Chapter 3 #3
The necromancer appraised her in turn, roving his eyes over her body from head to toe and a sickly feeling like worms crawling over her skin cascaded through Cerise. He scoffed, as if she wasn’t worth his time.
The lichboar suddenly dashed toward its masters’ side, a bright lime light bursting from the staff.
The bear roared and snapped its jaws the moment before the magic exploded, thrusting Cerise off her feet and blinding her in a cloudy green haze. She careened through the air and landed on her back, crashing against the frigid earth.
Cerise leapt to her feet, Beloved still in hand, and swept her gaze through the dead wood.
The bear moaned, rolling from its side to its stomach, clenching an object in its mouth.
The necromancer and his lichboar were gone.
All that remained was a crater of blown snow where they’d previously stood.
Cerise stumbled to the exposed ground, a mottled brown laced with frost. No footprints led away into the forest. They simply vanished.
Yet, that wasn’t all bad news. To do so, he’d need an attuned sending stone, and those only worked within a certain distance.
Which meant he had some sort of base nearby.
One of the gems on his staff was likely half of the combination.
When they encountered him again, if they destroyed the stones, they could prevent him from using the same trick.
Cerise looked at the sky, dread twisting to anxiety in her gut. In the east, the sky already purpled to a deep bruise. Even leaving now, they’d end their hike traversing the woods at night. “Bear, we need to get back. We can rest and—What are you doing?”
The sound of repressed roars grumbled through the bear’s throat as it ripped apart the object it dropped from its mouth. Its stubby claws tried shredding it, running its paws frantically over the item, the bear’s whine increasingly desperate.
Cerise stalked to the creature, leaning on Beloved.
On the ground was one of the effigies hanging from the necromancer’s staff. Made of black sticks and wrapped in golden-brown hair. Each piece the bear managed to break, the hairs broken ends reformed and twisted back over sticks.
“Move,” Cerise grumbled, wielding Beloved once more.
With a hopeful huff, the bear shoved the effigy closer to her with its snout.
Beloved, crafted from the bladesmiths of Merathel’s Order and blessed by the clerics of Zyrdriel, was made to dissolve these necromantic powers.
With a swift strike, the axe head cleaved through the effigy, a quick, loud crack emanating from it as the power that bound it broke.
A shudder rippled through the bear, and it sighed with relief. It looked at Cerise, its pink eyes pleading, as it thrusted its head to the side as far as it could.
“Your rune?”
It nodded, gave a pointed look at Beloved’s blade, then swung its head back to its shoulder again. The bear did this several more times, whine growing louder, before Cerise understood.
She sat beside the creature, using Beloved to ease herself down.
With the fade of battle fury, the pain in her knee cried anew.
Cerise roved her hand over the bear’s fur, finding the runic scars.
Pushing back the fur, she found the cuts still glowed pale green, though less dim than when she first noticed it.
Leveling Beloved’s axe over the skin, Cerise asked, “You sure?”
The bear nodded, and Cerise sliced Beloved into the bear’s flesh, just above the highest point of the rune.
The beast’s hot blood gushed over her cold, stiffened fingertips, and it roared with the pain before clenching its powerful jaws and eerie eyes shut, whimpering as Cerise sawed through its thick skin.
Pinching the dangling, dripping flesh between her thumb and forefinger, Cerise grimaced at the patch of skin. The rune carved into it no longer glowed, and she dropped it, the pelt hitting the snow with a wet slap.
No sooner had the loose patch smacked the ground than the bear groaned, the crack and pop of shifting bones breaking the silence.
The bear’s hide seemed to liquefy, loosening and drooping from the shifting skeleton like melting candle wax.
Its wet skull gleamed through the skin’s eye sockets as it slid off the bones.
Cerise’s stomach acidified with vomit, nose curling with disgust as the skin sloughed off the bear, moist heaps falling to the snow, blood steaming as it evaporated snow.
Bones protruded from the shedding skin sack as they popped, like an insect thrashing against a spider’s silken wrap.
With one last cacophonous splintering, uncomfortably similar to the breaking of Azkanix’s bones, the bear ceased moving. Silence blanketed the forest, pressing against Cerise’s ears in the abrupt absence of sound.
The bear lay still, nothing more than a pile of loose, furred flesh over its skeleton.
“What. The. Fuck.” Cerise had seen some disgusting things in her life, but this was one she’d never forget.
The heap of bear moved, flesh sliding on the snow, leaving smears of blood.
Cerise stepped back, whipping Beloved in front of her as the skin sack writhed.
Human legs, then a torso, slunk out of the bear’s flesh, the pale skin slicked pink with a mix of blood and other bodily fluids. Arms rippling with muscles appeared, then grasped the edge of the pelt and yanked it, a man’s head breaking free of the hide with the relieved sigh of freedom.
He stroked a large hand over his face, swiping off the fluids that blinded him, then pushed his thick, golden-brown hair, the same color as the bear’s fur, away from his face. The blood and moisture from the bear moved over the muscular planes of his body, outlining every firm angle.
Cerise swallowed, trying not to stare. But it had been a long time since she’d seen a naked man. And she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen one so…tempting.
She forced her gaze to his face as he blinked open his eyes, pink as the sunrises before Azkanix’s curse.
“Hello, Cerise,” the man said with a sheepish smirk, barely visible beneath his beard. He pulled a heap of bear flesh over his nakedness. “It’s a pleasure to finally speak to you.”
Cerise tensed. As their eyes met, she remembered where she’d seen them before.
On the parapet, before she left for the Undead Wars that’d claim her nightmares, eviscerate her skin, and destroy her knee.
Those exact eyes, shining out of a different face.
Rallying the war cry, invigorating the young, foolish templars who thought they could make a difference.
Lying to them about their worth before turning his back on them, returning to the safety of his stone castle.
Yet the face before her was not as refined as the one in her mind.
Yes, over a decade had passed since that moment, the last time in her life a spark of hope lingered in her heart.
Even so, she knew this was not the king.
This man’s hair was lighter and thicker, body taller and more muscular.
His face less stern, laugh lines around his eyes.
Though she’d never seen him, she knew who he was.
This was the king’s degenerate of a younger brother, Prince Oberon.