Chapter 4
FOUR
ZRYNOK
The chapel is worse than I imagined.
Vaulted ceilings soar overhead, painted with scenes of flowering bodies ascending toward a crimson heaven.
Stained glass windows filter the morning light into shades of blood and rust, casting the congregation in hellish shadow.
Rows of pews stretch toward the altar, filled with white-robed figures who turn as one toward the noise of my entrance.
The altar itself is white marble veined with red, its surface carved with channels that direct liquid toward basins at its base. Torches burn in a massive frame behind it, eternal flames casting the man at the lectern in shifting light and shadow.
The Abbot. Father Verantus.
He’s beautiful. The word doesn’t fit—shouldn’t fit—but there it is. Ageless features, skin smooth as porcelain, robes flowing around him in silk shadows. His presence commands attention the way a bonfire commands a dark room, drawing focus, demanding acknowledgment.
On the altar before him: a girl. Young. Barely grown. Strapped to the stone with leather restraints, her white robe torn, her face wet with tears she’s too broken to wipe away.
Circe.
A Keeper stands beside her, ritual implements laid out on a cloth—blades and brands and things I don’t want to identify. His hands are steady. Practiced. Someone who’s done this before and feels nothing about doing it again.
I recognize those hands. I’ve had hands like that. Done work like that.
The difference is I never pretended it was holy.
“Sister Arwen has chosen to reject our love.” The Abbot’s voice carries through the chapel, warm and resonant, continuing his sermon as if I haven’t just shattered his doors.
“Her departure wounds us all. But through this ceremony, we transform grief into growth. Through sacrifice, we remind ourselves that freedom is an illusion—”
I move.
The first Keeper dies before anyone realizes what’s happening. My blade takes him through the throat—clean, efficient, the spray of blood painting the pew behind him before his body understands it’s dead. He crumples. I’m past him, tracking the next target.
The second Keeper reaches for his weapon. Too slow. My sword opens him from shoulder to hip, the executioner’s cut that severs everything vital, and he folds in on himself with a gurgling scream.
The third tries to run. Bad choice. I catch him by the collar, spin him into my blade, feel the impact shudder up my arm as steel finds resistance and pushes through.
The congregation erupts.
Screaming. Chaos. White robes scrambling over pews, trampling each other in their desperation to escape. Some rush toward the exits. Others freeze, paralyzed by shock, their conditioned obedience warring with survival instinct.
A few—the believers Arwen warned about—grab for weapons hidden in their robes. I mark them. Prioritize. Adjust my path to intercept before they can organize.
The work is familiar. Brutal. Almost comfortable. My body knows this dance—the rhythm of violence, the geometry of death. Step. Strike. Pivot. Strike again. Blood sprays across marble. Bodies fall and don’t rise.
I wade toward the altar, carving paths through anyone stupid enough to get in my way.
In my peripheral vision: Arwen. She moves around the carnage rather than through it, using the chaos as cover, slipping between panicked cultists with the practiced invisibility of someone who’s survived by not being seen.
Her trajectory is clear—the altar. The girl. Rescue while I provide distraction.
The plan is working.
A Keeper meets me with a blade—longer than the others, better trained.
We exchange strikes, testing each other, and I feel the spores singing in my blood.
Everything is sharper. Brighter. The impact of steel against steel sends pleasure rolling down my spine, and that’s wrong, that’s the Bloom working on me—
I push through it. End the Keeper with a disemboweling cut that spills his insides across the floor. Step over him. Keep moving.
The Abbot hasn’t moved.
He stands at his lectern, watching the massacre unfold with an expression of patient amusement. No fear. No urgency. Just calm assessment, as if I’m a performance he’s judging rather than a threat he needs to escape.
That should concern me. Doesn’t. I’m too focused on the killing, too wrapped in the Bloom’s influence, too close to finishing what I started.
Arwen reaches the altar. I see her hands working the restraints, fingers fumbling with buckles designed to resist exactly this rescue. Circe is sobbing, saying something I can’t hear over the screaming of the congregation.
More Keepers pour through a side entrance. Reinforcements. Fresh and armed and very inconvenient.
I adjust. Intercept. The first one dies trying to reach Arwen; the second dies trying to avenge the first. My arms burn with exertion. My lungs labor against the spore-thick air. The Bloom sings in my blood, demanding more—more violence, more sensation, more of everything—
I reach the altar steps. The Abbot is right there. Ten feet away. My sword arm rises, prepared to end this, to fulfill the deal I made to a woman I’ve known less than a day—
My arm stops.
Not by choice. By force. Some invisible hand has wrapped around my muscles and squeezed, turning my body into a puppet with severed strings.
The wanting hits me.
Not the background hum I’ve been fighting since entering the monastery.
This is a tsunami—every unfulfilled need I’ve ever experienced, compressed and magnified and screaming for satisfaction.
Hunger, though I ate this morning. Thirst, though I’m not dehydrated.
The desperate need for touch, for warmth, for something I can’t name—
And beneath it all, specific and undeniable: her.
Arwen. The curve of her neck. The sound of her voice. The way she looked at me when I gave her my cloak, as though no one had shown her kindness in years.
I want. I want. The wanting drowns everything else, pulls me under, fills my lungs with honey-sweet need until I can’t remember why I’m here or what I’m supposed to be doing.
My sword drops from nerveless fingers. My knees buckle. I hit the stone floor hard enough to crack the marble, but the pain barely registers through the overwhelming tide of desire.
The Abbot smiles.
“The spores in this room are specially concentrated.” His voice washes over me—warm, gentle, horrifying. “Even an executioner’s will can break against sufficient desire.”
Arwen’s face appears in my vision. She’s there suddenly, abandoning the half-freed girl on the altar, her hands on my face, her gaze boring into mine with desperate intensity.
“Listen to me.” Her voice cuts through the fog. Sharp. Demanding. “You’re stronger than this. The spores work on desire. You need to want something more than what they’re offering.”
Want something more. She makes it sound simple. But the wanting is everywhere, is everything, is consuming me from the inside out—
“What could I possibly—”
“Want me to survive.” Her hands tighten on my face. Her breath warm against my skin. “Want to finish the job. Want anything real and hold onto it.”
She’s so close. I can smell her beneath the monastery’s floral rot—sweat and fear and something uniquely her. The hunger intensifies, focuses, becomes something sharp enough to cut.
But she’s right.
Wanting her alive is stronger than the Bloom’s artificial hungers. Wanting to see the Abbot dead is stronger than the need for surrender. Wanting to stand there when the bastard finally falls, to give her that one thing she asked for—
I force myself upright. Every muscle screams resistance. The Bloom fights back, sending fresh waves of need crashing through my blood. But I’m standing. Sword in hand. Eyes fixed on the Abbot’s suddenly uncertain expression.
“Impressive.” His composure cracks. Just slightly. The first flaw in his perfect facade. “But futile. You can’t fight indefinitely. The Bloom has you now.”
“Then I’ll kill you before it finishes.” I take a step forward. My legs want to buckle; I don’t let them. “That’s all the time I need.”
More Keepers pour through the doors behind me. Fresh reinforcements. Too many to fight through with the Bloom tearing at my control.
Arwen’s hand finds my arm. Anchoring. Directing.
“There’s a passage behind the altar.” Her voice is urgent now. “It leads to the lower levels. We need to go.”
“The Abbot—”
“Will still be here tomorrow. Right now we need to survive tonight.”
The logic is sound. I hate it. Hate leaving the job unfinished. But the girl on the altar is still half-bound, and the Keepers are closing in, and the Bloom is clawing at my thoughts with every passing second.
I grab Circe from the altar—Arwen finished freeing her while I was on my knees—and sling her over my shoulder. We run.
The Abbot’s voice follows us into the hidden passage, echoing off ancient stone:
“Run if you like, Sister. The Bloom has claimed him now. He’ll return to me eventually—they all do. And when he does, he’ll bring you with him. He won’t be able to help himself.”
I don’t look back. Don’t respond. Just focus on putting one foot in front of the other, following Arwen into the darkness, carrying a girl who seems to weigh nothing compared to the hunger eating me alive.
The Abbot is wrong. He has to be wrong.
But the Bloom pulses in my blood, and the wanting doesn’t fade, and somewhere in the deepest part of my mind, a voice whispers that fighting is pointless.
That surrender would be so much easier.
That she smells so good, and I want her so badly, and maybe the old man is right about what happens next.
I crush the thought. Bury it. Keep moving.
But it doesn’t die. It just waits.