Chapter Nineteen- A Torturous Bond
Ilock myself in the washroom in hopes that the stone walls are enough to drown out what I anticipate to be a lot of screaming.
My heart hammers, telling me to run to Thorne and end this before it even begins.
How much of his pain will I feel? If he can’t die, does that stop me from succumbing to blood loss? So much of this is unknown.
“Fuck!” I kick over a cart full of bathing supplies.
But he needs to expend some of his magic, it’s the only way he’ll have a chance at containing all that power when we destroy the Titan’s Kyanite.
My lips are still swollen from his kiss and I’m meant to just let him be tortured?
I can stop this, I can. Aleksander is protected from Thorne’s killing curse, he has to be.
Thorne would have stopped this long ago if he could.
But Aleksander is not immune to me. I lean against the wall and practice my breathing as the unmistakable sensation of my back being carved open sends me to the ground.
The debilitating pain sweeps over me in sharp burning waves.
For some reason, Sylvithria floats through my mind, her warm smile and comforting arms too far away to shield me from this.
The same way they could not shield Cain, either.
I swear I can hear Thorne’s roar of pain through our bond, but that’s impossible. It must be my own agony as my vision flashes white. I grab the closest towel to me and rip it in half, intensifying the pain in my back. But I need to stop the bleeding and I need something to bite down on.
Fuckfuckfuck.
A torrent of heat flashes over my face and I know Thorne has just been slapped.
Asshole. It feels like such a petty thing to do after tearing a wound through our flesh from shoulder blade to hip.
Still, it’s enough stinging pain to bring tears to my eyes.
Crowley hops into the washroom, flapping his wings frantically.
He provides a small boost of magic but not enough to help me with this.
To my great relief, the bleeding slows. Perhaps I have the ability to heal the way Thorne does. At least if the pain I endure is from Thorne… I certainly didn’t heal like this after the Venomwoods disaster.
I swallow against the pain of my wounds stitching themselves back together faster than I ever thought possible.
Muscle and tendons and sinew claw itself back together, leaving a distinctly unique ache behind.
It feels like being dragged through glass shards as I try to push myself to stand.
It’s like Aleksander knows I’m attempting to stand because my leg bends in an unnatural angle, sending my kneecap to the back of my leg with a crunch.
I wail into the makeshift gag and hit the floor like a stone in water.
Blessed Titans, how has he survived this for so long?
A deafening crack registers before my nose gushes blood.
My shaking hands are still holding my broken knee so I bend my head backward to slow the bleeding.
The room tilts viciously, threatening to spill the contents of my stomach out as a mistress might spill secrets to her lover.
I no longer have the slightest reservations about killing Prince Aleksander.
I distract myself from the pain by fantasizing about the lovely color of his intestines spread before me on cobblestone.
The delicious feeling of his still heart in my palm is the only thing that will pay penance for this.
His own brother. Rage rises within me, an unstoppable tide.
Somehow, Prince Aleksander’s torture isn’t as continuous and insistent as I expect.
I pant and huff for a few minutes, watching in horror as my knee cap rotates about my leg to find its proper place.
The skin blooms blue with bruising. I wince and bang my head backward against the wall, sure I must’ve felt pain like this before.
Toleus once broke every knuckle in my hands to strengthen them. I endured having my tongue split. Hell, I’ve even been stabbed. But this is somehow worse than each of those.
The next unspeakable act catches me off guard and I beg my body to black out.
This phantom echo of pain must pale in comparison to what Thorne is feeling and all I can think is that he’s so, so strong.
It’s an effort to get my boots off as I watch my heels split open.
A stab straight through to bone and then a violent yank cleaves my foot open.
“Gialya!” I wail. My body doesn’t respond to the healing spell. I’m not well versed in healing magic and besides, it doesn’t work when the caster is distressed.
Shock sets in, adrenaline blackening my vision as my body begins to shake violently.
The same thing happens to my other foot, forcing me to watch in horror as my body flays open before me.
The scream breaks through the towel, so I spit it out and dig my hands into the stone floor beneath me.
Crowley hops up my leg, tilting his head at me in confusion.
He doesn’t understand. There’s no visible threat for him to protect me from.
The washroom shakes, things fall to the floor, and the mirror shatters above me. I can’t help it, even the porcelain tub cracks. Mercifully, I blackout, dark blood coating me like a shadow.
“Thorne!” The cry tears from my throat on my way back to consciousness. Wails bubble through the blood pooling beneath my face on the cold floor.
Am I crying?
I don’t even have time to process whether or not I am because a phantom blow to the back of my head sends my face back into the floor.
I am nothing, I am everything. The expanse of time is my very existence.
I am being torn between awake and dreaming, life and death, consciousness and sweet darkness.
Vaguely, I’m aware that my fingernails are being removed, but I’m too far away from my body to care.
I should care, but my body is a foreign vessel of which I am free.
There’s no pain in this darkness, just the knowledge that there should be pain.
In this space I can hear Thorne screaming, too. But he is not here, he has not moved through the veil as I have.
By linking our lives, his mother has rendered him truly immune to death.
But Aleksander knows that there are things far worse than dying.
I feel Thorne being smothered to the point of unconsciousness, but it matters not to the body I no longer inhabit.
I know I should panic. Am I dead? Is there a way back?
I can feel Thorne’s life force feeding off of mine, off of my magic. I know my body is lying limp on the washroom floor. I try to move what I think are my arms but I don’t have them here, I am not moveable. I am energy, magic, swelling and flowing through nothingness.
“Get up!” I scream at myself. “Wake up!”
“You don’t get to die like this!” I roar. The sound shakes the dark expanse around me. Somewhere in the void I hear the repetitive prophecy from Queen Ivy; I hear it overlapping with the spell she cast to bind us and save Thorne.
A torrent of words and screaming seem to jolt me in one direction. I’m pulled into something darker than the expanse of nothing, then through a space so bright that sight doesn’t exist. Finally, with a slam, I am inside of my body again.
Crowley is on my back, pecking at my neck when I come to.
Every atom is on fire, every nerve aflame as if I have been remade in the burning pits of Incendria’s Scorching Fields.
I have died and risen, but the pain remains.
It is mine to have, to endure. My body can’t stitch itself back together fast enough, it was never meant to.
This is a borrowed gift, an imposter and it doesn’t fit correctly inside my body.
Not the way the Stygian magic or serpent magic does.
“Harrow?” A voice breaks through the cloud of pain. “What the—” Elm skids to a stop in front of me. There’s no hiding the blood, the fact that something terrible has happened here.
“Stop—” I raise my arm and it takes every ounce of my being to do that simple gesture. I can’t let him alert anyone else. I can’t let him sound the alarm or enable the protocol for an attack inside the palace gates.
He roughly pulls me to a sitting position while frantically searching the space for the culprit. I wince when the muscles in my neck fail to work and my head smacks the wall behind me.
“Heal me,” I groan.
“Where?” He drops to his knees beside me.
“Everywhere,” I beg. My body is shaking violently. It feels like Aleksander is pouring salt into Thorne’s wounds. I bite down on my arm to muffle the screams. At least it’s an injury he can’t see happen. I don’t know how I’m going to explain this.
“Gailya,” he grips my arm. He then begins to recite the longer form of the healing spell and I thank Xeusis that he actually does have an affinity for healing magic. Knights with this gift are invaluable and only make up about ten percent of the knighthood.
Slowly, the burning stops and I hope that this is helping Thorne too.
“Gailya…” It’s the only word I can make out. Our spells are fragments of the Titan’s language and no one is fluent in it. Healers and royalty have the largest vocabulary but it is still considered a dying language..
“Th-thank you,” I say.
“What is this?” Elm asks, clearly still looking for a threat.
“Sick… I’m sick,” I lie then turn my gaze to meet his. My world narrows with my irises. “You won’t ask more questions, you will help me willingly.”
The hypnosis takes immediate effect and his shoulders relax.
He stops searching for an external threat, instead turning his concern to my ailment.
I black out for what can only be a few seconds from the magic exertion.
I startle back to alertness when I realize Elmerov is holding my head up to keep it from sagging to the side.
The contact is new and strange, an act of tenderness I didn’t expect even if I compelled it. The real issue, I realize, is that for a brief moment, I hoped it was Thorne touching me. I’m then consumed by the need to get to him. If only the pain would stop.
“We need to get to the Enchanted Tree Garden,” I groan.
Elm helps me to my feet, hauling me awkwardly up under my arms. A searing hot pain spreads like spiderwebs from my thigh down my leg.
I lose the ability to stand and curse the Titans for this bond.
Elm offers resistance but ultimately the ground claims me again.
“How is this—” Elm starts but my magic seals the thought from his mind.
“Heal me,” I instruct and he does.
This cycle of injury and healing goes on for at least another hour before new injuries stop appearing. Elm is sweating with the exertion of healing me so rapidly while my body feels akin to that of a worm left in the sun.
But then ten, fifteen minutes pass. Now.
I shove Elm back and do what I never do.
“Iizyiah,” I whisper. Elm bites back a scream as dozens of snakes crawl forth from my skin, slinking to the floor around me.
They writhe in my blood, their forked tongues darting out to taste it as they prepare for the rarest of spells.
One I promised Sylvithria I would only use if my life was on the line.
“Iianze!” My precious snakes turn on me, but only after absorbing my life’s blood.
Elm exclaims in horror somewhere beyond my drifting vision.
The serpents’ fangs sink into me, returning every bleeding ounce of energy back into my body.
This act will kill these specific serpents.
It is a most sacred sacrifice, one that I never wanted to perform. But Thorne needs me.
Somewhere in the expanse of dreaming as my serpents refill my magic and stamina, I see the moment I first met Thorne.
That euphoria takes over me; no touch, no kiss, no drug has ever gotten me higher than that feeling.
No feeling except meeting him. Then seeing him flash that smile in my direction.
It was as if I could see his soul peering through those looking glass-blue eyes.
He was sugar to my bland pallet, an explosion of color in my life.
The kaleidoscope of color in my vision allows me to feel the dozen or so serpents retreating back into me to die.
It’s such a small number compared to the serpents I have access to but I mourn them, feeling this loss as I felt Cain’s.
They are a part of me, all of them. The souls of the Serpents of the Venomwoods slither through my veins.
I blink open my eyes to see that Elm has backed into the corner of my bathroom. He is unable to move, unable to question what he has witnessed. He had no idea that I was the Serpent of Netherhelm. I’m thinking he has a hunch now.
“All is well, you will keep this secret,” I say, and now I am the one pulling him up.
“I would keep it without the compulsion," he blinks and I tremble at the clarity. The truth in his words. That slight anger that I didn’t just… trust him.
“I’m sorry,” I squeeze his shoulder.
I’m looking into his eyes when a blaring light casts a warm glow over his tan face from my bed chambers.
“The Summoning Flame,” his breath hitches.
The Summoning Flame is only lit when there’s a big enough threat to the kingdom that every knight, noble, and soldier needs to know. They are connected throughout the kingdom and I watch from my window as small lights awaken across the realm, over ridges, and through tree lines.
Caelthar.
One inescapable thought pounds through my head in rhythm with our boots as we move with a sea of knights and royalty to the main courtyard:
After tonight, nothing will be the same—but first, I need to get to Thorne.