Elluin Nevan Past #2
My heart lurches into my throat as Tyroth charges into the room, a savage glint in his mismatched eyes.
I shield Kyzari with my arms, gathering the shawl around us both while a surge of nausea threatens to turn me inside out. A feeling that intensifies when a female Runi hobbles into the suite, the golden button pinned at her nape stamped with a bead of blood.
Bloodlace.
Tyroth stills at the end of the pallet, arms crossed, hair unbound. Though he wears a loose black shirt rolled to his elbows, something that suggests he’s relaxed and at ease, he looks nothing of the sort.
The hardness in his eyes is the same I’ve seen moments before he’s whipped folk with strings of flame. Sliced out their tongues. Ripped their heads clean off their shoulders with only his bare hands.
“Leave us.”
His voice is a booming assault that never fails to bruise.
The maids pour from the room in a hurried march while I drop my gaze to my daughter. Try to lift my hand so I can run my thumb across her brow … only to realize my limbs have grown heavy, ailed by the tincture. That he’s stealing our moment, piece by piece.
He’s taking it all.
Instead, I count Kyzari’s fingers, over and over, listening to her drink. Tighten my lips against the wobble threatening to overtake my chin.
The Bloodlace drops her satchel. Tinkering sounds fill the room as she etches a ring of runes on the ground beside me—fast but precise. All the while, my dragon battles in the distance, blue and orange flames colliding in the sky while Tyroth’s slitting gaze tries to hack me up.
I want to rage. To scream. But I do neither, knowing it’s hopeless. It’ll only take what’s left of this dwindling moment I have with Kyzari, ruffling it into something ugly and torn.
I don’t want to leave her with that echo.
I won’t.
“If you bleed my daughter, I will kill you.”
The calm of my voice does nothing to betray the protective violence shredding my insides.
I drag my eyes away to meet Tyroth’s merciless stare. “It may not be this dae, or this lifetime, but Creators hear me, I will have vengeance on your body and your filthy, rotten soul.”
He arches a brow. “A female?”
Something about the way he says it makes me flinch, like he sharpened the words into pins he just punched through her flesh.
His impassive gaze slides down to Kyzari, up again. Deadly calm, he says, “How disappointing. She’ll no doubt grow to be just like you. A wretched cunt.”
I snarl.
He smiles—a rarity I want to rip off his face, though it’s gone in a blink. “Now, Zatia.”
I shred Tyroth with a stare, still snarling as a pin is pressed into Kyzari’s heel. Though she squirms, she doesn’t pull from my breast, settling back into her suckling.
Tyroth stands stoic and unmoving, features poised, holding all the power in his clenched fists while the bead of blood is mixed with a loose tincture, dribbled within the ring of runes that begin to glow in my peripheral.
The liquid branches out like the roots of a tree.
I don’t have to look to see that the thickest two point to myself and somewhere else. North, to where Kaan no doubt resides. I don’t look, but I see the moment Tyroth slides his attention to the spreading tincture.
The moment his features harden, suspicions confirmed.
He lifts his chin, lids lowering until his stare is a slit glower. “You whore.”
I ignore him, choosing to spend my final heartbeats with the one who matters, dropping my gaze to Kyzari … wishing I could lean down and kiss her pale lashes. Instead, I sing to her—starting Mah’s song from the very beginning, moving softly through the tune.
I’m only two verses in when Tyroth mutters a spear-headed phrase.
Bulder doesn’t respond immediately, like he spent a moment fighting the order. Or at least that’s what I choose to believe, that he’s hoping I have the power to shift my body to the side.
I don’t.
I gag as a barb of stone punches into my back, busts through my ribs with a shatter of gouging pain. My chest fills with a flood of cold before it emerges through the front of me, spraying blood across Kyzari’s face.
She flinches. Opens her eyes, not quite enough for me to see their color before Tyroth rips her from my breast.
Blood boils up my throat with a serrated scream forged from a depth I didn’t know I possessed. Though to me, Kyzari’s shrill cry hits harder.
Sharper.
Tyroth bundles her within a cloth, then tucks her against his chest as life rushes from my veins, my body loosening much faster than my panicked mind still clinging to every detail it can frantically snatch.
The Bloodlace hobbles to my side and begins gathering her belongings. She glances up, looks at me through wide, sorrowful eyes—
Another sharp sentence spits from Tyroth’s lips.
A stone lance punches up through the underside of the Bloodlace’s jaw, out the top of her skull, blood weeping from her still-open eyes—now flat and lifeless.
Pushing past her, Tyroth reaches forward to jiggle the diadem bound against my brow, his upper lips pinching together, threatening to twitch into a snarl when the headpiece doesn’t budge.
He sighs, brings Kyzari close enough to tease me with her scent. To touch—to pull close to my chest where she belongs—if I could only lift my arms.
The runes on the diadem pulse with a warm throb before one of the many clawed tendrils loosen. Like a pin slowly sliding from my brain …
My skull …
I seethe through a torn and rattling breath as he pries his fingers around the diadem again, this time jerking almost hard enough to rip me from the spear.
The piece cracks free, like a barely calcified scab not yet ready to fall off, but a sure sign I’m no longer a viable host. That the metal parasite recognizes my baby as a better, juicer feast for it to suck from.
Because I’m dying.
Tyroth looks down at my daughter squirming, crying in his arms, and I’m forced to watch in fading horror while he presses the diadem against her tiny brow.
Sensing her presence, the metal filaments curl in, bending to fit her shape before they latch on. Like a claw.
Her responding squeal threatens to rip out my heart, the sound more painful than the mortal wound that’s draining life from me.
“Rest easy with the knowledge that she’ll never know what a filthy whore you are,” Tyroth mutters, passing me a final seething look before he shakes his head and turns for the door, breaking my view of Kyzari.
I scream, but no sound comes out.
I thrash, but not a single limb moves.
Then I realize I never told Kyzari I love her, and my soul shatters like a fallen moon, my heartstrings fraying.
Snapping.
Slátra’s roar rattles the palace. Morphs into a pained lament that echoes in my aching heart as it lurches through its final, drudging beat—
And I fall into a darkness that knows no end.
Elluin’s consciousness is ripped from Slátra’s heart like an artery torn free, leaving a gaping hole that weeps and throbs. Immeasurable pain branches through her chest cavity, as though it came away with chunks of flesh.
Bits of bone.
Strings of veins.
An agony she’s only felt twice before, when she lost her mate, and when her little Allume took to the sky and laid herself to rest.
Slátra roars so loud her ancestors rattle in the big black, thrashing her wings against the howling wind—consumed by wild, gnashing rage.
She whips forward. Clamps down on the Moltenmaw’s neck—the final of the three beasts that kept her from her Precious Little One for too long.
She tears out the buck’s throat, blood spraying as she releases his heavy body from her clawed grip.
An act that would usually bring her great sadness—felling a dragon spurred to battle by the sadistic greed of fae folk—but Slátra’s heart is not whole anymore.
Its final reason for beating, gone.
Slátra doesn’t need her vision to sense the direction of the palace, each milky speckle in her eyes the flaring consciousness of distant kin helping her sketch the shape of the world.
Even without them, the frantic Air Goddess is making enough sounds to render things in pristine detail, lashing against the heartbreaking contours of it all.
The fallen dragons.
The discord.
The death.
Slátra collides with the palace claws first, gouging into the eaves and walls built to withstand the might of a dragon. They crumble beneath her rabid grip as she clambers toward Elluin’s bloody scent, soured by the agony of her final moments.
Coming to the open entryway, Slátra tears big hunks from the structure.
Ripping into it like a fresh kill. With a flick of her head, another dwelling-sized chunk plummets toward the city beneath, not that she cares where it lands.
Caring only that she must safely reach her Precious Little One, Elluin’s dying thoughts a raging echo in Slátra’s heart.
A tragedy she vows to remedy with every bit of her being.
She wedges her claw, shoulder, and head through the jagged hole, sniffing. Scenting everything that has come to pass since she was chased from Elluin’s nestside.
She reaches for her body—
The high-pitched wails of Elluin’s young punch a splinter in her soul.
Snarling, she whips her head toward the sound, sniffing the male clutching the little one in a defiant, greedy embrace.
Using her as a shield.
A youngling Slátra certainly won’t risk the well-being of, not even to strike … him.
She opens her maw. Lets Tyroth Vaegor see the roil of flame sitting on her tongue, lashing between her teeth. Feeds on the panicked whump of his heart that echoes like a roar to her sensitive hearing, wondering if he’ll do to her what he did to her Precious Little One.
If he’ll dare.
Perhaps he senses the brewing carnage he would release if he tried to prevent Slátra from reaching Elluin’s body, because his lips stay firmly shut.
Slátra turns her attention. Softly nudges Elluin’s side, sniffing the sharp piece of stone still protruding from her chest.
A low whine moves up her throat.
Gently, she slides Elluin off the shard. Broken and limp, too easily folding into the cup of Slátra’s large claw.
Her attention snaps back to the male clinging to the youngling that isn’t his while she pulls Elluin close to her chest, snarling again. Emitting a quiet promise that Tyroth’s time will come.
She’ll make it so.
She retreats more delicately than she came, tipping her head to the sky the moment she’s free of the den that smells too much like her Precious Little One’s end. Of her fiery spirit raging until her final breath.
The world needs her, but it’s not yet broken enough to realize it.
Slátra lifts her wings and drops her hold on the crumbling turret, launching into the sky—milky eyes cast toward her beautiful sleeping Allume, bound around Elluin’s perished kin.
And she flies. Up toward them in a way she’s imagined many times since she watched Allume curl into a ball and loosen herself from life. She just never imagined it would be like this. That she would ascend with such sadness in her heart, holding her Precious Little One … not so little anymore.
With a Precious Little One of her own.
She flies until the atmosphere grows cold and quiet—too far for Clode to dwell—and pulls her final breath before gravity loses its grip on her. She swoops close enough to paint her tail across Allume’s little wing, then tucks into herself.
Curling around Elluin like she’s cradling a most precious egg, she finds a quiet spot amongst her many beloved ancestors …
Except she doesn’t give herself to death.
Instead, she unbinds that silver ribbon tangled through the fibers of her soul, gently unwinds every loose thread, until it’s a restless spool surging with the very essence of existence. Then, she shifts it from behind her ribs.
Plants it deep in Elluin’s chest.
Though it disappears, swallowed by the terminal chasm within her Precious Little One, she finds quiet peace in the hope that it will take root. That it will grow and pulse with life so Elluin has the chance to come back to her own Precious Little One.
So she has the chance to tell her that she loves her.
With that hope blazing in her consciousness, Slátra releases her final icy exhale upon Elluin’s brow before her body turns to stone.