanks lathered with foam.
I didn't go to the main Temple of the Thirteen in the city center.
I went deeper. I went to the under-city, to the hidden shrine carved into the bedrock beneath the sewers, where the air is ripe with the scent of cloying incense and rotting offerings.
The sanctuary of the True Believers.
I remember staggering into the nave. The shadows there were alive, twisting with a sentience that usually comforted me. Today, they recoiled. They hissed at me, sensing the void where my connection to The Serpent used to be.
High Priest Varon was waiting by the obsidian altar. He is a creature of parchment skin and spider-thin limbs, his eyes milk-white with blindness, seeing only the Aether.
"Lord Imas," he rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering on stone. "You smell of emptiness."
I did not kneel. I could not. I marched to the altar and slammed my hand down on the cold stone.
"Fix it," I demanded.
I showed him the ring. The obsidian band, once a conduit that hummed with the chaotic song of the universe, was dead. It was just a rock. A piece of jewelry for a corpse.
Varon reached out, his skeletal fingers tracing the carving of The Serpent. He did not touch my skin. He pulled his hand back as if I were contagious.
"The god is silent in you," Varon murmured. He tilted his head, sniffing the air. "But He is not gone. He is... repulsed."
"Repulsed by what?" I demanded, though the sickness in my gut told me I already knew the answer.
"There is a scent on you, Imas. It is not perfume. It is not magic as we know it." Varon turned his blind face toward me. "It smells of Order. Of Stasis. It smells of the ancient enemy."
He walked around the altar, his movements fluid and unnerving. "You harbor a Purna."
The word hung in the damp air, heavy and lethal.
"She is a slave," I lied, my voice tight. "A tool I am dissecting."
"A tool does not sever the hand that wields it," Varon hissed. "She is anathema. Her very existence is an insult to the Chaos. She projects a poison that calcifies the spirit. She is turning your soul to stone, Imas. She is cutting the throat of your god."
He stopped in front of me. "You came to be fixed? There is only one cure for gangrene. You cut it out."
He reached into the folds of his robes and withdrew a dagger. It was not a weapon for combat. It was a ritual blade, curved and serrated, its handle wrapped in human skin. The metal was dark, drinking the meager light of the torches.
"The New Moon approaches," Varon said. "The Rite of the Blackened Heart. You wished to ascend? You wished to crush Lord Malek?"
He held the dagger out to me, handle first.
"Bring me her heart," Varon commanded. "Place it on this altar while it is still warm.
Let The Serpent taste the death of the anomaly.
Only blood of the Purna can wash the stain of her influence from your veins.
Do this, and your power will return tenfold.
You will be a vessel of such ruin that Malek will crumble before you. "
I stared at the blade. It was the answer. It was the salvation of my House, my legacy, my life. All I had to do was kill the girl who made the screaming stop.
"And if I do not?" I asked quietly.
Varon sneered. "Then you are Dfam. You are meat. And I will send the Temple Guard to tear your estate apart until we find the witch and burn her ourselves."
Burn her.
The image flashed in my mind—Leora, bound to a stake, the fire consuming the fragile line of her throat, the sapphire eyes turning black with agony.
Something in my chest fractured.
It wasn't a thought. It wasn't a decision. It was a reflex, as involuntary as breathing.
I took the dagger.
"I will not be Dfam," I whispered.
Varon smiled, a horrific stretching of thin lips. "Good. The Serpent loves a—"
I didn't let him finish.
I didn't use magic. I didn't have any. I used the brute, physical strength of a warrior who has forgotten how to be civilized.
I drove the serrated blade up, under his ribs, punching through the frail cage of his bones and into the black, shriveled organ of his heart.
Varon gasped, a wet, choking sound. His blind eyes widened. He grabbed my shoulders, his nails digging in, but he was frail. He was a creature of magic, and without time to cast, he was nothing.
I twisted the blade.
"She is mine," I snarled into his face as the life bled out of him. "She is mine to keep or mine to kill. But no one else touches her."
I shoved him away. He collapsed against the altar, sliding down to the floor, a heap of bloody robes.
I stood there, panting, the dagger dripping in my hand. The silence in the temple was absolute. The shadows in the corners writhed, agitated, confused by the bloodshed of their own priest.
I had killed a High Priest. I had defiled a holy sanctuary.
I looked at the dead man. I felt no remorse. I felt only a terrifying, cold clarity.
I grabbed the hem of his robe and wiped the blade clean, then shoved it into my sleeve. I turned and ran, the smell of his blood clinging to me like a second skin.
…
"My Lord?"
Leora’s voice pulls me back to the library.
I blink, the gray light of the room washing away the memory of the temple's gloom. But the blood is still on my hands. The dagger is still heavy against my forearm, hidden beneath the ruined velvet of my sleeve.
I look at her. She is watching me with that maddening, penetrating gaze. Her pupils are blown wide again, sensing the turmoil rolling off me, but she does not understand the source. She sees the blood, and she might assume I have been in a duel, perhaps a skirmish on the road.
She steps closer, ignoring my command to stay back.
"You're hurt," she whispers, her hand hovering over the dark stains on my tunic. "Let me—"
"Do not," I rasp. I push myself up, using the table for leverage. My legs feel like lead. I am physically exhausted, spiritually hollowed out.
"But the blood—"
"It is not mine," I snap.
I stand fully, towering over her. I want to intimidate her. I want to see her cower so I can remember what it feels like to be powerful.
But she doesn't cower. She looks at the red smear on my hands, and then she looks at my face. And the empathy hits me.
It isn't a wave this time. It is a slow, seeping warmth. She isn't trying to calm me. She is trying to comfort me. She feels the horror radiating off me, the jagged edges of my self-loathing, and instead of recoiling, she offers a silent, terrifying grace.
Stop it, I think, squeezing my eyes shut. Stop looking at me like I am worth saving.
If she knew whose blood this was—if she knew I had just butchered a High Priest on his own altar to keep him from hunting her—she would not be looking at me with concern. She would be running.
"What happened?" she asks, her voice trembling. "Where did you go?"
"I went to see a man about a cure," I lie, the words tasting like ash. "It seems the price was higher than I anticipated."
I walk around the table, putting distance between us. I cannot be near her. The gravity of her presence is too strong. Every second I spend in her orbit, I feel the resolve I forged in the temple disintegrating.
The silence in my head is absolute now. It is not just her influence dampening the noise. It is abandonment. The Serpent has turned His face away. I am alone in the dark.
"The Rite of the Blackened Heart," I mutter, staring at the empty hearth where I burned the book. "The New Moon."
"What is that?" she asks.
I turn to look at her. She stands amidst the ashes, small and pale and infinitely dangerous. She has no idea that she is the centerpiece of the ritual. She has no idea that Varon’s dying breath was a demand for her heart.
"It is a doorway," I say cryptically. "Or an execution."
I slip my hand into my sleeve. My fingers close around the hilt of the ceremonial dagger. The handle, wrapped in human skin, feels warm against my palm. It hums with a dark, hungry resonance, urging me to finish what Varon started.
Cut it out, the memory of the priest hisses in my mind. Wash the stain from your veins.
I could do it. I could do it right here, in the quiet of the library. I could drive this blade into her chest and end the silence. I could offer her death to The Serpent as an apology for my heresy.
It is the only logical path. It is the singular way to restore my magic before Malek strikes.
I step toward her.
Leora watches me. She sees the shift in my posture, the sudden stillness that overtakes me. She sees the way my hand lingers in my sleeve. Her eyes dart to the hidden weapon, sensing the metal even if she cannot see it.
For a second, the empathy falters, replaced by a sharp spike of instinctual fear.
Good. She should be afraid.
She does not run, though. She stands her ground, lifting her chin, exposing the bruised column of her throat where I marked her.
"Imas," she says softly.
She uses my name. Not my title.
The sound of it goes through me like a spear. It anchors me to the floor. It shatters the resolve I was trying to build.
I stop. I grip the dagger so tight my hand shakes. I am a monster. I am a killer. I should end this now.
But I cannot make my arm move.
I stare at her, hating her, needing her, the dagger heavy and useless in my sleeve.
"The New Moon is in three days," I whisper.
I do not tell her that she is the sacrifice. I do not tell her that I am holding the knife that is meant to carve out her heart.
I simply look at her, trapped in the silence she created, knowing that I have burned the world down for her, and terrified that it still won't be enough to save us.