27. Archer
Archer
Asharp slice through the pad of my finger tears my gaze down to my hands. Dazed, I stare at the bead of blood welling from a small cut where it spills over, creating a rivulet trickling down my palm.
I’m used to bleeding. During the war and during the centuries that followed, enough of my blood was spilt for several lifetimes over. And yet here I am—the Black Flame—shocked to find myself bleeding over a pile of mushrooms. All because I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
I haven’t stopped taking my eyes off her.
Not for days. When we met, I had the distant understanding that she was attractive.
A striking silver gaze, full pink lips, and oddly, dressing like a man somehow worked for her.
Yes, she was pretty. I’d admitted as much to myself, albeit reluctantly.
Then the last few days happened. I saw glimpses of the person beneath the surface…
the way she riled me up and coaxed me from my darkest moods, her understated kindness—slowing down without a word when I needed a moment, forcing extra food on me, tending to my wound…
It only amplified everything else. And now?
It’s like seeing her anew. Moonlight illuminating her golden braid, which is slightly disheveled from travel, if tousled by the wind, lending her an air of wildness.
A rare gem pulled from the deepest earth, raw and unpolished, but priceless. Beautiful.
I’ve laid awake at night and thinking of all the things I could have done differently, how life might have panned out—not just for me, but for the whole of Lorevael, if I hadn’t failed.
It’s because of me that both mortals and Azkari have lived a lie for two centuries, believing themselves safe in peacetime rather than in the calm before the storm.
I tried to defeat him then, and in every passing moment since, I have tried to break free of his hold, to no avail, until now.
Five hundred years I have walked these realms, and now there are not enough hours in the day.
Not just to destroy Malevron, but to savor her.
Amidst the darkness of my own making, Saige is as bright as the sun, and just as untouchable.
“You can level fields of warriors with your power, but a bunch of mushrooms defeats you?” her voice says over my shoulder.
I follow her amused expression to my bleeding finger, which I’d forgotten about lost in my thoughts of her.
I’m instantly aware that we’re alone. “Where’s Daemos?”
“Filling up the water skins. Here.” She’s reaching for me without hesitation; her fingers warm on my skin as she takes my hand in hers and staunches the bleeding with a scrap of fabric. “Don’t want the essence of Archer in our dinner.”
“I’m sure I taste delicious,” I retort before I can stop myself.
She raises a skeptical brow at me, dabbing at the small cut.
“Never had any complaints.” I pull my hand away and use my canteen to wash the mushrooms. Is this what humanity is?
Kind gestures in the face of a broken past?
An exchange of quiet words in contrast to the lashings of anger that came before?
Or is it part of a much bigger game? It’s been a long time since I had to wonder.
“Well, who’s going to complain?” Saige replies with a huff of amusement. “You can burn people from the inside out.”
“I assure you, that’s not the reason—”
But she’s biting her lip to keep from laughing.
“You’re joking,” I surmise. How is she to know how long it’s been since someone had the opportunity to make a judgement on the taste of me anyway?
She nods with a grin. “A foreign concept to you, I know.”
Saige is relentless. Always offering a challenge, a counter. And for the first time in centuries, I don’t keep score, for the sheer likelihood of losing.
It’s a minute or two before I realize we’re both staring at one another. She seems to be on the verge of saying something, her hands restless at her sides.
“Something on your mind, bookbinder?”
Saige’s gaze drops to my mouth, and there’s a gleam in her molten silver eyes, one that sends a thrill ricocheting through me.
I know what that look means. Desire. I know it like the back of my hand.
It lies at the core of so many mistakes.
But my body reacts to her interest, how could it not?
She is breathtaking; a shining light despite the cloud of pain that often looms over her.
She’s good. Too good for the likes of me.
Blood rushes south, my heart rate increases, and I wet my lips with my tongue.
For two hundred years I have missed this feeling, and now it comes flooding back to me in Saige’s presence.
But on the tail of my longing for her, comes the blunt force of dread. I can’t taint her with darkness.
As I tear myself away from her, something brushes up against my leg, and I step back in disgust as the damn wolfhound drops something at my feet.
“Charming,” Saige says, jumping aside as Grim reveals what he’s gifted me.
It’s a rotten dead badger. The stench of it is overpowering.
“Get it away from the food,” I hiss.
The mutt has the gall to look sweet and baleful, and Saige falls for it, hook, line and sinker. “Awww… He’s trying to help you with the cooking.”
“I’d think so too if it weren’t for the vermin crawling out of it. He’s punishing me. Only the Weaver knows why,” I grumble.
I swear the stupid creature looks fucking smug. Can canines smile?
“Don’t be daft, Archer,” Saige replies, her name sounding sweeter on her tongue by the second. “He’s just a dog, remember?”
My sleep is plagued with memories. First, I dream of the Resonance Sanctum in a chamber deep within one of the many crystalline spires of the House of Mirrors.
It’s been a long time since I visited this place.
Accessible only by glass bridges that span the reflecting pools below, it’s a multi-level workspace carved into the living crystal of the spire itself, its walls hewn directly from the spire’s translucent stone, while the slabs of polished mirror-stone are suspended by crystalline supports, creating the illusion that the work benches float on their own.
I’m with my brother, Caelyth, standing before an ornately framed full-length mirror.
“Are you going to look?” he asks. “Or are you scared of what might stare back?”
“Only raw animal magnetism, brother. If you’re the brains, then I’m the handsome face of the family.” I step in front of Caelyth’s beloved creation.
I look as I did this morning: tall and muscular, black hair falling about my face, green eyes, golden Azkari skin.
I give my brother’s arm a playful punch. “Perfect. Like I thought.”
“Is that what you see?” There’s an edge to his voice as he peers around me. His green eyes match my own. Only, they’re filled with concern.
Shoulders tensing, I turn back to my reflection.
My breath catches, and orange flames flicker at my fingertips as shock ripples through me.
Slowly, I turn to Caelyth. “What is it that you’re showing me, brother?”
But my brother doesn’t meet my gaze this time. Instead, his stare is latched on the atrocity in the glassy surface. “Your true self.”
Next, I dream of the Wailing Wilds, of Morzanmyre and Malevron.
I can hear my name whispered in the wind, and I can feel the searing of my own flesh beneath the red-hot brand lined with poison.
Every one of my senses is assaulted—the scent of burning meat, the taste of my own blood in my mouth, the raw scream that pierces the night from my own throat, the darkness that swallows me whole.
Time is endless here, a different kind of suffering from all that has come before.
I was never good. Never whole. But this?
This is like someone else has been born from my ashes.
The twice-forged chains rattle against my thrashing, creating open welts of their own across my wrists and ankles, containing not only my body, but my magic too—black flames writhe inside me, trying to obliterate anything that stands in their way.
I wish they would. I wish they’d consume me until there is nothing left—