18. Stellan
STELLAN
The assault goes wrong before it even begins.
We ride out at dawn, thirty brothers strong, the largest force Ironfang has mobilized in years.
The plan is solid, the intelligence good, the element of surprise on our side.
We'll hit the Bloodtusk stronghold hard and fast, take out their leadership, end this war before they can recover from the losses they suffered attacking our compound.
That's the plan, anyway.
The morning air is cold, biting through my jacket as we move through the foothills. The brothers around me are focused, professional, checking weapons and maintaining radio discipline. Everyone knows what's at stake. Everyone knows this could be the battle that ends everything, one way or another.
I keep thinking about Esmerelda. About the way she looked at me this morning when I left, her eyes red from tears she was trying to hide, her voice steady even though her hands were shaking. Come back to me. Three words that feel like the only thing tethering me to the world.
We get within a mile of the target when the first explosion rips through the convoy.
The lead vehicle goes up in flames, flipping end over end, and suddenly the hills around us are alive with gunfire.
Muzzle flashes from every direction. The crack of automatic weapons.
The screams of brothers caught in the kill zone.
It's an ambush. Bloodtusk was waiting. They knew we were coming.
"TRAP!" someone screams, probably Barrett, but I can barely hear him over the roar of weapons and the deeper roar that's building in my chest. The hum is already a thunder, already drowning out everything else, and I can feel the beast surging against my control like a tidal wave against a failing dam.
I try to count. Try to breathe. Try to hold on to the thread of myself that Esmerelda gave me, the memory of her voice saying come back to me.
But the ambush is too sudden, the violence too immediate.
A brother goes down beside me, clutching his throat, blood spraying between his fingers.
Another takes a round to the chest and crumples like his strings have been cut.
The air is thick with the smell of gunpowder and burning flesh and the copper tang of blood, and the beast is howling, straining, demanding to be released.
I lose control in seconds.
The break is violent, absolute. One moment I'm Stellan Vargas, fighting to maintain discipline, and the next I'm gone.
Swallowed by the red. Consumed by the rage.
The beast doesn't take over gradually, doesn't give me time to prepare or brace or say goodbye to my humanity.
It just rises up and devours me, and I become a passenger in my own body.
Kill. Destroy. Protect.
The words fragment through what's left of my consciousness, repeating endlessly like a drumbeat.
I can feel my body moving, faster and stronger than should be possible, tearing through the Bloodtusk fighters who emerge from the hills to finish what their ambush started.
My hands are weapons, my tusks are weapons, every inch of me is designed for one purpose and that purpose is devastation.
Threat. Eliminate. Threat.
Time loses meaning. Minutes might be passing, or hours, or seconds.
I can't tell. There's just the red and the rage and the endless parade of bodies that fall before me.
Some part of me is aware that I'm screaming, or roaring, or making some sound that barely qualifies as language.
The beast doesn't need words. The beast only needs targets.
I can't feel my body anymore. Can't feel the pain that must be accumulating, the wounds that must be forming. Something warm runs down my side, something that might be blood, but it registers only as data. Irrelevant data. The beast doesn't care about damage. The beast only cares about destruction.
Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.
I'm killing. Can't stop. Don't want to stop.
For the first time in fifteen years, the cage I've built around the morveth has shattered completely, and there's nothing left but the monster.
No counting. No breathing. No anchor. Just an endless well of violence that I'm drowning in, and the surface is so far away I can't even see the light.
This is what Mira saw. This is what made her stop loving me.
This is what I really am.
The thought surfaces from somewhere deep, a bubble of clarity in the sea of red, and I reach for it. Try to hold onto it. Try to remember that I'm more than this, more than the beast, more than the violence and the blood and the bodies piling up around me.
But the rage pulls me back down. Every time I get close to the surface, every time I almost remember what it means to be human, the morveth drags me back into the depths.
It's stronger than it's ever been. Angrier.
Hungrier. Like something fundamental has broken inside me, and there's no way to put it back together.
Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.
The world narrows to a single point. A single purpose. I move through the battlefield like a force of nature, and nothing survives my passing. The beast doesn't distinguish between threats and obstacles, between enemies and environment. Everything is destruction. Everything is rage.
And then, somewhere in the abyss, I hear something.
Distant. Faint. A voice that doesn't belong to the violence.
"Come back to me."
Esmerelda. Her voice, not here, not real, but echoing in my memory like a lifeline thrown into the dark. The last thing she said to me. The promise she extracted before I left.
Come back to me.
I reach for it. Reach for her. Try to orient toward that voice the way a drowning man orients toward air. But the rage is too strong, too deep, and every time I get close, it pulls me back under.
"Come back to me."
The voice again. Fainter now. Further away. I'm losing it. Losing her. The beast is swallowing everything that's left of who I was, and soon there won't be anything left but the monster.
Esmerelda.
Her name. I hold onto it like a prayer, like a sacred incantation. Like the only solid thing in a world that's dissolving into red chaos and violence.
Esmerelda. Esmerelda. Esmerelda.
The rage howls in protest, a physical force trying to drag me back under.
The beast fights back with everything it has, clawing at my consciousness, trying to submerge me again in that comfortable numbness where nothing exists but destruction.
But I keep saying her name, keep repeating it like a mantra, keep holding onto that thread of memory, keep reaching desperately for the surface even as the depths try to claim me completely.
"STELLAN!"
A different voice. Louder. Closer. Cutting through the red haze like a blade through flesh.
"STELLAN! COME BACK!"
Hands on my face. Real hands, rough and callused and warm. Grounding me to something physical, something solid and actual in the maelstrom.
"Come back, damn you! COME BACK!"
Kieran. I know that voice. Fifteen years of trust, of brotherhood, of being talked down from the edge. He's screaming my name like it matters, like I'm still in here somewhere, like there's something left to save.
I claw my way toward him. Toward consciousness. Toward whatever remains of the man I was before the beast consumed me.
It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
The rage fights every inch. The morveth doesn't want to release me, doesn't want to give up the control it's finally, fully claimed. But Kieran keeps screaming, keeps holding my face, keeps saying my name like a command and a prayer.
And underneath his voice, I can still hear hers.
Come back to me.
I break the surface.
The world crashes back into focus, too bright, too loud, too much sensation after the numbing red of the berserker.
I'm on my knees, I realize. Somewhere hard and cold.
My body is shaking uncontrollably, and everything hurts in ways I can't begin to catalog.
There's blood on my hands. Blood on my face.
Blood everywhere, and I know without looking that most of it isn't mine.
"Stellan." Kieran's voice, rough with relief. "You're back. You're here."
I try to speak. Nothing comes out but a ragged sound that might be his name.
My throat feels raw, shredded, like I've been screaming for hours.
Maybe I have been. I don't know. I don't know anything except that I'm kneeling in blood and the beast is finally, reluctantly releasing its grip on my mind.
"Easy. Easy. Just breathe. You're back now. You're safe."
But I can't just breathe, because I'm looking around now, seeing what I did, and the carnage is worse than anything I've ever witnessed.
Bodies everywhere. Dozens of them. Torn apart in ways that don't look like the work of bullets or blades.
The work of hands. My hands. Some of them are barely recognizable as having once been people.
The beast did this. I did this.
"Did I—" The words scrape out of my throat like broken glass. "The brothers—did I hurt any of?—"
"Everyone's alive. Our side." Kieran's grip on my face tightens, forcing me to look at him instead of the destruction.
His eyes are bloodshot, his face streaked with grime and blood, and I can see the exhaustion in every line of his body.
"You stayed on target. Every body out there is Bloodtusk. You didn't touch any of ours."
The relief should help. It doesn't. Because I can see the truth in his eyes, the thing he's not saying.
It was close. So close that he had to physically restrain me, had to scream me back from an edge I've never been this near before.
So close that he's looking at me now like he's not entirely sure I'm still me.
"I almost?—"
"You didn't." His voice is fierce, certain. "You came back. That's what matters."
"I was lost. I couldn't feel anything. Couldn't remember—" My voice breaks. "I couldn't remember why I should stop. I wanted to keep killing. I wanted the whole world to burn."
"But you remembered her." Something shifts in Kieran's expression. "I heard you say her name. In the middle of the worst episode I've ever seen, you said her name. That's what brought you back."
Esmerelda. The thread. The anchor.
But it almost wasn't enough. For the first time in fifteen years, I almost stayed in the abyss forever.
"She can't see me like this," I whisper. "She can't know what I?—"
"She already knows." Kieran helps me to my feet, and I realize I can barely stand.
My legs are shaking, and there's something wrong with my side.
When I look down, I see the handle of a knife protruding from my ribs, the blade buried deep.
Another wound on my arm, gaping and raw.
I don't remember receiving either of them.
"She saw you during the attack on the compound. She reached for you anyway."
"This is different. This is worse. I almost didn't come back." I'm shaking so hard now that Kieran has to support half my weight just to keep me upright. "She deserves better than this. Better than a monster who loses himself and doesn't know if he can find his way home."
"That's not your choice to make."
"It should be. I should let her go. I should walk away before I destroy her the way I destroyed—" I stop, swallow, can't finish the sentence. The way I destroyed Mira. The way I destroy everyone who gets too close to the beast.
"Stellan." Kieran's voice is sharp, commanding. "Look at me."
I force my eyes to meet his.
"You came back. Through the worst episode either of us has ever seen, you found a thread and you followed it home.
That's not nothing. That's everything." He pauses, and something flickers in his expression, some old pain I've glimpsed but never understood.
"Some of us don't get that chance. Some of us lose the thread and never find it again.
Don't throw away what you have because you're afraid of what you might become. "
I want to believe him. Want to think that Esmerelda's love is enough to keep me human, to keep me anchored, to keep me from drowning in the red forever.
But I'm standing in a field of bodies I created. Bodies I don't remember killing. And somewhere deep inside me, the beast is already settling back into its cage, already waiting for the next time I crack, already hungry for more.
She deserves better than this broken, bloodstained shell of a man.
She deserves better than me—better than someone who can't even guarantee he'll remember her face when the beast takes over.
"We need to get you to medical," Kieran says, shifting his grip to take more of my weight as I stumble over the uneven ground. "You've lost a lot of blood. Too much. You're going into shock."
"The battle—" I manage, my tongue thick in my mouth.
"Is over. Bloodtusk is broken, scattered to the winds.
Dragan retreated with what pitiful remnants were left of his forces.
" A muscle twitches in Kieran's jaw, and his eyes darken with frustration.
"We didn't get him. The bastard slipped away in the chaos.
But we took their stronghold, destroyed their supply lines. We won."
We won. The words should mean something profound. Should feel like victory, like triumph, like the long-awaited end of the war that's cost us so many brothers, so much blood, so many sleepless nights.
But all I can feel is the hollow, cavernous ache of what I almost became out there in the carnage.
All I can see is Mira's face in my mind, looking at me like a stranger, like something inhuman wearing her brother's skin.
All I can hear is Esmerelda's voice echoing in my memory, asking me to come back to her, making me promise.
And all I can think is that one day, maybe one day soon, I won't be able to keep that promise.
Kieran half-carries me toward the convoy, toward the brothers who are regrouping, toward the medical attention I desperately need.
Around us, the remaining Ironfang fighters are securing the area, checking bodies, calling out for wounded.
The battle is won, but it doesn't feel like victory. It feels like survival. Barely.
And with every step, the guilt builds higher. The certainty that I don't deserve the woman waiting for me at home grows heavier. I'm a weapon that almost turned on its wielder. A monster that almost swallowed the man.
She asked me to come back. I promised I would.
But I'm not sure the man who left her this morning is the same man who's returning. I'm not sure there's anything left of him at all.
The knife wound in my side pulses with every heartbeat, a reminder that I'm still alive, still physical, still tethered to a body that I almost lost completely. The blood loss is making me dizzy, making it hard to think about anything except putting one foot in front of the other.
But one thought remains clear, cutting through the fog:
She deserves better than this. Better than me.
And when I see her again, I'm going to have to find a way to tell her.