Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter
Twenty-Five
“That’s a critical hit,” Wesley announces.
This bodes well.
Rolling a 20 for an attack means that the attack will do twice as much damage as usual. And since the first thing Vadrien did when he found Sindra and Antoni was rush into action…
Colin turns and claps his hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “It’s been nice knowing you, Captain.”
Wesley’s villainous grin looks even more foreboding than usual, especially since he’s turned off every light for today’s session, save for the chandelier and the wall torches. He claimed he wanted to set the mood, and so far, the mood is bad.
“Well, let’s see.” Wesley meets my eyes. “Do you think you can save him, Sindra?”
Sindra cannot move fast enough.
Vadrien shoves her back, sending her sailing into the nearest marble column. The impact dazes her, and as she struggles to catch her breath, the vampire turns his attention to the captain.
“No,” Sindra gasps, “don’t—”
It’s brutally quick work, though Antoni doesn’t go down without a fight.
He runs for a shield and sword, reaching for any of the dozens stored along the armory’s walls, but Vadrien is unmatched for speed.
Without his armor and weapons, the paladin is defenseless, and each vicious swipe of Vadrien’s claws tears deep wounds in Antoni’s chest, thigh, and shoulder.
Within seconds, he falls to his knees before crumpling to the floor.
The captain’s lips move soundlessly—calling the name of his god, perhaps—and a dull golden glow lights at his chest. Though some of his wounds begin to heal, blood still pools under his body, and he soon falls unconscious.
Vadrien eyes the spreading crimson with fierce hunger—but at the last moment, he tears his gaze away and fixes it on where Sindra holds her sword with shaking hands.
“He means something to you,” Vadrien observes.
“Yes.” She can’t remember when the shift happened, when she started to care for these people, but she can’t deny it now.
Vadrien rips a spear from the wall and holds it poised at Antoni’s throat. Sindra freezes with Brightmorn outstretched. The prince tsks at her again, and that condescending click of his tongue against his teeth makes her want to cut it out of his mouth.
“Drop your weapon, Sindra,” he commands, “and come here.”
Internally, she seethes. Antoni would want me to keep fighting. He would want me to risk it all—even his life—if I thought I had a chance of killing this monster.
But even if she could manage the feat, just the thought of having to break the news to Vera sends her sword clattering to the floor. Like a puppet on strings, she stumbles toward Vadrien.
“Good,” he murmurs.
She keeps her gaze trained on Antoni, counting each shallow rise and fall of his chest. Vadrien makes a disgusted noise and jerks her chin up with his free hand until her eyes meet his. “Do you remember what I told you during our dance?”
“You had something to show me.”
“And you, clever girl, have nearly found it already.”
Vadrien presses his palm to the empty pedestal where the false crown sat. The marble glows a dull red before it seems to shimmer. As the illusion magic falls away, a compartment at the pedestal’s top folds out to reveal a second crown—but not the one they’re seeking.
No, the silver of this crown looks cold and sharp, and darkness swirls in its central ruby. Etched on the interior of the crown is text identical to the runes inked into Vadrien’s skull. Though many of the words still elude her, one leaps out: pact. “More infernal runes,” she mutters.
“Very good.” Vadrien reaches up to touch the side of her horn; Sindra flinches back. “Tell me, Sindra, what is your story? Did one of your parents lie with a devil?”
At first, she doesn’t answer—she doesn’t owe him her history. But then, casually, Vadrien presses the point of the spear against Antoni’s neck. It’s enough to draw a thin rivulet of blood.
Sindra hisses. “No,” she spits. “They worshipped devils. The magic they indulged in changed them irrevocably.” And me, she thinks.
“Sinful creature,” he murmurs. “Is that where you got your name?”
She grinds her teeth near to breaking. “The devil tried to claim me once, but I chose my own path.”
“And I chose mine.”
This close, Sindra can see the madness in his eyes, the way the bloodshot veins branch out from his burning ruby irises.
It dawns on her then, and she gasps. “That’s what happened to you, isn’t it? All of the questions, the runes in your skin, in the crown…” she breathes. “You’ve made a deal with one, haven’t you?”
His gaze is steady on her, even as his eyes narrow dangerously.
“Have I hit close to home, my prince?” He bares his fangs at her now, but still she continues. “What were you seeking? Power? Control?” That’s almost always the case, she’s learned. It was with her parents.
“I didn’t want to control the people of Moros,” he says, seething. His eyes darken suddenly, and for a moment, Sindra swears she sees a flash of the warm brown they used to be. “I wanted to protect them. Look. Look.”
He wraps a hand around one of her horns and wrenches her forward until her forehead knocks painfully against his.
“Ursan tried to have us killed for stealing food, Sindra—many of us. You think me a monster, but you know nothing of monstrosity. You were not here,” he snaps.
“I escaped Frozenfang Pass. I found the cave. I freed this whole fucking kingdom.”
This time, it’s not the slow ease of sinking into a dream. Instead, Sindra’s vision turns black, and painful pressure builds behind her eyes as Vadrien forces her to witness another memory.
He has almost accepted his inevitable death when he sees the light.
After his exile, Vadrien wandered for days through the darkness of Frozenfang’s cave systems. He tried to stick with the others, working together to survive, but one by one, their numbers dwindled.
Some were lost to the wolves, others to the cold.
Some left to scout the dark caves ahead and never returned.
Just this morning, Vadrien had one companion left, but starvation had seen the end of him before the sun even rose.
Vadrien’s own hunger claws at his empty stomach, makes him slow and delirious.
The caves are so dark that he begins to imagine shapes and shadows.
When he finally sees a glow at the end of the tunnel, it feels like hope.
And so he follows it, even as it leads him deeper and the air begins to swelter. Even as the heat grows oppressive.
By now he has counted dozens of bends, and he has just begun to believe that it was simply a figment of his imagination when the light suddenly blinds him.
The bonfire surges upward from a pit at the cave’s center, filling it almost entirely. It’s impossible to tell what fuels the flames—it is as if the earth itself has cracked open to release the fire, though Vadrien sees scatterings of bone-white wood at the edges of the pit.
Or perhaps that is not wood at all.
Vadrien carefully clears his dry throat. “Hello?”
“Welcome.”
He feels more than hears the voice, like a rumbling that begins underneath his feet and makes every step unsteady. Vadrien looks around for the source, but the fire overtakes his vision; he can see nothing beyond the flames.
“I saw your fire like a beacon when I entered these caves. I thought I might—” He winces as a pang of pain shoots through his arm. He’d injured himself badly when he slipped down a ravine. “I thought I might find safety here.”
The answering laugh is like nails clawing at his spine—it grates at Vadrien like a warning. If he had any energy left, he might have run.
“I may be able to grant you what you want,” the voice muses.
Impossibly, the firelight casts hundreds of shadows against the cave’s walls. Vadrien spots humanoid silhouettes but also flashes of spine-tipped wings, the arcs of horns, the whip of a tail. It makes the cave seem as if it is filled with beings, and each shape is more horrific than the last.
“What do you want, boy?” the voice demands.
“I—I just need somewhere safe to pass the night.”
The voice hisses angrily, and Vadrien finds himself cowering, his knees gone soft. “More. Do not lie to me, human. What do you want?”
Vadrien licks at his cracked lips. The heat is stifling—almost unbearable.
“I just want to live,” he insists. In Zaska, with my family, surrounded by the friends I’ve lost. With a full stomach. And my sister, safe. Peace—finally, peace.
“Closer,” the voice rumbles. “This is the last time I will ask: What do you want?”
Vadrien stares into the fire as it crackles and burns. His heartbeat begins to surge, and so do the flames, roiling as they stretch toward the ceiling. He feels their heat in the pit of his stomach, and an awful rage flares to life.
He’s always carried this anger with him: to every sentencing, every protest, every posting of a new and worse decree in the city square.
With every customer who could no longer afford his tailoring services, every dinner spent hunched over a nearly empty bowl, his hate has grown.
It expands now to fill his chest—to fill the whole cave.
“I want King Ursan gone. I want him dead,” Vadrien snarls. “I want him to pay for what he’s done to us—him and his whole line—for years.”
As Vadrien stands with his fingers curled into fists, the cave fills with silence.
Finally, someone steps out from the bonfire.
Not someone, Vadrien realizes with horror. Something.
The creature is impossibly tall and corpse-pale, with ink-dark veins tracing jagged lines underneath its skin, down to its blackened feet and clawed hands.
Black horns sprout from its hairless head, and torn leathery wings extend from its hunched back.
Its pointed tail drags along the rock behind it as it approaches Vadrien.
It’s not until the creature looms before him that Vadrien sees the black liquid that stains its mouth and neck.