Chapter 7 Retreat Under a Poisoned Sky
(and Other Tactical Necessities)
Kazimir
There are levels to pain, a connoisseurship one acquires with enough practice. The clean bite of a well-honed blade is a sharp, honest agony. A broken bone is a throbbing nuisance. Magical exhaustion feels like having one’s soul wrung out like a damp dishrag.
This, however, was a new vintage, and it was fucking foul.
It was a symphony of agony conducted by a mad god, and my own bones were the orchestra.
One moment, I was savoring the sublime, blood-soaked afterglow of a flawless victory, my eyes drinking in the sight of Arabella—fierce, beautiful, and terrifying.
The next, the universe folded in on itself.
The runes carved into my flesh and bone—the very foundation of my power—blazed with the heat of a failed star.
Every sigil screamed in protest, as if my mother’s knife were at it again, digging for fresh bone to brand.
I distantly registered the battlefield. Scattered bodies, the air thick with the metallic tang of blood and conquest. Standard stuff. But the view was quickly obscured by a shimmering veil of agony as my knees decided, without consulting me, to buckle and meet the dirt.
A scream tore itself from my throat—a raw, ragged sound that stripped away every scrap of the Dark Lord’s carefully constructed terror, leaving only the primal agony beneath.
Amaryska’s face swam before my eyes. I was nine. Strapped to a stone altar in my mother’s workshop—a room that perpetually smelled of incense and my own blood. Her version of a nursery.
“Hold still, boy.” My mother’s voice, clinical and dispassionate. The blade in her hand, etched with its own glowing runes, caught the candlelight. “Power requires sacrifice, my darling,” she whispered as the blade bit deep, “and you are going to be so very powerful.”
Unconventional parenting, to be sure.
The knife bit deep, scraping against bone. I hadn’t screamed then. I’d learned early that screaming only made it last longer.
When she was finally finished, she wiped my blood from her hands onto her gray robes stitched in red.
“There,” she said, her voice flush with the satisfaction of a job well done. “The foundation is laid. When these heal, we can move on to the more advanced sigils.” As she unstrapped me, she whispered, “One day, you’ll see this as the greatest gift I ever gave you.”
I was on my hands and knees, my body slick with a cold sweat.
My stomach heaved in a violent, gut-wrenching spasm.
I managed to turn my head just in time to vomit a thin, bitter bile onto the stones.
Weakness, absolute and terrifying, washed over me.
My magic, my very essence, felt tattered.
Violated. As if some celestial parasite had sunk its fangs into the core of my being and was attempting to drain me dry.
Fuck. Fuck. This was not part of the plan. Public displays of catastrophic, debilitating weakness were generally frowned upon in the Dark Lord business. Bad for morale. Terrible for my reputation.
Through the shrieking static in my skull, a single, anchoring presence cut through—Arabella.
She lay across me, her hands on my back. A wave of her clean, offensively bright magic washed over me. It felt like cool water on a burn, soothing the worst of the fire but not extinguishing it. Her touch was hesitant, her own shock crackling through our bond, but she was real.
And just as quickly as it had begun, the searing agony vanished, leaving behind a hollow, aching void and a weakness that made my limbs feel like they were filled with wet sand. The light from my runes dimmed, their glow fading back beneath my skin.
I lay there breathing hard. Arabella shifted so that she was beside me instead of on top of me, her hands trembling.
Shit. We were in the middle of a conquered enemy outpost, surrounded by my men, who were currently busy slitting the throats of the survivors. They couldn’t see this. They couldn’t see their invincible leader laid low, puking like a green recruit after his first battle.
Control. That was the first and only instinct. Seize it, wield it, fake it if you have to.
I forced myself to straighten. My head swam, and for a terrifying second, the world tilted sideways. I gritted my teeth, planting a hand on the ground to steady myself. Arabella’s hand stayed on my back.
Thorne hurried over, his face a mask of concern.
“My lord?” he ventured, his eyes flicking from me to Arabella and back again.
I drew a breath. It felt like inhaling shards of glass. “Secure the outpost,” I managed to rasp. “Hold this position. Send scouts south but engage no one. Await my orders.”
Thorne’s eyes widened slightly at the clipped, urgent commands, but he simply nodded, his jaw tight.
“And Thorne,” I added, channeling every scrap of menace I had left, “the official story is that I was overcome by the sheer brilliance of my own victory. Anyone who suggests an alternative version will be used for target practice.”
He swallowed. “Understood, my lord.” He turned and began barking orders.
Excellent. Now for the hard part.
Getting the hell out of here.
My only priority was removing Arabella from whatever this was. Back to Skyspire. Back to the controlled environment of my fortress where I could figure out what fuckery was afoot without an audience.
I turned to Arabella. “Skyspire.”
She nodded, her eyes full of questions. “Can you manage a portal?”
Usually, a portal was as simple as breathing for me, but now… “We’re about to find out.”
I closed my eyes, focusing my will, what was left of it. I reached for the familiar threads of spatial magic, the power to bend and tear the fabric of reality. I pictured the Inner Sanctum, the cold, dark stone of my private workroom. I pulled.
The air in front of us began to shimmer and fracture.
A hairline crack of pure darkness appeared, as thin as a spider’s thread.
But the portal wasn’t obeying. Instead of a smooth, silent tear, it shrieked—a high, keening wail like tortured metal.
It flickered, spitting sparks of corrupted energy, unstable and malevolent.
It felt like I was trying to open a door while a ten-ton behemoth was holding it shut on the other side.
Black spots danced in my vision. The weakness intensified, threatening to drag me back down to the unforgiving stone.
“Kazimir!”
Arabella’s voice was sharp, cutting through my faltering concentration. Her hand closed around my forearm, her grip strong.
And then she pushed.
It wasn’t a physical shove. It was a deluge.
A torrent of her magic, bright and clean and an utterly offensive shade of heroic gold, poured into me.
It wasn’t the slow, symbiotic exchange we’d grown accustomed to through the Heirloom.
This was a desperate, full-force intervention.
Her untainted, heroic power slammed into the corrupted, struggling dregs of my own.
With a final, guttural roar, I shoved the last of my energy into the spell. The portal snapped open, revealing the familiar stone of my workroom. I hooked an arm around Arabella’s waist and hauled us through.
We collapsed onto the floor as the portal slammed shut behind us with a deafening crack of thunder. The backlash left us gasping, a tangled heap of exhausted Dark Lord and dangerously competent Dark Lady.
Silence. Utter, profound silence, broken only by the sound of our ragged breathing. The air in here was still and cold, smelling of ancient stone, ozone, and the faint, alchemical tang of my various ongoing experiments. A stark contrast to the iron-scented chaos we’d just left.
For a long moment, we just lay there, tangled together on the floor, the raw, visceral power of our escape leaving us both shaking and drained.
My first coherent thought, after the roaring in my ears subsided, was for Arabella.
I pushed myself up onto one elbow. My gaze raked over her, a frantic, clinical assessment.
No visible wounds. No blood—that was hers, anyway.
Her face was pale, her eyes wide with shock, but she was breathing. She was whole.
“Are you all right?” I managed, my voice hoarse.
She pushed herself up, her hair a wild storm around her face. “Fine. Just… drained.” Her eyes fixed on me with worried intensity. “You’re not, though. What in the nine hells was that?”
“I don’t know.” The admission cost me. I was the Dark Lord. I was supposed to have answers. I was supposed to be in control.
I frowned, my fingers instinctively tracing the burning runes beneath my skin.
The sensation was familiar—that prickling awareness that came when magic shifted in unexpected ways.
But this was different. The usual hum of power that connected us to the earth’s veins felt tainted.
Like drinking clear water only to find mud on your tongue.
“Something’s wrong with the ley lines,” I said, the realization crystallizing as I spoke. “Something’s wrong with—”
I stopped, the words dying in my throat.
The ley lines were the foundation of all magic in the Western Realms. They were what made the Heirloom of Dominion so powerful, what gave it the ability to dominate entire kingdoms.
I shook my head, my mind already working, analyzing, compartmentalizing the visceral horror of the memory. The burning runes. My mother’s voice. That was old news. The corruption, however—the alien presence in my magic, in my Heirloom—that was new.
And I do not appreciate new things I haven’t personally approved.
I levered myself into a sitting position, my back against the leg of a heavy oak table littered with alchemical glassware. I ran a hand through my sweat-damp hair and let my head fall back against the table leg with a dull thud.
“What. The. Fuck,” I said angrily. “Is wrong with my Heirloom?”