Chapter 8 Share Your Villain Origin Story #2
“Amaryska raised me as a weapon.” The words came more easily now, a torrent held back for too long.
“A tool for her revenge. The runes in my bones, the training, the constant lessons in warfare and sorcery… it was all to forge me into something that could one day slit his throat. She saw the potential in my magic, in my ambition. So she nurtured it. She was a brilliant, ruthless teacher. And a monstrous mother.”
I pushed out of the chair and began to pace again.
“I slaughtered my first battalion for her when I was fifteen. At seventeen, I led a rebellion against my father, finding allies among the rebels Vargus had crushed. It wasn’t difficult.
His own people could barely stomach him.
I walked into his hall during a feast, with his own commanders at my back, and beheaded him at his own table.
That’s how I became the Scourge of Azroth. ”
The memory was as clear as yesterday. The look of shocked disbelief on Vargus’s face. The spray of blood. The satisfying thud of his head hitting the floor. It was a triumphant moment.
“And your mother?” Arabella asked quietly. “You said she abandoned you.”
I gave a short, bitter laugh. “Once her revenge was complete, she vanished. Her weapon had served its purpose. She didn’t need me anymore.”
Arabella remained silent, letting me gather my thoughts. I hesitated at the next part. The nightmare that stalked the edges of my mind in the darkest hours, the thing I’d spent sixteen years trying to bury so deep it could never claw its way back to the surface.
The demon.
Even thinking the word made my skin crawl, made the scars on my chest burn with phantom pain. “The commanders who had backed me, my supposed allies… they saw a seventeen-year-old boy who had just toppled a warlord. A threat. So they sold me.”
“Sold you?” she whispered.
I met her gaze, and for a moment, the Chamber of Accords materialized around me.
I saw Zaraiah’s venomous smile, heard her taunt.
Has your new wife heard stories of that incident?
I remembered the hot spike of fear, the cold rage at having my deepest wound exposed.
I’d shut Arabella out then, viciously. Because Zaraiah had wielded the story as a weapon, and I refused to let it hit its mark.
But this was different. Arabella wasn’t wielding anything but a request for the truth.
A truth she had earned a hundred times over when she bound herself to the Heirloom, when she fought for my home as if it were her own.
She’d seen me at my most powerful and my most pathetic, and she was still here.
To keep this from her now wasn’t guarding a weakness. It was insulting her strength.
“When Zaraiah mentioned this,” I said, forcing the words out, “I refused to speak of it. She wanted to use it as a dagger. For you, it’s just a fact. Another ugly stone in the foundation.” I took a breath. “They sold me to a demon.”
Arabella’s breath hitched. A flash of understanding—and something fiercely protective—lit her eyes as the pieces clicked into place.
Zaraiah’s comment about my fascination with demonic anatomy.
The memory of my fury in the Chamber of Accords, the splintering chair, the thorns thick with poison.
Arabella’s expression wasn’t one of horror at the revelation, but of recognition at the weight of my confession.
She knew what it cost me to say those words aloud to her now.
“That’s what she was talking about,” Arabella murmured, her quiet way of telling me she understood.
“Yes.” The memory was a room in my mind I kept locked.
The seduction, the slaughter, the sheer, messy trauma of it all—I still wasn’t going to give her every detail.
But I could give her the shape of the thing.
“I escaped,” I said simply. “I came back, raised my own army, and took Azroth for myself, along with its strategic port city on the coast. I killed every last one of the men who betrayed me. Slowly.”
I stopped in front of Arabella. Her expression wasn’t pity.
It was a cold, hard fury that mirrored my own.
“I spent the next few years building my power. Taking what I wanted. Proving that I was beholden to no one. I took Skyspire. I took the kingdoms on the eastern coast, one by one. I clawed my way into the Syndicate’s good graces by loaning out my mercenaries to them—for a fee, of course—until I became so indispensable to them they had to offer me a chair.
I built an empire on a foundation of fear and control, because it’s the only foundation that holds. ”
My gaze fell on the Heirloom again. “Then I came for Solandris.”
“Why?” she pressed. “Because it was next on the map?”
“Because it was wealthy and strategically vital. But it stopped me.” I clenched my jaw.
“A kingdom of sanctimonious flower-worshippers and their vaunted heroes. I marched my forces to its borders, my magic at its peak, and I was thrown back. Not with armies. Not with steel. With its magic. Some inherent property of the land, of its ley lines, that blunted my own power. It made my runes ache. It weakened my shadows. It was the first time in years that something had not just resisted my will, but actively repelled it. And I…” I trailed off, searching for the word.
“You hated it,” Arabella supplied, her voice a soft whisper.
I nodded. “To lose is one thing. To be denied, to be told there’s a power I cannot have, a place I cannot conquer, is unacceptable.
Solandris isn’t just a kingdom to me, Arabella.
It’s an insult. It’s the one damn thing in this world that has ever said ‘no’ to me and made it stick.
I want to remake it. I want to crack it open and own the power that denied me.
I want to grind their Golden Roses and their self-righteous history into the dust. Because I can.
Because I should have been able to years ago. ”
The confession left me breathless. My heart hammered against my ribs hard enough to hurt.
I’d never told anyone the whole story like that.
The only other person who knew all of it was Vex.
I’d laid out the ugliest parts of myself, the blood and betrayal and ambition that had forged me, and Arabella was just…
watching me. I braced myself for the recoil, the judgment, the fear.
Instead, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around my waist, pressing her cheek against my chest, over my heart.
The unexpected affection sent a jolt through me. My entire body went rigid. Affection was a language I was not fluent in, even with her. My first instinct was to pull away, to reestablish the distance, the control.
But her arms were warm around me. She smelled of the intoxicating scents of battle and magic.
I could feel the steady beat of her heart against my ribs, out of step with my own but somehow stronger.
Beating out a slower tempo that reverberated through every part of me in an invitation, willing my heart to follow hers.
Something in my chest cracked open.
Slowly, I let my own arms come up to encircle her. I rested my chin on the top of her head, her golden hair soft against my skin, and for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I just breathed.
It was terrifying.
And the best thing I’d ever felt.
We stood like that for a long moment, the silent, warded room a world away from the battles and betrayals outside. Finally, she stirred, pulling back just enough to look up at me.
“All right,” she said. “My turn.”
I blinked. “For what?”
“To try the magic hat.”