Chapter 13
Elric forgot many things about being human, but the sensation of being clean after being so very dirty was not one that he had readily forgotten.
He was eager to feel that delicious sensation of clean skin on clean sheets, and knew as soon as his head hit the pillows, he would sleep for a very long time.
If any of these witches thought to wake him, he would not be responsible for what he did.
His love was back. His little nightmare had turned his entire world upside down, and all he wanted now was to fall asleep with her in his arms. Not on a bed of hay like the night before, but on a proper bed.
He’d even waste some of his magic to make sure it was comfortable for her.
She deserved to feel like a princess again.
Soon, they would return to the fight. But tonight, he wanted her to be happy.
Except in the last moments of his bath, when he’d conjured a brush and was vigorously scrubbing the blood and dirt out from under his nails, the door to the shack opened.
He sighed. Not even a single moment of relief, it seemed, would be provided to them. Not that they hadn’t all seen him naked by this point. Still, it always made him want to throw an arm over his chest when a witch stared at him like the one in the doorway.
She blinked a few times, her eyes caught on the planes of muscles of his chest before Jessamine stepped in the way. She might be a little rabid when it came to protecting him, but it was nice to have someone be like that for him.
“Can I help you?” Jessamine asked.
“Th-there’s something going on in the sky,” the witch stammered.
In the sky?
Jessamine looked back at him, and he could see the worry in her gaze. “The spell?”
“It must be getting worse.”
He stood, uncaring if anyone saw his nudity now that he knew what was happening. The very last thing he wanted was for that spell to run out of control. His brother knew what he was doing, and that blue electrical storm was something dire, but he didn’t know what it was.
Rushing through throwing his clothes on, he headed out with Jessamine at his side. They’d been in the shack for a while. The sun had long ago set, and now the sands were glowing white as the moon illuminated them. But it was the fifteen women who stood on the shore that caught his attention most.
They were highlighted by the pale light of the moon, although each of them was dark in their own way.
For the first time, he saw them as the coven they were.
Dangerous monoliths of women who would be spoken about for centuries to come.
Each of them had their face turned toward the sea, staring out into the distance at what he was certain was a horrific spell that would alter the very world they all lived in.
But for just a brief moment, he wanted to drink in all the essence of the women before him. They were stunning. Truly wondrous as the first coven this world had seen in over two hundred years.
And then he looked up.
The storm had indeed gotten worse. Although now he hesitated to even call it a storm. It stretched like fingers across the sea, claws that were reaching for something in the distance that he couldn’t quite make out.
“No,” Jessamine whispered as she staggered forward.
He followed her right up to the edge of the sea, with waves licking their feet. “Where is it going?” he asked.
“That’s Inverholm.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Pain,” he muttered. “So that’s what he’s doing.”
“Elric?” Jessamine asked.
“There is nothing more painful for a person than having their soul torn out of their living body. Pain gives him power, and souls can be trapped. I suspect that’s what Leon has done.
He trapped all those people and tortured the souls to bring Ajax back.
” He paced, walking back and forth on the sands as he slowly unraveled his brother’s plan.
“But that must mean Ajax needs more energy. He’s weak now, and likely seeking more souls to torment.
The more people he kills, the more magic he has access to. ”
“An infinite amount of energy,” Jessamine whispered.
“All he needs is enough souls and then, yes, an infinite amount of power. But a god like him is thirsty. He will need more souls than you can imagine to bring him back to what he once was. I’m sure dealing with us also was very, very tiring for him.”
Elric flexed his hands. It had been tiring for him as well. Most of the magic that he’d had was gone already. If he was this exhausted, then Ajax had to be much worse. He’d been expending a significant amount of energy to bring the Huntress into Jessamine’s body, and all of that had been wasted.
He looked at the electrical storm brewing on the horizon as it stretched clawed fingers toward Jessamine’s home. “How many people are currently living in Inverholm?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
“Tens of thousands?” she threw out. “There are multiple districts, and each of them lost significant numbers to the infected. I don’t think there is any way for us to know an exact number. That plague was difficult on my entire kingdom.”
“How many, Jessamine?” He looked her in the eyes, trying to stress how important this was. “Give me a number.”
“Thirteen thousand, most likely.” She reached for him, grabbing onto his hand and squeezing it hard. “What is he going to do?”
“He’s going to take all of their souls. Every single one of them. Your kingdom, it will be nothing more than a kingdom of the infected. No one will be able to return to it.”
One of the witches let out a choked “My sister!”
Another whimpered the name of a man.
Then they were all saying names. All at the same time. Words and names and people who were left behind. And there was nothing any of them could do.
They stood there, the smallest coven he’d ever had, watching as the lightning claws reached for Inverholm. It was a slow process for the spell to cross the sea, and he hadn’t the faintest idea where his brother was getting all this energy from.
The spell crawled, and then suddenly it was there.
Jagged bolts reached the shore first. Each home in the Water District lit up.
Even from this distance, he could see the shape of the windows, the buildings, as they glowed with a blue radiance that was as unnatural as it was beautiful.
The icy coloring followed to the Pleasure District, the nobility’s homes, the Merchant District, continuing on and on as it rose all the way up to the castle.
Though he couldn’t imagine there were many people left in the castle at all, it still blazed with light.
Jessamine’s home. Every home, every building, every part of that kingdom was a memory for her. He knew it, because he had seen them all. In the shards of her soul that he still kept safe, he’d watched her grow.
Even if those people had eventually betrayed her, Jessamine was still that little girl who loved them dearly. She was still the young woman who had needed them to show her how to grow and how to live. But now she was also the woman who had to watch them all die.
Elric turned his gaze away from the glowing city to look at her.
He wasn’t the only one. Many people in the coven were looking to their gravesinger to understand what they should be doing. Should they be angry? Should they weep? They were all losing so many of their loved ones in this instant. But Jessamine was frozen.
Still and cold as a lake in the dead of winter, she stoically watched her entire kingdom be attacked while she was too far away to do anything about it.
“Jessamine,” he said quietly, trying to make her stop. “You don’t have to watch this.”
“I do, Elric. Someone has to see them.”
A wind blew in from the sea, carrying the sound of screams. From so far, he didn’t think it was possible without the aid of magic. So many screams as all the people in that kingdom died. One by one.
And through it all, their princess stood vigil over every single lost soul.
The spell grew larger until it bubbled up, surrounding the entire kingdom of Inverholm. It looked like a massive dome, as beautiful as it was deadly.
Together, they all waited to see what would happen next. He’d never seen a spell like this in his lifetime. It was beyond imagination, beyond reckoning. The sheer size of it was so great that it was hard to even fathom how it was being powered.
His brother had some way of controlling all of that, though. And he knew, he just knew in his gut, that there was something else they had missed. Something that they should have seen.
“Elric?” Sybil asked. “What do you think is going to happen next?”
Likely the destruction of Inverholm, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her that.
He recognized that he’d originally asked Jessamine to destroy her entire kingdom for him, but he hadn’t expected it to be like this.
Not with the soft cry of thousands begging for mercy while their souls were ripped out of their bodies and fed to one of the worst gods to ever exist.
Before he could reply, the ocean shook with a rumble that had everyone staggering back from waves that were suddenly boiling. They looked like someone had taken hold of the sea in between the two kingdoms and started rocking it back and forth until it all… popped.
The electrical bubble around Inverholm shattered. The entire world rumbled with the spell that suddenly flooded back toward Orenda, and all of them were blasted back in the force of it.
The whole coven was thrust in multiple directions, but this time he would not be the one to lose even more of the people he needed.
Elric shouted out a spell, slicing through the water and the wind with shadows that could hold on to every single coven member.
He tied them all to him, holding on to them with the sheer force of his will as the spell broke around them.
Then, just as suddenly as it had occurred, it was over. The waves turned glassy. The entire world seemed to hold its breath as though even the elements knew what had just been done was cruel and horrible.
Each of the witches staggered to their feet. Some of them were bleeding where they had struck the sand too hard and scraped themselves, but they were alive.
Then his gaze landed on Jessamine. She wasn’t getting up. Why wasn’t she getting up?
Elric took another step forward, and her back bent unnaturally. Rising like she had been possessed, her body shook with her head arched back so far that the crown of her head was digging into the sand. Her arms were at an odd angle, her fingers like claws as she convulsed.
He lunged for her, grabbing one hand and scooping his hand under her neck so he could try to force her into a position that wasn’t so painful. He stilled when he saw her eyes.
Sybil landed on her knees at her head, both of their gazes wide with horror.
“What is happening to her?” Sybil breathed.
He didn’t know.
At first glance, one might think her eyes were bleeding. She was so arched that the liquid dripped from her eyes down her forehead. But it wasn’t blood. He could see it was his magic. Shadows that leaked out of her.
They oozed out of her nose as well, dripping up her cheeks and forehead as she arched even more, seizing with the magic that was being forced out of her body.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know what’s happening or how to help her.”
“Elric, you are the Deathless One. Surely you have seen something like this?”
He watched as Sybil hovered her hands over Jessamine’s form, clearly trying to figure out how to help her and where to touch her.
Jessamine gave a little choked sound, and then her mouth stretched open. He heard her jaw pop as more shadows oozed out of her mouth to join the others. She was a shadow-covered mess, like someone had doused her face in ink.
He reached out with a shaking hand, touching the shadows that he had only seen in his realm before.
These were the same dark ooze that made up the form of the gravesingers, ooze that shouldn’t exist here.
It dripped out of her and should have reacted to him.
It always had in that realm. It usually clung to his fingers, ankles, hands, holding on to him and trying to force him to stop moving.
But this didn’t react at all. Almost as though it was… dead.
“I have no idea what this is,” he breathed. “But it is not natural. It should not be in this realm, nor should it be affecting her like this. I don’t… I don’t know.”
And then her entire body flopped onto the sand. She let out a long, low wheeze, as though all the air in her lungs had to be expelled. And then she inhaled. Once. Twice. Three times.
Her eyes blinked open and her hands flew to her face to tear at the black sludge that clung to her still.
“What is happening to me?” she whispered, flinging the dark liquid away from her face and shaking it off her hands. “This is… is… Elric, isn’t this yours?”
He swallowed hard. “It’s mine. But it shouldn’t be coming out of you, Jessamine. I gave you that magic when you resurrected me. It’s a gift from god to patron.”
She blinked a few times, then looked at him and Sybil. “I didn’t think anything could rip energy like that out of someone.”
Sybil touched the dark ooze, rubbing the small bit of it between her fingers. “It didn’t take it out of you, Jessamine. Whatever happened? It destroyed Elric’s magic.”
He could see the panic forming in Jessamine then. Her chest rose and fell with rapid breaths as she stared down at the magic that should have been hers. He’d given it to her.
But now he knew for certain he no longer had a connection with his gravesinger, nor would her body hold any more of his gifted magic.