Chapter 14 Fenrik #3
“Because you’re trying to dam a flood with your own body!
” Thorven shouted. He pointed at the runes carved into the wall.
“The Wards act as the sluice gates, Fenrik! They are designed to take the excess pressure from the anchor and disperse it into the air—that’s why the dome shimmers!
But you’ve clamped down on the anchor so tight the power can’t vent! ”
I staggered back, claws scraping against the stone. Was I?
“The system is a circuit!” Thorven said, gesturing wildly between the glowing floor and the rune-etched walls.
“Earth to Anchor. Anchor to Ward. Ward to Sky! That is the design! But you’re blocking the transfer between the Anchor and the Ward because you don’t trust the Wards to hold! So the energy is backing up into you!”
“If I let it go to the Wards, they will shatter,” I said, the shadow-wings beating phantom air behind me, knocking over a stack of crates. “They are too old. Too weak.”
“Then let them shatter!” Thorven said, grabbing his mallet again. “Better the windows blow out than you turning into a crater and taking the mountain with you! Open the connection, Fenrik! Let the Anchor feed the Ward!”
The wyrmling screamed again from upstairs.
I am doing it again. I am holding on too tight, and everything is turning to ash.
I couldn’t hold nature back. I was just a man. A broken, cursed man standing in the path of a magical tsunami.
“Clear the vent,” I choked out, dropping to my knees.
I withdrew my will. I stopped visualizing my magic as mortar plugging the cracks.
Instead, I imagined opening a gate. I tore my power away from the obsidian slab.
I let go. I expected the rush of magic transferring to the Wards, and most of all I expected relief.
Instead, the dam broke inside me. The silence came first. The archive of my mind, the debts, the spells, the history, the guilt, all vanished. My name dissolved. The room dissolved.
There was only a red tide that crashed over my consciousness.
I wasn’t standing on the stone floor anymore; I was floating in a crimson sea, and something else was piloting the vessel of my body.
The grey gloom of the dungeon sharpened into clarity.
I could see the heat pulsing in the veins of the figure before me.
A collection of beating organs wrapped in fragile skin.
An obstacle. The creature, Thorven, a small, distant voice whispered, before drowning under the roar, moved. It raised something. A weapon.
The tide surged, turning my blood to molten lead. Silence the threat. The obstacle scrambled back, eyes wide and white, the scent of terror coming off him was intoxicating, a sharp vinegar tang that made my mouth water. He was slow. Prey was always slow.
I raised my hand. A shadow writhed around my arm, lengthening, sharpening. I saw the pulse fluttering in his neck, the jugular. A precise, vital target. One strike to sever the flow. One strike to protect the lair. The world narrowed down to that frantically beating vein.
“I’m trying to help you, my lord!”
The shout punched through the roar of the blood-tide.
My lord. Fenrik.
The words snagged on a jagged edge of my remaining humanity. Not the title—I didn’t care for the title—but the loyalty. The desperation. The voice that had talked me down from the greenhouse roof when I was fifteen, bleeding and ashamed.
Thorven.
Horror spiked through me. I was looking at the man who had stood by me when everyone else had fled or died. And I was close to eviscerating him. My hand collided with the dungeon wall with a loud crack.
It didn’t feel like hitting stone, it felt more like hitting water.
The solid foundation rock that had held up the manor for centuries, gave way like wet clay.
My fingers—my claws—sank deep, tearing through the minerals with a shriek of pulverized rock.
I dragged my hand down, fighting the momentum, using the friction to arrest my forward motion.
Dust plumed outward, choking the air. Four parallel gouges scarred the granite wall—deep, jagged trenches.
Thorven was pressed against the opposite wall, his chest heaving, his face drained of all colour. He was staring at the ruin of the granite, and then at me.
“Fenrik?” he whispered, his voice trembling.
From the upper floors, I heard the Sentinels approaching.
The stone serpent, the wolf, the lion—they roared in unison down the dungeon stairwell.
They were screaming because I was screaming.
The curse had jumped the gap, turning the guardians into amplifiers for my own soul.
The house answered them. A groan shuddered through the floorboards beneath my boots, and a fissure unzipped down the corridor wall to my left, racing from ceiling to floor.
Another followed on the right. Plaster rained down around us, coating my shoulders in white dust. I tried to pull free, but my fingers wouldn’t obey.
They were locked, my claws were hooked into the stone, fused by the surge of magic pulsating through my veins.
The world was washed in blinding silver. It poured from my eyes, casting shadows against the destruction.
Thorven scrambled backward on his elbows until his back hit the far wall. His eyes were wide and unblinking as they fixed on me.
“Run,” I choked out, but the word came out as a snarl.
He didn’t move. He couldn’t. I had paralyzed him with fear as surely as the stone paralyzed my hand.
Then I felt warm. It was faint, a ghost of a sensation against my back.
Tentative and shaking, but undeniably there.
It landed on my spine, right between the shoulder blades where the phantom wings were tearing at my skin.
The silver haze fracturing my vision wavered.
A low, painful whine sounded near my knee. Kirion. The wyrmling was there, pressing his flank against my leg, the poor thing trembling. The hand on my back pressed closer.
“Fenrik.”
Her voice was barely a whisper, but it drowned out the screaming Sentinels.
Even though I felt coming back to myself, there was no gentleness in Lysa’s correction. The golden warmth of her magic punched through the freezing shadows of my curse like a heated iron rod. It found the beast thumping its rhythm against my ribs and grabbed it by the throat.
Snap.
My heart seized. It was a physical brutality, the sensation of a dislocated shoulder being wrenched back into its socket without warning.
The extra beat, that shadow-echo that had been driving me mad for years, was strangled into silence.
My heart gave one pause, and then kicked back in.
I hit the stone floor, when the shadows that had been elongating my limbs and fusing my fingers to the stone evaporated.
“Fenrik?” She was too close.
I dragged my head up, sweat stinging my eyes. The lantern Mrs. Crane had dropped was sputtering its last, casting shadows that made the scene look like a massacre. And it almost was.
My gaze locked on the granite foundation wall. Four parallel trenches, deep enough to bury an arm in, had been carved through the rock. The edges were pulverized. I had done that.
I looked past the ruin to Thorven. My groundkeeper, my friend. He was pressed into the corner, his face the colour of parchment. He wasn’t looking at Fenrik Stormgarde, the boy he’d taught to ride.
I am going to kill them.
The realization wasn’t a fear. It was a certainty.
“Get back,” I rasped, scrambling backward on my hands and heels.
Lysa reached for me again, her hazel eyes wide, filled with defiance. “Fenrik, your heart—it stopped racing, I can feel—“
“Don’t touch me!” I roared, the sound tearing my throat.
I recoiled from her as if she were the one made of acid. I backed up until my spine hit a crate. Seeing her there, illuminated by the dying lantern light, dusty and determined and so fragile... it broke something inside me.
Kelda was right. Kelda warned me. She said I was too volatile. She said bringing an outsider here would only end in blood.
I squeezed my eyes shut, gripping my hair. I should never have listened to myself. I should never have had the idea to send for a healer.
But then the thought snagged. Did I have the idea?
I tried again to summon the memory of the day I wrote the letter to Lysa.
I reached back into my mind, looking for the moment of decision, the desperate hour in the library when I’d decided to break my isolation.
There was nothing there. No, not nothing.
That would have been mercy. Instead, there was a grey, oily fog. Why did I send for her?
I pushed harder against the fog. I remembered sitting at my desk. I remembered the quill in my hand. But the impulse? The name Lysa Emberlin?
“...perhaps fresh eyes, Fenrik...”
The voice whispered from the grey sludge in my mind.
“...the Emberlin girl. Such a tragic gift. She might be useful...”
My blood went cold. The memory wasn’t mine. The decision hadn’t been mine.
I stared at Lysa, who was watching me, her hand still outstretched.
And if I hadn’t chosen this... then someone else had set the board. Someone who knew what would happen when a monster met a woman who could quiet him.
“Oh Gods,” I said. “Get out. Lysa, you have to get out.”