Chapter 10
He had a weapon.
A Veilblade.
Which meant, as Magus had suspected.... he was Veilborne.
A Seer, supposedly, though Kinlear had never seen a damned thing but his own death.
Still, the moment the shock settled, he ran.
Just like he’d wanted to do in Touvre, like he’d needed to do if he was to escape his own panic and rage...
He let loose.
Into the woods he went, his illness no longer able to reach him here.
He leapt over a fallen branch, his bare toes hitting the cold ground as he landed.
He laughed and kept running, the weight of the blade a reassurance at his hip.
He slid his fingertips across a deeply gouged tree trunk as he passed by.
His fingers fit perfectly into the five huge claw marks in the skeletal bark.
..one of the relics left here from the many times he and the monster had played a losing game of chase.
He thought of all the times he’d been helpless against it, all the years he’d spent running.
Not tonight.
Tonight, he had a blade.
Tonight, he was the hunter instead of the prey.
“Thank you,” he said to Magus, imagining the old man could hear him, and pushed himself faster.
Kinlear turned left towards the frozen river, where he leapt again. A flip and a roll, and he was back to running through the dead forest as fast as his dream-body could take him.
He was tired of dying. He was tired of being a victim.
He would slay his monster, the way Marin never did.
He refused to stop, even when the snowstorm came. Even when the wind howled and the trees trembled, and the snowbanks rose until Kinlear was trudging through it with all his strength.
He went back to the furthest place he’d ever been. The place where he so often met his death.
He smiled when he heard the telltale sound of breathing come from behind him. A stick snapped. And through the snow, his monster arrived.
“Princeling,” it crooned. “Why do you run from me?”
When he was a boy, it terrified him.
Now, he turned, holding his beautiful dagger between them. “I’m not running anymore,” Kinlear growled. “And you will not kill me today.”
To his surprise, the monster paused.
It was large in frame...a head taller than him, with shadows that leaked from its dark cloak like it was caught in some kind of rogue wind.
Amongst the dead trees, it looked starkly black.
Depthless. He could see nothing of its face, only the long, dark claws that protruded from the edges of its once-human fingertips.
“A blade that walks between worlds,” the monster said. “Are you ready for the next?”
Kinlear nodded.
So, the monster moved forwards as if on air. Shadows trailed after it like slithering snakes. “I can see your soul, Princeling,” it hissed. “It aches to know me. But it never will...not until you are strong enough to See.”
“I’m strong enough,” Kinlear said. “But I don’t want to know you.”
The monster cocked its head again. “No?”
“No,” Kinlear said, inching forward, despite the roaring in his ears, despite the terror that appeared, an unwelcome arrival in his veins. “I want to kill you.”
You are Veilborne, he told himself. You are not afraid.
...he was very much afraid. But he lunged forwards anyways, slashing out with his blade.
The monster met it with sharpened claws, effortlessly stopping him. But Kinlear did not back down. They circled in the snow, in the howling wind that tossed his dark hair into his eyes.
In life, he could never win a fight. He’d trained as a youngling for years, was always the smallest, the weakest, the worst.
But this body?
He trusted this dream version of himself, and he knew how to wield it, and for the first time in his life, his limbs responded as they should.
He attacked.
But before he could swing the blade, shadows swarmed him.
They overtook him, clouding his vision, turning everything black.
They slid into his mind, like living things...and suddenly he was thrown back into his own memories.
He heard the echo of every awful thing ever said to him, when he was a child.
Weak. Insignificant.
The spare and forgotten prince.
He heard the younglings’ laughter as he tried and failed to fight, and he saw Arawn’s blazing flames, the kind that the gods had never dared gift to him. He saw the furious flash of his mother’s eyes, and his father’s back, always turned away.
He smelled the putrid smoke of his own skin, burning beneath a mark of penance, and he saw Soraya...his only friend.
“You’re not good enough to be loved, Kinlear,” she said. “Not really.” And she was laughing as she burned the letters she’d written, every week, just for him.
He heard the words his mother whispered, when she thought he wasn’t close enough to hear. “He is a burden. A distraction from the gods...a way to get back at me for my own sins.”
He could feel the shadows pushing at him, begging him to listen. To fall prey to the lies – or perhaps they were truths, for most lies always held some semblance of them.
“Die, Kinlear,” they hissed. “Die a beautiful death.”
But then a voice sang louder than the shadows’ song. It broke through the darkness, broke through a lifetime of pain.
“You are Veilborne,” it whispered, and it sounded like Magus. Like the only person that had ever truly believed in him, enough to give him a gift. “You have a weapon now...and you are not afraid.”
Kinlear screamed into the darkness, listening to that voice, holding on to it. It became a song in his head, a rhythm that sidled up against his rage.
The smoke faded from his eyes, as if he’d finally broken through it.
And this time, he did not hesitate.
He swung his blade.
The monster met him, hit for hit.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Princeling.”
Sparks filled the darkness, embers that danced as its claws met his blade.
“You know where to cut. You know how to kill. Do it, and prove you aren’t afraid.”
And it was Arawn’s voice that slid into his mind next, a true memory...from the day he paid penance in Kinlear’s place.
Go for the throat.
But before he did...
“Who are you?” Kinlear growled. “Why are you here?”
He swung again.
More sparks flew, setting the darkness ablaze.
“WHO ARE YOU?”
His voice echoed off the skeletal trees as the monster circled him, leaving a trail of shadow in its wake.
“I came for you once,” it whispered. “Long ago, in the darkness.”
At that...it was Kinlear’s time to pause.
Because suddenly, he connected this voice, his monster’s hiss, with the voice of the one who soared towards him in the dark place.
“Choose,” it had called to him, from far in the distance.
He never did, because the gods had grabbed him. He knew it was their magic that pulled him back, that cast him into his life, a sick child.
A dying thing.
“It was you?” Kinlear asked, as he backed up another step. As the monster followed, and those shadows stretched towards him like snakes.
Still, he held the dagger out between them.
He was Veilborne.
He was not afraid.
He lunged again, trying to aim for the throat. But the monster evaded the hit.
“You must mean it,” the beast growled. “You must crave my death, the way you crave your mother’s approval. Your father’s attention. Your brother’s crown.”
Kinlear screamed and swung again.
The monster howled with laughter as he missed.
And missed.
And missed.
He was Veilborne.
He was not--
“You’re afraid,” the beast said, ruining his thoughts. “Come closer, Little Prince, and prove to me that you want this. That you are done waiting for the gods to save you. It’s you who holds the power now. Not them.”
He did want this. He longed for all of this to be over...for it to be him that set himself free, that brought glory to his name.
If he ever did anything brave in his life, it would be this.
He’d never killed before, but the motion was fated, the blade was hungry, as if it had long awaited its chance to help him win.
“Careful,” the monster growled. “You’re at the edge of the world, Prince.”
Kinlear blinked and realized the forest around them had changed. The trees had lessened. He was nearing the edge.
But the edge of what?
He risked a glance backwards and yelped.
Because there in the ground, a dark pit awaited him.
It was endless. Depthless. It stretched so far below...he wondered if it had any end.
When he turned back around, the monster was right before him. Mere inches from his face. Shadows licked Kinlear’s skin, cold and biting as the wind. He was lost in the monster’s reek. He could sense that its shadows were hungry to devour him again.
The Veilblade shook in his grasp, because he knew he was inches from another death.
But...something gave him pause.
The monster’s claws were so close, they should already be deep in his chest.
They should already have won this battle.
So why did they wrap themselves around his wrist – the one that held the Veilblade – instead?
“Why?” Kinlear asked. “All these years...why have you hunted me?”
He was crying now, the air so cold the teardrops began to freeze on his face. “Why must it always end like this?”
The monster bridged the gap between them until their chests were touching. Until he could feel his own heart, and the monster’s...
And they beat together, as one.
In perfect tandem.
“I do it because you must become who are you meant to be,” the monster said.
“Because you must die, Kinlear Laroux...in order to truly live.” Gently, reverently, it lifted Kinlear’s wrist, until the Veilblade was pointed at its throat.
“Do it. Make the kill. But only if you’re ready for what comes next. ”
He was ready.
He was ready for anything other than this.
So, with a scream, Kinlear slid his Veilblade across the monster’s throat.
Shadows poured out, spilling onto his hands. They were cold, like fresh-fallen tears.
The monster released its grip.
It staggered and dropped to a knee as the snow filled with shadows around it.
The very same ones that now dripped from Kinlear’s Veilblade.
“Good,” the monster whispered. It was dying. He could hear it, with every heaving breath in its voice. “Now go, Little Prince. Go...and See.”
It pointed, with a trembling claw, at the chasm beyond him. At that endless dark pit that awaited.
“Go...in there?” Kinlear asked.
The monster nodded, its breathing ragged. It had little time left.
“You are Veilborne,” it whispered, and he could have sworn he heard a smile behind its words. “You...are not afraid.”
His own thoughts.
His own words.
Something cold and strange slid into Kinlear’s bones as the monster gave a final, rattling breath. It tumbled backwards and died, face-up in the snow.
In a breath, the shadows disappeared. And as the snow slowly tumbled down...time itself seemed to slow.
Kinlear felt like he was dreaming – a dream within a dream – as he saw the face that had been hidden beneath the darkness, all along.
“No,” he whispered.
Because his monster, the terrible beast that had hunted him, slayed him, reveled in his endless deaths...
It was him.
With fangs and dark lines across its face, as if the shadows had soiled even the blood in his veins. He stared down at it, trembling as the wind kissed his skin.
Darksoul.
Prince.
They were one and the same.
He barely had time to make sense of it before the ground beneath him gave way.
And he fell, screaming, into the dark and depthless pit.