Chapter 37 Sariel
SARIEL
S ariel stood frozen in horror before the pitch-black cell. A thousand curses appeared and died in his mind, each one angrier than the last. His shock imprisoned him as Faron rushed to their sister’s side.
“Aylah,” he said again, hesitating before her. He spoke as if her name would resurrect her. “Aylah, we’re here. We’re here for you.”
Their sister hung from the ceiling by two sets of chains, one holding her arms, the other her ankles.
She swung above the ground, like a hog set to butcher.
She was naked, exposing a terrifying number of scars across her body.
The words of the vow they had sworn centuries ago were visible in the shape of blackened blisters across her left arm.
Even worse were the scabbed wounds on her throat, angry and red.
Sariel’s horror magnified. He and his siblings did not scar, for the healing magic of radiance was too strong. For Aylah to be so beaten, so marked, then those wounds had to have been inflicted each and every day upon her…
“Faron?” she groaned, lifting her head. Her eyes fluttered open, her eyelids heavy. When she spoke, she sounded intoxicated. “Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” Faron said, grabbing the manacles around her wrists. He fumbled at them, searching for a way to open them. “A key, a key, do you see a key?”
“Catch her,” Sariel said, stepping close, his paralysis finally ended.
One swing, with all his fury swept into it, shattered the chains.
Faron caught his sister’s fall. She leaned against him, burying her face in his chest. Her hair, once as beautiful and black as the midnight sky, was a pale shade of gray and brittle as it wrapped about her to hide her face.
Sariel turned to the table alongside the lightless cell. A seemingly endless array of cutting instruments filled it, knives and daggers of all sick shapes and edges. What frightened him most were the dozen silver and gold cups and the deep red stains within them.
“What happened here?” he asked.
“Now is not the time,” Faron snapped.
“They drank,” Aylah said, ignoring him. She curled tighter against Faron, so weak and pitiful. “They cut me and then they… they drank.”
Sariel needed to hear nothing more. He clutched Redemption with a grip to make his fingers ache. The entire world around him swam red with his rage.
“Get her out of here,” he said.
“Where are you going?” Faron asked.
“I said out!” Sariel shouted. His teeth were bared. His self-control wavered on the edge of a knife. His brother stood and cradled Aylah in his arms as if she were a child. She likely weighed as much as one. Faron hesitated, perhaps to argue, perhaps not. He relented in the end.
“Do what you must,” he said, and pushed past him to exit the cell.
In his absence, Sariel walked to the middle of the cell and stood where Aylah had hung.
He looked to the stone floor. It was caked red, and when he scraped it with the tip of his sword, it was nearly an inch thick.
So much blood, and spilled for how long?
Aylah had been missing for decades. Had she spent each and every one of them here, in the pits of the Grand Castle of Kanth?
The knowledge gave him the rage he craved. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to doubt. Such crimes inflicted upon his sister deserved only one fate, no matter the level of involvement.
The entire castle would die.
Sariel burst out of the cell at a full sprint.
The world narrowed around him. Colors drained.
Up the stairs. Out of the dungeon and into the castle proper.
He saw bleak halls, cold stone, and portraits of dead humans without love or joy in the remembrance.
The curtains were the color of his sister’s dried blood.
He crossed the hall, searching for life. Searching for victims.
Two servant women were the first, their skin marble white and their eyes pink like a rabbit’s.
They saw him and fled. He ran them down, hacking both in half with a single swing of his sword.
Stepping over their corpses, he kicked the nearest door open.
A man cowered on the bed, his lower half bulbous, two legs becoming four, each short and ending with a silver scorpion tail.
Two women were with him, their mouths fanged and their skin sparkling like gold.
Their hair had fallen out, and little feathers replaced it.
They hissed at Sariel like angered vipers.
Sariel impaled the first that charged at him, ripped Redemption out her side, and then cut the head off the second. The man howled, but he could not move from the bed.
“Angelica!” he cried. “Beatrice! You… you killed them!”
One thrust, and dragon bone punched through the man’s open mouth to tear out the back of his head. Blood sprayed across the bedsheets.
Not enough.
Never enough.
Another room. Another. Servants. Families with little children, spiked with quills and with three faces upon their skulls, not one. Sariel butchered them all.
The hall took him to the castle entrance, its grand doors locked and barred against the coming invasion.
A chain was attached to a pulley to lift the bar, and he cut it, ensuring no one could escape.
Still unsatisfied, he grabbed several paintings, as well as a nearby dresser, and piled them near the doors.
A raise of his clenched fist, and he summoned blue flame within his palm.
“Smoke and fire are better than any of you deserve,” he whispered as he set the pile aflame. “Pray that it finds you before I do.”
To the stairs, and the higher floors. Two pale-skinned soldiers were there to stop him, and he gutted them with ease.
Their clawed hands could not hold their swords correctly.
Another door. Another slain monster, this a woman whose entire lower half was a brilliant white-and-gold serpentine tail.
Door by door. Room by room. Locks shattered with a kick of his heel.
Throats bled with lone cuts of his dragon-bone blade.
Their fine silks, gold rings, and silver necklaces were no armor against his fury.
One hall finished, he returned to the entrance.
In the grand foyer, three women were panicking before the flames, seeking a way out.
Sariel leaped upon them from the upper floor, his momentum strong enough to impale the nearest all the way up to the hilt when he landed.
She flailed, blood pouring across his sword to the carpet.
Sariel ignored her pained thrashing, ignored the fearful screams from the other two women, whose six eyes were bloodshot and wide with fear. He watched the blood pool and witnessed it burning with stars. Radiance. The blood of these wretched people bore the faint signs of sickly golden radiance.
There was no doubting where it came from. Where it was stolen from.
“You drank of her,” Sariel said, swinging without removing the first body.
The heads collided, bones snapping. The third fled, but he chased her down, Redemption’s long reach carving her open from shoulder blade to hip.
She collapsed, her intestines spilling out, and from within the pink ropes of flesh burst a dozen red gnats, buzzing and swirling wildly.
A glare from Sariel, and they burst into flame, ruined by his own seething radiance.
Back to the stairs. To the third floor. Higher.
Cleansing the rooms. Butchering the nobility of Kanth.
He began setting fire to the radiance-twisted corpses.
No one needed to see the monstrosities within.
They deserved no burial, no grave, and no headstones.
A man with the head of a goat bleated furiously at him, and Sariel severed it in turn, grabbed his collapsing corpse, and burst it into flames with a thought.
A woman with him shrieked, turned, and leaped through the stained glass window.
Feathers covered her arms, and thin flaps of flesh connected her elbows to her hips. Perhaps she thought she could fly.
Sariel glanced out the window, saw her corpse lying amid shards of broken glass.
She could not.
The next room. The next. With his sword, he bled the monsters dry.
With his sword, he reclaimed the gift they had stolen from his sister.
His beloved sister. With every swing, he saw her hanging naked from the chains.
With every kill, he imagined the blood flowing from the scars across her neck, pooling into decadent cups and goblets stained red.
There was no fixing this. No redeeming this.
Fire was the only cleansing that would suffice.
The fourth floor. More guards, looking fearsome in their silver armor and red tassels.
They wielded slender short swords, and they stood fearful before a set of wide doors.
Their skin was pale. All of them lacked eyes.
All of them had too many arms. They clicked their tongues, and Sariel suspected them still capable of seeing him.
Sariel charged into them, the reach of his blade and strength of his swings making a mockery of their meager human training.
Their armor parted against the dragon-bone edge.
Their blood flowed, black as the night, radiance sparkling in it like sickly golden stars.
Sariel kicked open the door they guarded, revealing a long, cramped dining hall.
A crowned woman crouched atop the table.
Her crimson dress was torn in multiple places, making room for the six pairs of wings that sprouted from her back.
Their feathers mixed white and gold near the top but transitioned to a deep crimson by the bottom set.
Goat horns grew from her forehead. A second pair of reptilian eyes opened above her human ones, the irises of all four a pale shade of red.
Her hands were clawed and coated in blood, for a human corpse lay open before her, a twisted image with its legs bent backward and arms tucked underneath so it might fit upon a silver platter.