ZARETH
It comes from the ceiling and the only warning I get is a crack in the rock face above with a spray of loose stone, then the creature drops between us.
It is enormous. Limbs too long for the torso they belong to, joints bending in wrong directions, its body bloated with whatever passes for life inside the corruption.
Its smell of rot hits me first then the smell of the Wildspont's poison wearing flesh like a disguise.
Cybele stumbles back as I move forward.
My magic answers sluggishly than it should, a dull throb where there used to be a clean surge of power.
The mountain is dying. I feel it in my own bloodstream, the stuttering pull of underground magic that has sustained my kind for centuries now flickering like a candle left in the wind.
It costs me more than it should to summon the shadows to my hands. It costs more than yesterday.
But my hands remember how to kill even without magic.
I catch the creature's nearest limb, a twisted rope of muscle and bone with three elbows and I pull. It makes a wet sound. Satisfying. I feel the bones resist, then give, the crack traveling up through my palms as the joint separates from itself. It shrieks like a stone dragged across stone, and I twist the limb further, past the point of separation and repair, until I am holding what used to be part of it and it’s scrabbling away from me with the remaining limbs.
I follow.
There is no fury in this. Only efficiency.
I have killed things like this before, when they were smaller, when the corruption was younger.
Now they grow larger because the Wildspont is growing larger, and I am growing tired, and I kill it the way I do everything I cannot afford to feel, cleanly and without hesitation.
I drive my knee into its ribcage. Feel the ribs fold inward. Reach through the gap that creates and grip something vital and tear until the creature's movement becomes twitching, and there’s only stillness.
I stand over what remains. It is still technically moving. They always are, these corrupted beasts do not know how to stop, even when every mechanism has been destroyed. One remaining limb drags uselessly against the stone. I crush it beneath my heel.
Then I look at Cybele. She is pressed against the far wall, chest heaving, eyes wide and fixed on me. Not on the creature.
"Move," I say. "That noise will draw the others."
The alcove is small. I find it twenty meters further down the passage, a natural hollow in the rock, dry, defensible on three sides, just wide enough for two people who have no interest in being this close to each other to sit with their shoulders pressed together and their thighs touching from hip to knee and absolutely nowhere to look that doesn't eventually lead back to the other person's face.
I am aware of every point of contact. Her heartbeat is loud in this silence.
Humans always underestimate how loud they are to us, the constant percussion of that small, stubborn heart, beating faster than it should, a rhythm my own body tracks without my permission.
I can smell her sweat. The copper thread of old blood from the injury she sustained earlier, still healing.
Beneath both of those is a warmer touch of life.
My fangs ache. I press my tongue against the back of them and stare at the passage entrance and say nothing. She lasts approximately four minutes before she opens her mouth.
"You look at them like they're already dead."
"They are."
"Before you touch them, I mean." A pause. "You look at me like that sometimes."
I turn my head slowly. She is watching me with those amber-brown eyes, direct in the way surface humans rarely are when they're sitting next to something that could kill them in three different ways without trying. "You should sleep," I say. "Your body heals slower than mine."
"Answer the question."
"It wasn't a question."
"Then answer the observation." She shifts, pulling her knees toward her chest, making herself smaller in the space. Giving me more room. I do not move into it. "You hate us. Humans, I mean. I want to know why it's that kind of hate. One that looks like it's been sitting in you for a long time."
I should not answer. There is no strategic value in this conversation.
But the ruins groan around us, deeply settling and cracking somewhere we cannot see, and in the single bioluminescent stone I set between us there is just enough pale blue light to see that she is not asking to provoke me.
She is asking because she wants to understand something.
And I find, in this small and dying space, that I am unutterably tired of silence.
"My mother lost three children before me," I say.
My voice comes out even. "The hunger took two.
Dark elf hunters took the third. He was eleven years old.
They strung what remained of him at the entrance to one of our lower districts as a message.
" I let that sit for a moment. "I was fourteen.
Old enough to understand what the message meant.
We were not enemies to them. We were not even prey.
" I keep my gaze on her, unflinching. "We were vermin.
Things to be exterminated before they become inconvenient. "
Cybele is very still.
"So when surface humans arrive in my tunnels," I continue, "I do not see individuals. I see the faces of the people who decided my brother was worth less than a warning sign." Something in my neck tightens. "That is the why of it."
She is quiet for a long while. Then, softly: "That's not hatred. That's grief."
I do not answer.
"Zareth." She says my name like she has the right to it, and the worst part is I no longer want to correct her. "I'm not them."
"No." The word comes out unbidden. Low. More honest than I’d planned. "You are not."
The silence after is heavier, charged with what I have been refusing to name since the moment I watched her shove me out of the path of a creature three times her size and take the injury herself.
A human. Taking an injury for me. The absurdity of it.
The way it cracked something open inside my chest that I cannot seem to close again.
I mark her with my eyes, the line of her jaw, the freckles scattered across her nose, the way the bioluminescent light turns the amber of her eyes to something richer and stranger. She is within my reach, has been for days and I have been treating that fact like a wound I needed to keep covered.
"I cannot stop thinking about you," I say. The words land like stone in the quiet. "You are short-lived. Fragile by every standard I understand. You should be nothing to me." A pause. "You are not nothing to me."
Her breath catches. I hear it, a small disruption in her rhythm and it pulls me forward, slow, inevitable, the way the corruption pulls at the mountain's foundations.
Inevitable and unstoppable and disastrous.
I lean in. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her skin and feel her breath against my mouth.
Her lips part, open and inviting.
The tunnel explodes.
Not with creatures but with stone. A deafening concussion of rock somewhere in the passage behind us, the entire alcove shuddering, dust cascading from above, a crack appearing in the ceiling like the mountain is deciding right now to make its judgment known.
We break apart. I am on my feet with my hand around her arm before the second rumble hits, pulling her against me as a section of ceiling drops into the space where she was sitting.
When the shaking stops, I am holding her.
My heart, slower than hers, is not behaving like itself.
I know these symptoms. Every Vrakken above a certain age knows them.
The possessiveness that arrived without invitation and has not left.
The constant, low thrum of her underneath my blood hunger, louder the closer she is and maddening when she's not. The soul-deep, cellular recognition that’s not a strategy and everything to do with the ancient and absolutely beyond my control.
This is not an attachment, it’s a mating bond forming.
And when my people find out their prince has bound himself to a human surveyor, a surface woman who still carries maps of our kingdom in her hands, it will not only be my throne they come for. It will be her throat.