Chapter 28 Khaelor
KHAELOR
The roar of the violet inferno swallows my scream.
The agonizing, century-old agony in my marrow suddenly, violently reverses.
It is an absolute excision. The parasitic weight of the blood curse—the feral, starving beast that has lived in my bones since the day my family turned to ash—is literally ripped from my flesh.
The sensation is a hollow, tearing vacuum moving through my internal organs, pulling the poison out through the pores of my skin.
The dead-black tracks marring my ashen-violet arms evaporate. They are dragged upward, pulled through the freezing air of the Heart-Stone chamber like ribbons of toxic smoke, rushing directly into the center of the room.
The rot is leaving me.
My vision clears through the haze of my own failing body, locking onto the epicenter of the extraction. The sight waiting for me is a landscape of absolute horror.
Mireya kneels on the petrified mosaic. The overlapping heptagrams she drew in her own human blood are blinding, projecting a swirling, towering vortex of unadulterated Blackflame around her small frame.
She is the conduit. The heavy, rotting magic of the Vanguard massacre slams into her.
I watch, paralyzed by a terror so profound it eclipses a hundred years of dark isolation, as the luminous undertones of her brown skin are swallowed by jagged, pulsing black veins.
She is taking the Venn rot into her own body. She is burning alive from the inside out to balance the ledger of her Purna ancestors.
The unyielding refusal explodes in the hollow void of my chest.
My family earned the fire. She earned the light. I will not allow her to trade her breath for my freedom. I will not accept an absolution paid for with her agonizing death. I do not want this.
I drag myself across the massive mosaic despite my weakness.
The null-iron wound at my ribs screams, leaking thick, dark blood onto the ancient tiles.
The brutal physical output of annihilating the Vanguard in the vault above has left my muscles trembling, utterly devoid of arcane reserves.
But the sheer force of my desperation propels me forward.
My armored forearms scrape against the jagged, petrified edges of the geometric ley-lines.
Every agonizing inch costs a fraction of my remaining vitality.
The subterranean chill of the deep catacombs is entirely incinerated by the blistering heat radiating from the ritual circle.
Near the outer wall, Garric slumps against the bedrock, a helpless mortal witness to the cataclysm, but my focus is narrowed to a singular, violent point of violet light.
I leave a dark, wet smear of my own blood across the ancient tiles, crawling like a broken beast through the tomb of my ancestors. I reach the boundary of the spell.
The overlapping heptagrams form an anomaly. It is a towering wall of pure kinetic and necrotic force, vibrating with the archaic, destructive frequency of the Purna bloodline. It is a locked door, and the ancient magic instantly recognizes the Venn lineage approaching its perimeter.
I force it to open. To give me a passage to her.
I thrust my shoulder directly into the perimeter of the Blackflame.
The chaotic magic lashes out instantly, recognizing the designated target of its ancient wrath.
Whips of violet fire strike my exposed skin, searing the flesh of my arms and the side of my face.
The heat is obliterating, a concentrated, lethal dose of the very decay I have suppressed for a century.
It seeks to repel me, to protect the fragile anchor so the spell can finish hollowing her out in peace.
I grind my teeth until the enamel threatens to shatter, tasting the metallic tang of my own blood. I push my frame entirely through the veil of black fire.
The center of the inferno is a suffocating vacuum.
Mireya’s head is thrown back, her throat corded, the archaic chant tearing from her lips in a continuous, agonizing stream.
Her left hand is pinned to the mosaic, feeding her fresh blood to the Heart-Stone.
The veins on her neck are thick and black, pulsing with the toxic rhythm of the curse.
I lunge forward across the center of the circle.
I grab her burning hands. My grip is iron-clad, absolute, locking my massive fingers over her delicate wrists.
Her skin, the only surface in the world that has ever offered me sanctuary, is now a blistering forge of necrotic rot. The heat scorches my palms, but I do not flinch. I do not let go.
"Mireya! No!" I roar over the deafening, metallic shriek of the active wards.
Her dark eyes snap to mine. They are fractured with blinding pain, swimming with tears that instantly vaporize in the blistering heat of the air.
She tries to wrench her wrists from my grip, her expression twisting into a desperate, frantic plea.
She shakes her head, her dark curls whipping around her face.
Go, she mouths, the sound completely lost to the roaring flames. Let it end.
"We end together," I snarl, leaning directly over the Heart-Stone, closing the distance until our foreheads nearly touch.
The blood curse demands a sacrifice. It demands the life force of the Purna caster to permanently anchor the rot into the foundation, to pay the toll for the open circuit. It expects her to die. I cannot let her go alone. If we die, we die together. I will accompany my beloved woman.
I will give it my life. I am the cursed heir.
I am the exact bloodline the spell was engineered to track, consume, and annihilate.
I open the floodgates of my own vitality, taking the ambient magic of my ancestors and the raw, remaining physical strength in my marrow, and I force it downward.
I push my life force directly through my arms, down through my corrupted hands, and into the circuit where my flesh meets hers.
I feed the parasite. I offer the designated target directly to the hungry anchor in hopes of lessening her pain, if not survival.
The architecture of the spell violently glitches.
The ancient Blackflame magic was meticulously designed for a singular, linear dynamic: a caster to hold the spell, and a target to be devoured.
Now, the target is willingly pouring his life into the caster.
The overlapping heptagrams carved in her blood on the mosaic flare with a blinding, contradictory light.
The toxic, corrosive violet of the starvation rot clashes violently with a sudden, searing surge of raw, unadulterated gold.
The spell snaps shut.
An invisible, unbreakable tether of pure arcane force locks my body to hers.
The magic calcifies around our joined hands.
I cannot pull my grip away if I try. The ritual is trapped in an impossible loop.
The spell cannot hollow out the Purna anchor while the Venn target actively sustains her, and it cannot devour the Venn target while the Purna anchor controls the circuit.
There are now two anchors bound to a single spell.
The bedrock cavern shakes with a world-ending vibration. The ambient magic roars, spiraling around us, the air pressure dropping so rapidly my ears pop. We are trapped inside the detonating center of the curse, holding the line together, with absolutely nowhere left to run.