Chapter 28
Into a runic sleep, he went.
He felt like a child again, a boy fighting to hang onto life, as the Ehvermages marked him. And just like that, he was gone to this world...
...and waking up, as he always did, in the next.
But when he entered his dreams tonight, he was surprised to find that he was not falling through the dark sky, a helpless, tumbling thing. He was not forced to watch the future play out.
He was, instead, back at the entrance to his dark and dying woods. Where it all began.
And there, just inside the tree line...
His monster was waiting for him.
“I killed you,” Kinlear said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
His Veilblade was in his hands in an instant, but the monster did not move to attack him.
It only shrugged, pulled the hood back from its head, and said, “You killed the idea of me, Little Prince. But I was still there, watching and waiting, all along.”
Kinlear lunged towards it, furious.
But the monster easily sidestepped him, and batted out with a clawed hand, so fast, Kinlear hadn’t even seen it until he realized his Veilblade was missing.
The beast had stolen it from his grasp.
And now he would die.
He would die, just like this...the way it was always supposed to end.
“Funny,” the monster said, as the snow began to dance down from the sky, and the wind blew hard enough that the skeletal trees rattled with the sound of quaking bones. “You’re still afraid of me. Why?”
“Because you’re a monster,” Kinlear growled, as he pressed his back against an aspen tree. The eyes of thousands of others in the forest seemed to be glaring down at him...eager to watch him finally die.
“Why?” the beast asked him. “Because I’m different?”
The question surprised him.
“Because you have claws on your hands,” Kinlear blurted, still holding his blade between them. “Because you have shadows for a face and you have hunted me, haunted me, every day of my life.”
But the monster only chuckled, and the sound was so familiar it made Kinlear’s stomach ache.
He watched as the shadows tumbled away from the monster’s face...as they slithered down his neck and shoulders until they finally coiled up at his feet like snakes.
And where the shadows had once been...
Just like he remembered, it was his own face staring back.
Same...but different, for where Kinlear had teeth, this darksoul version of him had elongated fangs. Where Kinlear’s skin was pale, the monster had dark tendrils beneath the surface, revealing the black blood in his veins.
Terrifying.
Handsome, yes, for he emanated power, the kind anyone would want.
But his hands?
His hands were tipped in those long, terrible claws, black as the night above them.
Kinlear flinched at the sight of them, remembering so many deaths. So much pain.
“I live and breathe and walk and worship, the same as you,” the monster said. “And I hardly think hunting you, haunting you, counts as monstrous, when it’s your dream.”
“But I can’t control it,” Kinlear said.
The monster chuckled, revealing his fangs. “Aren’t you, though?”
Kinlear raised a brow.
“You’re looking at your future. Your destiny. You are to be what your brother could never.”
“And what is that?” Kinlear asked, as the snow muddled his monster’s expression.
“A catalyst,” it hissed. The shadows churned at his feet.
“You, Little Prince, are to be the one that sets everything in motion. When you bring Ezer to the other side, when you reveal to her that bowing to the Acolyte is not so forbidden, after all...when you use the Veilblade to take her to the darkness...” the monster smiled.
“She will finally step into her power. And become the greatest threat that Lordach has ever known.”
“No,” Kinlear said.
Because he did not yet understand, because this darksoul version of him was speaking about Ezer and a blade, Ezer and darkness, and the two were meant to destroy it, not become it.
“Yes, Little Prince,” the darksoul said, and for a second, he sighed in frustration.
Before he lunged forward, faster than Kinlear thought him able...and drove his claws into his chest.
There was no pain.
There wasn’t even death, he didn’t think, because suddenly everything shifted, and he was falling again.
He saw it all play out, like normal. Himself on the cliffside, facing a mother that had always hated him.
Ezer beside him, Six beneath them both. A journey through the shadowstorm and the jagged beauty of the world that awaited beyond.
He saw the purple cave, the strange shapes on the black stone walls.
Ezer’s kiss and Six’s final goodbye and then Kinlear...
Bowing to the Acolyte, a blade revealing the dark blood hidden beneath his skin.
But it did not end there.
It kept going, until he saw everything.
With open eyes, he watched, as he was transformed. As his entire existence, his pain and his suffering and his dying...
It was all replaced by a beautiful, powerful version of him.
He was the monster now.
He was the darksoul, and the feeling in his veins? Utter bliss.
There was no more weakness in his legs. No, he was so strong he could have run forever, and with his new darksoul claws, he needed no blade. He was a blade, a weapon that could not be defeated.
His body wasn’t a cage.
It was freedom incarnate...capable of doing anything he asked of it. Anything he wished, and it would bring glory to the darkness. It would—
“No!” Kinlear screamed.
He fought against the vision. Against the future, because it was wrong, all wrong.
He served the Five. He served the gods, fought on the side of the light, even if it had done little to love him.
“Don’t fight it, Little Prince,” the monster’s voice came to him from far away. “This is your destiny...to die in order to live.”
So, he was cast back into that vision again, even deeper than before, back to the Acolyte’s cave. He rose before him, and as he did, he suddenly understood the full truth.
The Five were a lie. They were enemies, not saviors.
Everything he’d ever been taught was a lie, and Soraya was right all along. She was right...and she’d died believing in it.
Ezer was horrified.
Kinlear watched from his darksoul eyes as she was dragged away, kicking and screaming, cursing him to the wind, because she did not yet understand what it was like on the other side. The freedom and the blessing and the realization that all his life, he’d been a prisoner.
And now he’d been set free.
He saw the Long Day ending. He saw Arawn, standing on a cliffside, realizing that they were never coming back...
He saw Ezer, pulled from a prison cell, broken. Furious.
He saw himself driving a blade into her chest. He was horrified as he saw his clawed hands shove her backwards into a dark and yawning pit. It was the very same as the one he’d fallen through for years in his Veilborne dreams...but now she got the chance to experience it.
“Watch what she becomes,” the monster hissed in his mind.
She rose from the pit...changed. Because she was the next Acolyte.
She was brilliant. A beautiful monster he’d bow to for the rest of his days, and he had been the catalyst. He watched as she soared on Six’s back, went to battle, and was victorious.
The vision ended.
He was left breathless, tears rolling down his cheeks, as he found himself in the forest again, the monster before him.
“Why?” he asked.
The monster only smiled. “Because in the opposite, Little Prince... you both cease to exist.”
Claws drove into him again.
He was tossed back to the beginning of his life.
He saw himself as a boy, laying in a too-large bed. He saw the terror in his eyes, the way his mother had frowned down at him as he’d begged her to stay.
And she didn’t.
He saw himself paying penance, the smoke rising from his skin as the Masters branded him into repentance. But every time they marked him, something darkened in his heart. Every time they tried to fix him, that part of Kinlear Laroux that had never once wanted to bow to their laws...
It fed the monster inside of him.
And the darkness grew and grew and grew.
He saw himself standing on the training room floor, struggling to keep up with children half his age. He heard their laughter...saw the way they only respected him when Arawn was watching.
He was just the spare.
The second born.
The forgotten prince.
He saw every moment of his life, played out.
The illness and the day his mother first brought him to Touvre, how he’d been so alone, for so long, clinging to letters and a speaking stone for happiness, until he met Magnus.
Until he received his Veilblade and understood what dreams and destiny could do.
He saw the moments with Ezer and Six, every beautiful second up until this.
“Two paths,” the monster hissed, its voice echoing to him as he watched his life unfold. “Which will you choose, Little Prince?”
It sped forwards. The cave, the kiss, the darkness. He saw the Acolyte on the throne, the blade in his hand...but this time, he buried it deep into the Acolyte’s chest. He killed the beast the way he was always supposed to.
But the Acolyte did not fall. He didn’t even bleed.
Instead, he took that same blade and thrust it into Kinlear’s heart.
“Fool boy,” the Acolyte hissed.
And Kinlear watched himself die in a puddle of crimson on the throne room floor.
Ezer screamed. The sound was animalistic. It split through the Acolyte’s throne room, until every darksoul eye was upon her next. She couldn’t even fall to hold Kinlear’s lifeless body before the wolves were set free...
And finally, at long last, they finished what they had once started and ended her with their claws and teeth.
Kinlear sobbed as he watched it play out.
Himself, dead on the floor. Ezer, dead beside him.
“No,” he sobbed. “Please, no.”
But the vision refused to release him.
It moved forward again, until he saw Arawn standing alone on the cliffside, his shoulders heavy with snow. He stayed until the Long Day ended...until darkness fell like a blanket, over the north...and he realized that Ezer and Kinlear were never coming back.
They’d failed.
They had failed their mission, their only chance at glory.
And as time wore on, and the war raged, and the once-great Kingdom of Lordach dwindled…nobody remembered Kinlear Laroux’s name.
The vision went dark.
He found himself standing in the woods again...tears soaking his face.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would you show me this?”
“Choose,” the monster hissed. So cold, so heartless. “Choose a path.”
“No,” Kinlear growled. “That’s not how it works.”
“It is,” the monster whispered. “Because the One deems it so. You must choose, Little Prince, to step into the plan laid out for you. One holds greatness and glory...power and freedom and the only true chance you’ll ever have to live.
The other brings darkness eternal...where you and the woman you love do not exist.”
It wasn’t a choice, not really.
Had he ever had choices? Had he ever even stood a fighting chance?
“Choose,” the monster whispered.
“No,” Kinlear said, sobbing into the night. “I can’t.”
“You must.”
A pause. A sigh of the wind, and he swore, in the distance, he heard the cawing of a raven.
Ezer.
Ezer…she deserved to live. To have power and pleasure and all the things that, like him…he had never been given the chance to experience.
“Will it hurt?” he asked. “When…when she switches sides?”
The monster smiled through his fangs. “It will feel like falling, at first...and then, Little Prince? Then it will feel like flying. She’ll be unstoppable. She’ll be the greatest threat the Five have ever known, and you will stand by her side. You will have her. For eternity.”
A claw lifted…and wiped a single tear away.
“Weakness,” the beast said. “You won’t have to feel this anymore. Choose.”
Death…or eternity.
A choice that was rooted in darkness…but so was fighting for the Five. The liars. The monsters he’d spent his whole life waiting to save him...but it was only this monster. This beast, a darker version of himself, that had come to offer him a chance at greatness.
“The first one,” Kinlear whispered. He sucked in a breath, realizing what it meant. For him. For her. For Arawn, who’d once paid his penance. Who would not understand. Who would fight Kinlear, fight Ezer, until his very last Sacred breath. “…I choose the first.”
Something shifted in his soul, then.
He could feel it, could sense the transformation inside of him, as the monster tore its claws from his chest.
He gasped as he found himself pulled from the woods, and back to the Acolyte’s throne room.
Where Kinlear Laroux, a darksoul made new, showed him the way his choice would go.
He saw all of it.
Every fragment of truth.
The Acolyte was Ezer’s father...and she?
She was to be the next.
And Kinlear knew now, that she had to die in order to live.
He wanted to scream at her, to warn her of what was to come, for some part of him knew it would feel so utterly wrong.
But he’d decided.
He’d decided, and if it meant she did not die…then he hoped, someday, she would forgive him for it.
“It isn’t the end,” the monster hissed. “It is only the beginning of her greatness.”
He saw when it would all happen.
She stood with her heels hovering over the edge of a dark and yawning pit. His Veilblade was in his clawed hand. She was crying, sobbing for him not to do it, but she didn’t understand. She would, soon enough.
He leaned in, and one last time, he kissed her soft human lips.
“Die, my love,” he whispered. “Or choose to join us and live.”
He killed her with that fated blade.
He drove it in deep, and the last part of him that was human, that one that had felt pain and sorrow and the deepest longings for love...
It died as she did.
But it wasn’t the end. It wouldn’t ever be.
This was only her beginning, as Kinlear pushed her backwards, into a dark and yawning pit.
Later, she rose.
She was drenched in shadows, crowned in glory that the Five could never even dare to try and claim.
Ezer, his Raphonminder, the woman from his dreams...
She was the next Acolyte.
And she was glorious.