Chapter 73
Sapphire
Over One Thousand Years in the Past
If today I die, I hope my family will understand why I’ve done this.
Why Niklaus and I had to slip away, to make it look like we were going into the Nightlung with them to return home. Why we have been chasing Vrath through time, following his scent like a bloodhound, into the gorge.
And he knew we were coming.
He knew DaiSzek would not follow and that he would be safe.
But all it will take is for Niklaus or me to draw his blood once. One time for the Short-Haired Windilas to appear and hunt him down.
“The golden lamb has been slaughtered!” Vrath sings in a monotonous nursery rhyme tune from within the forest we’ve been dumped into.
Niklaus keeps his face unreadable as we spring to follow the sound of his voice, though I know these taunts are killing him inside.
“I silenced your yellow songbird!” he chimes again.
My blood bubbles over in hatred.
The night is young under a full moon. It’s ice cold out, somewhere close to the North Sapphrine Forest with sharp-needled pine trees and the bland scent of snow. Our breath heaves from our chest in white clouds of fog.
“I killed you father, Niklaus Demechnef. I killed Niles Offborth!” Vrath’s howl through the trees is baiting and unnatural. “The last thing he tasted was rain. Rain!”
Niklaus and I stop running as the sickness comes back in full force, meaning we’re close. So close I can hear Vrath’s excited breathing.
“Come out and fight me like a man, coward!” Niklaus growls.
My mind won’t block out the image of my uncle’s head.
The way his shoulders stayed angled over the chopping block.
I feel nauseous and dizzy. But it gives me that bit of fire I need.
I know I will not return home until I end Vrath’s life.
Until I watch him bleed enough to drown out this memory that I will never forgive myself for.
“There is no fight to be had. I was less confident of my footing in the face of your RottWeilen.” Vrath steps out from behind a pine tree, meandering, that gnarled, black stick in his hand.
“Hence, why I beckoned you to follow me here. And now that your beast is gone, I maybe collect the blood that will help me find my way back home. You understand, don’t you? ”
I’m on my knees now, vomiting blood.
Niklaus remains standing, hunched and clinging to a dying tree.
“You are right, Vrath, you took my father from me,” he barks, suffocating on swollen lungs. “You could have stopped it. He was—a good man. With a big heart.”
Vrath twirls the stick and avoids eye contact. “You made me do it. Why did he not beg do you think? Why become dead without a single plea?”
As the sickness drains my body, I hold Uncle Niles’s face close. I remember the hugs. I remember the nights he would make Mom laugh after she had clearly been crying for our dad. I remember the look of absolute awe he had for Aunt Marilynn.
He was too good for this world.
And his death has given me wings. Ones that materialize behind an invisible veil, side by side with the Nightlung.
Ones that contort into cascading plates of volcanic black.
They give me strength as if the Void is pumping enough power to withstand the symptoms Vrath curses me with, opening a window to the ability I need the most.
I crawl forward, with a low harmonic rumble cracking the tectonic plates beneath my hands. My world is sheathed in a layer of black and red as I aim for him.
Vrath stumbles back a step, caught off guard by my persistence to eat away at the barrier his World Dark Twin tree branch has ensnared me with.
I am a holy furnace of revenge that refuses to tear my gaze away, though blood and tears drip from every pore. My body losing its life force with each movement.
But I can’t let him go.
My broken heart will always be tied to him.
“We begged you to spare him,” I call out, now inches from his languid, insipid posture.
“Yes, you did,” he replies.
The ancestral beast that has formed wings sends forth every drop of power to break the ceiling of his hold on me. An exiled seraph cast out of heaven and willing to risk it all.
I rise to my feet, levitating until my toes hardly touch the dirt.
“You may keep your body,” I say, low and bruising. “But I will have your mind. I will move it through time until you are nothing but the mental scape of a little old man. You will forget everything.”
He isn’t fast enough to overcome my daggered talons as they plunge into his neck and puppeteer the strings of time in his brain. I fast-forward seventy years. Giving my uncle’s assassin every ungodly mental illness one can obtain in the end years of their life.
Only, externally, he hasn’t aged a day.
“Goddamned you, child!” he whines like his tongue has gone numb.
Vrath swipes his hand across my bloody forehead, streaking the red color down the brittle stem in his hands. The gore of my body absorbs into the wood, and my world is sunken in a sea of hell. I’m on my back, unable to move. Niklaus inches closer as blood gushes from his ears.
Whatever he is doing, we are dying.
Dying.
“Niklaus!” I cry. “Get out of here!”
Though in my heart, I know he will never leave.
I should have done more.
It’s my fault.
Uncle Niles should live, and I should be dead!
I should have done more!
“Undeserving! Undeserving! Undeserving!” Vrath enforces every pain upon us.
My heart sputters and slows, unable to keep up, unable to survive—
A portal of darkness stretches open from above our heads, and in a blur of white teeth and a mist of onyx fur, Dellilian dives forward, chopping her jaws around the branch. It snaps. It breaks. Its other half is whisked off in a soft breeze.
“NOOO!”
“Dellilian!” I stutter, unable to let a smile spread to show my undying love and gratitude for her. Because she came. Despite her fear of the bad man. She came! She came for us!
But as she lands on her feet, Vrath uses the broken branch to slice into Dellilian’s chest.
Her blood is red like ours, but with stardust and an opalescent shimmer.
It is everywhere.
“DELLILIAN!” Niklaus bellows.
This…this paired with his father’s death…
He is not grieving. He is becoming a mausoleum.
The Morphing Onyx Short-Haired Windila falls on her side, air thumping out of her lungs from the tumble. And she lies so still, each small breath invisible.