Chapter Eight- Blood
There is a darkness so infinite that falling through it stretches through time. A darkness that crawls in and suffocates, that summons the air from your lungs and blood from your body.
This darkness has claimed me. My life’s blood abandons me as I heave and sputter to rid myself of it. Gasping for air makes it worse.
Blood. That’s all I know. Blood.
Other than that, Thorne is dead. I watched him go over the edge; I backed away.
Past that, there’s nothing. I don’t even remember turning my back on him after I heard his body harshly collide with the earth far below.
Blood gurgles up from my stomach, forcing its way out of my mouth.
But since I can’t see anything in front of me, I don’t even know where the blood lands.
There could possibly be a floor beneath me but it could also be cold packed ground.
I scramble around like a mole, searching with my hands for anything to tell me where I am.
My body betrays me again as if needing to purge itself of its own life blood.
I sputter against what I think is a tree in front of me but I still can’t see.
There’s no sound, no hint of light for my eyes to adjust to.
I feel what I instinctively know is blood begin to trickle from my eyes, weakening me.
When I try to stand, my knees give way but at least there’s room to do so.
My magic begins to go haywire, snakes manifesting around me.
They coil around my arms and legs as if to urge me to just lie down.
I try to tell them to go, to be gone. They don’t listen and I don’t know what’s happening.
The world spins around me as what I think is the hundredth snake uncoils from the palm of my hand.
Fuck. I’ve never experienced such raw turmoil, such weakness.
Losing consciousness does not give me respite, but instead casts me into a shapeless place. It’s impossibly bright, almost white but not a color that exists in the real world.
“Harrow Darkbloom of The Venomwoods,” comes a chilling female voice. Her voice is everywhere; it is the very essence of this place.
“What do you want from me?” I spin around looking for anything but only seeing empty space.
“Thorian of Netherhelm is not yours to kill,” she informs me.
“Queen Ivy…?” Hers is a voice that hasn’t been heard in decades, and I doubt my own ears. And yet, I recognize the way she says his name immediately.
“Silence,” she shushes me. Am I dead?
“You have cruelly undermined the hands of fate, Harrow,” her voice is full of disappointment.
My mind swims. How is she doing this?
“I had to protect my home!”
“I see only your thirst for blood!” She roars.
And she’s right, my hunger to spill noble blood runs deep. But this… this thing with Thorne. I only pursued it earnestly because I was hired to.
“You must know what he asked of me!” I reason.
“I know not of the one who hired you. Nor do I care,” she hisses. I find myself stumbling backward.
And then it hits me.
Is not mine to kill.
Is.
Not was.
Something like hope swells in my chest.
Just then a burning sensation tears up my arm. I watch in horror as my veins and arteries stand out black against my skin.
“What—” I panic, searching for her.
“This is the only way,” her voice sounds as though she’s soothing a child.
My entire right arm is banded in dark lines like lightning. My arteries are black against my pale skin, pulsing angrily as I watch the magic move through them. Like Thorne’s eyes.
A whirling sound seems to tear through the threads of consciousness we share.
“You can’t do this!” I howl as reality clicks into place.
“You were killing each other!” She bellows. “Free him, Harrow of the Venomwoods! His fate is now yours!”
Her voice is fading. She grows further away as she screams with finality:
“Shatter the Kyanite! Unleash him upon those who keep us chained!”
I am slammed back into my body at breakneck speed, the wind knocked out of me. I find myself lying in a pool of blood.
To my horror, the brand she gave me remains.
What. The. Fuck.
I try to shake it off, thankful that my blood is back inside of my body but horrified at what the Queen has done. I watch blood and magic swirl beneath my skin.
No, no, no.
Thankfully, the space I’m in is no longer completely dark. For some reason the space is dimly lit. A small house? A cottage?
The main room and one other bedroom makes up the space. Walls built with sturdy logs, a few dust covered surfaces, and a wood burning stove is all there is to look at. Save for three books on a small couch below a window, the place is empty.
I’m less concerned with that than how I came to be here. Then there’s the brand on my arm. However, things grow more curious when I see what I’ve scribbled in my blood beneath me. Seemingly, Queen Ivy is the silent Queen that keeps on giving. I internally scoff.
Titan’s Kyanite,
seventh antechamber beneath library
I scramble backward, sliding into something soft and still on the floor behind me. My heart is hammering as I try to heave air into my lungs. The Titan’s Kyanite must be the stone that binds Thorne’s curse.
Then I come to the dreadful realization that it’s not just my blood on the floor, it’s our blood, because Thorne Shadowfall’s lifeless body is staring blankly up at me when I turn around.
The sight is gruesome, so much so that nausea roils in my stomach.
His once perfect face is split open down the right side, his head bashed in an abnormal looking way. His arm is bent unnaturally behind him and there’s a bone jutting straight out of his thigh.
“Fuck,” I groan.
I can’t fix him, I can’t take it back.
“Fuck!”
But Queen Ivy… She made it seem like he was alive.
I look down at my arm. He doesn’t have the markings to match.
How could he? How could Ivy think she could bind my life to his when he was already dead?
Somehow I find myself trying to fix his blood slicked hair, trying to heal his split open flesh.
It hits me all at once, the realization that I did not truly wish him dead.
That I have begun to feel something deeper for him.
It’s only ever present now that I’ve done it.
I swipe tears from my face and lean back over him.
“Gialya” I whisper the healing spell but nothing happens.
“Ivy!” I scream because somehow I know she’s the reason we’re here, in what I can only assume is some kind of cottage in the woods.
I gasp for air, hungry for oxygen. Stories of the Arcanist Ivy Shadowfall began to fade once she fell silent, bound by Dreven.
Her abilities were rumored to be transportive.
A rare type of teleportation magic that led the King to her in his search for a wife.
The only thing that I know for certain is that the magic she has armed herself with since becoming mute is beyond my understanding.
There used to be a sacred order of Arcanist Priests who lived their lives in silence to grow closer to Xeusis. Perhaps Ivy succeeded, perhaps she was bestowed a gift that has allowed her to…
I stare at my arm again, dumbfounded at the rare beauty of the spell.
It was easier, facing the reality that I killed him when I thought I wouldn’t have to see the aftermath of it. I use my hand to push his eyelids closed as a tear falls onto his split open chest. It’s not the gore that gets me.
It’s because it’s him.
The helplessness is all-consuming.
Still, I check for a heartbeat that’s long gone.
His cold skin informs me that his blood has come to a stop in his veins. What’s left of it, anyway. I blink through tears and bury my face in the bloodied fabric across his shoulders.
How could I only allow myself to feel these things for him now?
Perhaps it’s because no one will ever know.
He will never know. I’ll never get to admit to him that the depths of his eyes are the pools I submerse myself in when I dream.
I won’t have to tell him that I’ve kept the scars from our night together because I know it’s all I’ll ever have of him.
Especially now. He won’t know that I find him cruelly beautiful and wickedly brilliant, especially in his ruthlessness.
My newfound desire to look behind the curtain and see him when he isn’t the Executioner, though, will never come to be.
For the first time in all my years of killing, I feel regret.
“I’m sorry,” I breathe into his shoulder as I hold him.
I feel sorrow for the boy who paid the price for his mother’s infidelity, who was cursed by his father, tortured by his brother, and forced never to love. All of it, only to meet a cruel and painful end at the hands of someone he could have cared about.
My tears mar his skin, his cheeks, his hair, his mangled chest. I don’t know why I let them, but the grief this death has pulled from me is unmatched. His lifeless body is soon drenched in my tears.
Crowley hops towards me, the sounds audible in the silence of the space.
He looks between me and Thorne. His black eyes only blink once and, as if in question, he tilts his head.
He croaks twice back to back as if to call me “stu-pid” before puffing his feathers.
Some of them reflect iridescence in the dim light, forcing me to remember how Thorne’s silver hair did the same.
Fuck.
Then Crowley begins to let out a series of croaks and caws, the likes of which I have never heard before. His small onyx form seems to swell as he begins to hop around with urgency.
“What’s the matter?” I huff at him, moving to sitting from my knees.
Then, too much happens at once. A magnificent black and white bird swoops in through an open skylight that I hadn’t noticed before. Crowley’s croaks grow more chaotic as he hops and I feel his heart pounding through our connection.
The other bird—another raven, I realize—dives towards Thorne, a blur of black and white before arching upward with a mighty squawk at the last second. I scramble back as Crowley takes flight, the two birds filling the air in the small space.
“What the—”
The two perch on a beam high above, facing one another in complete stillness for a moment. Crowley inches closer to the black and white raven, cautiously. He bows his head and the other raven puffs their feathers in response. My eyes go wide in realization.
It’s a female and this is a mating dance!
The two begin flying around excitedly, completely oblivious to the agony I’m in.
They spiral upward together, wings brushing in a beautiful display of intimacy with puffed and iridescent feathers.
Wow. My heart swells with affection for Crowley, though it might also be my tether to his emotions.
The bloody bird would start mating while I’m in the midst of turmoil over a kill for the first time.
Suddenly, Thorne’s body heaves upward on a massive inhale and he rolls over onto his stomach with a heart-wrenching scream. The smaller black and white raven breaks its trance with Crowley and lands beside Thorne.
I make a small noise with my mouth, the sharp sound summoning Crowley to me. He croaks in protest but lands on my shoulder just the same. My entire body shakes as I try to make sense of Thorne’s rapid heaving breaths, despite the fact that he was just dead.
Blood pushes from the wound on the back of his head as his bone begins to heal and reshape.
“Shit,” I whisper.
When I kill someone they’re supposed to stay dead.
That’s just simple logic. But I war with some mixture of confusion and relief before reality blurs into focus.
Thorne turns to me and I watch as he snaps his femur back into place.
Rage swims among the black tendrils in his eyes and reminds me that I should be feeling fear, not relief.
He places his hand on the bird currently nudging him and I watch the power flow between them in hues of purple and navy blue.
Crowley pecks my neck, urging me to get to my feet as Thorne’s expression becomes murderous.
“You actually fucking killed me!” He roars, becoming a blur of motion. Crowley leaps from my shoulder, abandoning me to my own reckoning with a mighty caw.
Before I even see him get to his feet, he tackles me into what might have been a wooden table. Ow. My head, ironically, cracks and bleeds even as Thorne's heals. He is rabid as he wraps his now bare hands around my throat.
“It won’t work—” I shove at him. He doesn’t seem to notice the identical black brand crawling up his right arm, tying his life to mine.
Still, I feel him trying to kill me with his fucking death curse or touch or whatever it is. I don’t have time to care. I bring my knee up to his crotch and deliver a blow that he doesn’t see coming, surprising him enough to allow me to shove him off me and jump to standing.
The birds seem to squeal and caw in protest to our fighting, but all I know is I need to get him away from me.
It would be well within reason for him to kill me right now and he’s clearly intent on it.
However he managed to come back, I’m positive I can’t.
So I’m equally intent on that not happening.
He sputters but stands and I don’t advance on him.
“It was a mistake!” I exclaim, holding my hands up as he lunges for me again.
He halts and laughs. Actually laughs. It’s a beautiful but haunting and sardonic sound.
“A mistake?” He tilts his head. His clothes are tattered, covered in blood. But he’s healed from the horrific way I left him.
I’m also trying to figure out how Queen Ivy got us both here. I swallow as he yells again.
“A mistake would be not blocking a blow in training. A mistake—accidentally setting something on fire.” He takes a step towards me as cruel humor drips from his words. “A mistake was sleeping with you,” he spits. That one hits its mark and my heart squeezes.
“Keep lying to yourself,” I seize his arm as he turns from me. “There is more to this and you know it,” I gesture between us.
He bares his teeth at me.
I see the moment he realizes what his mother has done as his eyes move from my arm to his.
Life-tethering is a taboo practice, but recognizable usually between married Arcanists with high amounts of power. I swallow hard.
Thorne’s eyes flash in alarm and he rips himself from my grip. Shock settles over him as he inspects his body. We both look like we dipped our arms in ink and dyed our veins black. The veins in our arms seem to reach out for one another and I feel a drowning need to touch him. But I don’t. I can’t.
“Amnyistey,” he casts with a gentle flair of his fingers.
He catches me as I collapse into nothingness in his arms.