Chapter 24 #3
“Where did you learn that knowledge?”
Releasing a strained breath, I open my eyes and look up to twin blood moons. Dark hair carefully styled, face clean shaven, almond eyes the exact same as Thorne. I could almost say his father looked closer to an older brother than the one who sired him.
Thorne stands beside him in his uniform with a softer expression on me and Mr. Kyros is on his other side. I wonder where Darian is.
“I learned it when I watched Locklyn’s daughter, Esmirra of Ebony, kill her mother.”
Mr. Arcturus’s throat bobs as he swallows. “That’s not possible.”
I look up and past him around the library.
This school built by a vampire descended from Syngenia the Vampyr.
But he did not name this school after her.
He named it after Syngenia the Blood Witch.
Who’s blood and venom was procured right before her death and passed on through generations so her magic and story would never be forgotten.
“It is when that blood and venom that was shoved into me was not a vampyr’s. It is when Syngenia the Blood Witch’s spirit remains on these grounds and her blood flows through my veins.”
That presence shifts, reminding us it’s still here. It’s still listening. She’s still watching. Even now, nearly twenty-five millenniums after her death.
“You said you didn’t know whose blood it was.”
I slide my tongue over the front of my top teeth before answering.
“I lied.”
“Why?”
I clench my fists and let my nails imbed themselves into my palms. It helps ease the strain.
Looking over to Castiel, instead of Varian, his dark eyes are stuck between unbelievability and anger. “Because it was not your business.”
“It is, however, the Mage Board’s business,” Mr. Arcturus slowly states.
I tilt my head from side to side and hum through my closed mouth.
“You said I was a vampire, I told you that vampire hadn’t turned me.
It was never asked if I had any magic, you just assumed I was weak.
Clearly the Mage Board’s business is whatever the hell they want to see and believe.
It’s not my fault you guys didn’t do your due diligence.
Your hatred for vampires overshadowed everything else. ”
“Well if you don’t mind me asking,” Mr. Kyros intervenes, breaking the awkward silence that was about to start, “what else do you know? There’s never been a record of memories and knowledge being transferred through blood that didn’t only belong to a vampyr.”
I rest my side against the back of my chair as I look over and include the rest of the people in my ground.
“It makes sense when Syngenia the Blood Witch was the first created and the first being with a fractured blood art. I also have a fractured blood art.”
Jullia whisper at my back, “What exactly is a fractured blood art? What’s the difference?”
“Fractured blood arts,” Varian answers before I can, except when I look over to his red eyes encased in gold, there is no connection between our souls, “is where the user’s blood itself is their magic and a physical essence of their aura.”
His eyes darken and something other flickers within them.
“It means even if they were to completely bleed out they could still live, if they were to not have a spirit or soul they could still live, and there is no limit to their blood use. Rather than someone with a blood art able to control their blood – and only the blood in their veins which is limited – a fractured blood art means their blood is limitless.”
I hold my finger up. “Their blood is only as limitless as their aura and their body’s energy.”
“Your point is contradicted by the fact that you’re a vampyr who can write fates.”
“No, it’s not. As I told you, professor, anyone could write fate, make a death blow, so long as they have the aura and magic to do so.”
“But you stopped a blood witch’s death blow. A blood witch.”
“Yes,” I snap. “By killing her faster than she could kill. That is not an impossibility. She was too slow.”
I can see his swirling true form threaded through his eyes. The rage and wrath he felt on that field.
“So brutal,” he whispers. “And you have no remorse for her death? She could have been a good person. She could have been a mother. She could have been pregnant.”
His fated perhaps?
It wouldn’t make a difference. “Then she shouldn’t have been on that field and she shouldn’t have tried to kill my fated. She’s lucky I gave her a clean death.”
He growls and that does not sound like Varian.
“And what about the bone witch?” he hisses, “You were able to withstand her fracturing every bone within your body, I’d say yours is as close to limitless as one could get.”
I roll my shoulders out as I remember that. I do fully remember that part. “That bone witch was also young.”
“That bone witch,” he grits, “was nearly five hundred years old.”
“Exactly.”
He scoffs. “So much confidence for someone who has only existed for not even a wink in time.”
“And yet,” I say softly, “I stopped a blood witch’s death blow, I did withstand a bone witch’s torture, and I created a death blow that would have eviscerated a True Form. You think I’m young, but I think you’re scared.”
His nostrils flare and I can see it. His true form. The thing within that he is one with. The Kolasi before me as I state facts.
“Let’s also not forget,” I add with a lightly cocky grin, “that my death blow also fractured the entirety of that field. Both the land and the earth beneath it. And just imagine what I could do if I was really trying.”
Something within him flinches, someone chokes, someone else shudders, and then I dramatically sigh and turn back towards my group.
“Anyway, professor, we have assignments to finish and secrets to spill.” Dismissed, I pull my notebook closer to me and pretend to ignore them as I look at my group. “So, the War of Gods. . .”