Chapter 26 Khaelor
KHAELOR
The violent, shuddering echo of my own release is entirely swallowed by the agonizing screech of melting iron.
I withdraw from Mireya, the sudden severing of our physical connection leaving a hollow, freezing void in the center of my chest. I step back, my boots grinding against the salt-rimed marble of the Echo Crystal Vault.
The heavy, ringing silence of the tomb is shattered.
Across the freezing dark, the massive metal doors are glowing cherry-red, warping inward under the immense, sustained pressure of the Vanguard’s siege magic. We have seconds before the breach.
I look at the woman pressed against the deep-earth resonating pedestal.
Her breath is ragged, her chest heaving as she pulls desperate lungfuls of the freezing subterranean air.
Her skin is flushed, shivering in the sudden absence of my blistering heat.
The front of her leather tunic is completely shredded, ruined by the desperate, starving violence of my own corrupted hands in the dark.
I stoop, snatching my heavy velvet cloak from where I discarded it on the floor days ago when I was here.
I step into her space, throwing the thick, dark fabric over her shoulders.
I pull the heavy edges tight across her bare chest, shielding her from the cold and the encroaching eyes of the executioners who are seconds away from breaking down our door.
I drag my trousers up, securing the heavy iron buckles with trembling fingers.
She is looking at me with questions in her eyes. Questions I cannot answer. I turn away as a vicious, tearing cough rips from my throat.
I taste raw copper and necrotic ash. The null-iron suppression sigils the Vanguard planted in the outer corridor are bleeding their frequency through the buckling doors.
The anti-magic field acts as a suffocating vice on my body and magic.
Because the curse cannot project outward, it has turned entirely inward.
The black-gold ichor in my veins is boiling, actively consuming my internal organs to sustain its feral starvation.
Every heartbeat is a jagged, white-hot agony.
I stare at the glowing, failing iron. Archmagister Theryn is on the other side.
I know exactly what the politician intends.
He wants to push Mireya to trigger the missing anchor.
He wants to use a Purna witch to detonate the estate and kill me so he can sweep away the ashes and claim the sovereign territory for himself.
“Khaelor…” she whispers my name so softly, tickling my long, frozen heart.
I look back at the woman wrapped in my cloak. Her eyes are full of unshed tears and love. A love I have never felt and experienced, so beautiful and heartrending it makes me want to kneel in supplication for I have received it from her.
The tragic, devastating paradox of our existence crystallizes in my failing mind. The moments we spent together, the happiness and light she brought into my life flashes as I gaze at her. Even before the curse, I have never felt such emotions. Never experienced such moments.
House Venn was cold and lethal. My own mother was so cruel she killed children she deemed useless, but the slaughter of my innocent sisters and the eradication of my bloodline still forged my century of grief.
In Mireya, I found what makes life worth truly living.
I cannot kill the witch who murdered my family; the feral possessiveness in my blood violently rejects the thought of her harm.
I love her with a terrifying, absolute devotion that makes a mockery of the hundred years of grief I have carried.
But I cannot keep her, either. My very being is a walking apocalypse, and my body is failing under the weight of the siege.
Either way, I am going to die.
But her survival is flawlessly simple.
If the designated target of a blood curse dies, the magic terminates.
The cataclysm ends. The rotting architecture of Venn Manor will violently collapse the second my pulse stops, burying the Vanguard and the Archmagister under ten thousand tons of petrified timber and stone. Theryn will not get his victory.
She just needs to be out of the blast radius. It is time to let go of House Venn. It is time to let the graveyard finally sink into the earth.
"Listen to me, Mireya, ” I step close, gripping the sides of her face.
My thumbs map the sharp curve of her cheekbones one final time, committing the exact warmth of her skin to my fading memory.
"When the doors fall, I will break their line.
You will not fight. You will run toward the deepest level of the catacombs, directly to the Heart-Stone chamber. "
The Heart-Stone is where the offensive wards can be activated but also a primordial bedrock anchor of the estate. It is the only subterranean structure dense enough to withstand a total foundational collapse.
"Khaelor—" she begins, the fierce, stubborn defiance flaring in her dark eyes. Her hands come up to grip my wrists, her fingers trembling. She reads the absolute, fatalistic finality in my posture. She knows I am not planning to follow her.
"Do not argue," I cut her off, the sheer, crushing weight of my decision pressing into the syllables. I mask the agonizing, tearing devotion in my chest with cold, untouchable command. "You have to go. You reach the Heart-Stone, and you do not look back. That is an absolute command."
"I am not leaving you!" she protests, her voice cracking, her grip on my wrists tightening desperately. “I will die with you if it is what it takes to pay for my sins. How can you let me go? Didn’t you want to punish me? To let me suffer for hundreds of years?”
"You will go!" I roar, the volume shaking the suspended memory crystals above our heads. I force my tone to soften, a lethal, silken plea. "Mireya. Let me do this. I will end this myself."
Before she can scream her defiance again, the hinges of the vault violently shear.
The massive iron doors shatter inward with a deafening explosion.
A shockwave of concussive force throws a shower of molten, glowing shrapnel across the crystalline floor.
The heat is blistering. Through the smoking, jagged breach, dozens of heavily armored Vanguard enforcers pour into the room, their dark-steel boots grinding against the stone.
They fan out with military precision, their null-iron halberds lowered, forming a lethal semi-circle.
Archmagister Theryn steps through the smoke, flanked by Captain Vaelor.
Theryn’s heavy ironwood staff radiates a blinding, suppressive white light that immediately makes the curse in my veins scream in agony.
"Lord Khaelor," Theryn sneers, his pale eyes sweeping over the ruined vault before locking onto Mireya’s trembling form behind me. "Hand over the Purna. She is a sanctioned threat to the Undercity. Her execution is mandated. And so is yours."
I step in front of Mireya, completely eclipsing her smaller frame, shielding her from the Archmagister’s sight.
For a century, I have maintained an iron-clad, agonizing mental cage around my own sanity, carefully metering the rot so it would not consume the world. I have held the cataclysm back with pure, suffering discipline.
I close my eyes. I find the lock on that cage, and I completely, irrevocably shatter it.
The ambient temperature of the vault incinerates. The black-gold veins on my chest erupt with an apocalyptic, blinding radiance.
"Run!" I scream over my shoulder to Mireya.
I throw both of my bare hands forward. I do not summon a targeted strike; I unleash a telekinetic snare of pure, concentrated decay.
The heavy, necrotic magic explodes outward, slamming into the Vanguard perimeter.
The dark-steel armor of the enforcers instantly begins to aggressively rust and warp under the suppressive pressure of my snare, binding them in place.
The vanguard grunts and shouts in panic, their boots locked to the freezing crystal floor by the sheer gravity of my rotting aura.
"Take the witch!" Theryn roars, his face twisting in fury. He slams the base of his staff against the marble, sending a concentrated shockwave of kinetic, anti-magic force directly toward my chest.
I grit my teeth, bracing my feet against the stone, and force the necrotic snare tighter around the Archmagister and his struggling guards.
The physical toll of fighting Theryn’s suppression magic while simultaneously holding two dozen men in place is consuming my soul, flesh, and blood.
The latter begins to track from my nose, thick and black.
Mireya hesitates for a second, her horrified gaze locked on my failing form, before the raw, survival instinct overrides her. She turns and sprints for the narrow servant’s archway at the back of the vault, her boots slipping on the slick stone as she dives into the dark.
"She is escaping!" Vaelor bellows.
The Captain surges from the right flank. He drops his heavy suppression sigil, sacrificing his defense to break free of my snare. He lunges at me, his massive, anti-magic broadsword arcing directly toward my exposed throat. He expects me to draw my steel. He expects a duel.
I do not parry. I channel the absolute, untethered apex of the Blackflame rot through my right arm.
A tidal wave of liquid, black-gold fire erupts from my bare palm. It strikes Vaelor and the five enforcers rushing immediately behind him.
The reaction is instantaneous and absolute.
There is no resistance. There is no clash of metal.
The heavy Vanguard armor liquefies into a hissing, toxic vapor.
Flesh, muscle, and bone turn instantly to weeping, black ash.
Vaelor does not even have time to scream before his entire physical form is violently unwritten from existence, the blistering heat of the blast scattering his remains across the glowing, crystalline floor.
The sheer magnitude of the blast obliterates the front line, but the cost is terminal.
The unmitigated output of the unleashed curse hollows out my absolute center. The blinding gold light in my veins instantly dies, leaving thick, dead-black tracks across my ashen-violet skin. The necrotic magic, having consumed the immediate threat, turns inward to consume the host.
A ragged, wet gasp tears from my lungs. I cannot breathe.
My knees hit the crystal floor with a heavy, sickening crack.
The world violently tilts. The deafening shouts of the surviving Vanguard and the crackle of Theryn’s magic fade into a muffled, distant drone. The edges of my vision dissolve into a suffocating, encroaching gray. I collapse forward, my hands pressing weakly against the freezing stone.
I lie in the ash of the men I just slaughtered, the raw, unfiltered magic literally burning out the remaining fragments of my soul. As the dark finally rushes up to claim me, my last, desperate thought is a prayer to a dead god that she made it to the Heart-Stone.