Chapter 37 Sariel #2
“Greetings, Queen of Kanth,” Sariel said, leaping atop the table to join her. “Have I interrupted your feast?”
Queen Alise grinned at him, a strip of muscle still between her teeth.
“You,” she said, standing to her full height. Her wings spread to their fullest extent. Her voice was deep, and it sounded as if four women spoke at once. “I see you for what you are. You’re like our dear Aylah, aren’t you?”
Sariel approached, Redemption at the ready.
“Did she tell you of us?” he asked.
“She murmured your names when she was at her weakest. Which are you? Faron? Eist? Sariel?”
Sariel closed the distance between them with a leap, his sword plunging for her chest. Alise caught the blade with her scaled hands, her claws latching tightly about it to prevent herself from being impaled.
“Do not speak our names with your defiled tongue,” Sariel said, and twisted the hilt.
The dragon-bone edge scraped the queen’s claws and opened gashes across her hands.
Blood, white like milk, splashed to the table.
If the pain caused her distress, she gave no sign.
Instead she spread her wings and beat them to rise into the air.
A second pair of arms emerged from within her dress, the flesh rough and brown like bark.
Vines grew from her fingernails and wrapped about her wrists, encasing them in thorns.
“Defiled?” she asked. “I am beautiful, immortal one! Look upon me and witness the light of creation.”
She spread her four arms in opposite directions, and before her swirled a golden ring of tainted radiance.
It crackled with lightning, and peering through it sickened Sariel and left him dizzy.
The queen laughed, and as much as he hated it, Sariel could not deny the joy he felt in hearing that laughter.
She pulsed with a desire to be loved. Her voice was crystalline, perfect, radiant, incomparable…
Sariel sliced his own arm, using the pain to focus his mind. As his blood flowed, Alise stared and licked her lips.
“I have always wondered,” she said, her four arms twirling the golden ring so the reality within it wobbled and threatened to break. “Will you taste the same as her?”
Tentacles burst from within the ring, each one coated with white scales and intermittent gold thorns.
Sariel retreated, his sword lashing back and forth, cutting the tentacles in half.
The pieces collapsed to the table and writhed as they dissolved into smoke, leaving behind only puddles of white liquid akin to Alise’s blood.
The fourth he failed to stop in time, and it slammed into him.
He rolled off the table, jarring his left shoulder hard upon the stone floor.
Instinct had him halt his momentum to leap aside, but his timing was still wrong.
More tentacles beat against him, bruising him and opening shallow cuts across his arms and back.
Sariel came up swinging, cutting free one last tentacle.
More blood coated the ground, white from the tentacles and red from where the thorns had opened up a gash on his chest, thin but painful.
The tentacles retreated into the center of the ring, which then broke apart into buzzing golden fireflies. Alise gasped, sweat trickling down her face and neck from the exertion. Her wings beat harder, lifting her to the ceiling.
“It matters not the size of your armies or the death of our people,” she said, her vine-laced hands clapping. “We can always rebuild. My husband and I are eternal.”
“Eternal?” Sariel said, descending into a prepared stance. “No, Alise, you are not eternal. You are not of the blood of my family. When my sword opens your throat, you will die and stay dead. If I could, I would burn your soul so even it would not be reborn, you are so wretched.”
Alise licked her lips. “Breaking you shall be divine.”
The vines extended as they shot like arrows from her second arms. Sariel lifted Redemption, thinking to deflect, but they were never aimed at him.
The vines wrapped about his sword, curling around again and again as their grip tightened.
Sariel pulled, matching the queen strength for strength.
He was careful with the direction, applying all the force upon the blunted side so he would not cut the vines.
Alise used all four arms to pull those vines, uncaring that the thorns pierced the scales of her hands and dripped pale blood upon them.
Her wings beat, adding to the power so she might disarm him.
Sariel held firm, forcing her to commit, to lift with all her strength, and then he reversed the force, leaping into the air.
The vines catapulted him upward, and this time he did twist the sword and swing, cutting through the vines with ease.
Alise screamed and slashed at him with her claws as his momentum carried him higher.
He spun, dragon bone slicing off fingers, and then the last of his momentum ended with him at a hover directly before the queen.
One thrust, and he plunged Redemption into her chest, piercing her heart.
Her dying scream rattled the walls as they both fell, Sariel pulling the hilt closer and rotating so her body was beneath him.
She landed upon the table, and he slammed down atop her, his knees crushing her abdomen as his sword punctured flesh, wood, and even the stone of the floor as it was buried all the way up to the hilt.
The queen’s wings flopped wide and went limp, and her scream ended with a wet gurgle. Red blood mixed with the white, forming a milky pink substance that sickened Sariel’s stomach.
“Queen of Theft, I name you,” Sariel said, needing both hands to yank his sword free. That done, he extended his right fist and summoned his fire. “May you die nameless and forgotten.”
He opened his palm, and from it dropped blue flame. It landed atop the corpse and immediately set it alight. The fire quickly spread, the spilled blood volatile as oil.
Sariel stretched, testing the limits of his body. He was coated in his own blood, and his bruises ached, but no injury was significant enough to prevent him from battling. No pain would compare to the disgust he felt at seeing what Alise had become.
“One left,” he said, exiting the room as, behind him, the fire spread from the table to the curtains and paintings, blackening them and coating the ceiling with smoke.
More stairs. Another floor. He kept going.
Nothing would stop the cleansing. Sariel felt guided, for now he had met the queen, he knew the odious sensation of their ultimate corruption.
In the highest tower of Castle Kanth loomed a presence like a thorn in Sariel’s mind, and he climbed the stone stairway toward it.
His dread grew with every step. Only his rage kept him climbing.
The room was small, perhaps six feet wide in total. King Laurence stood at the far end, gazing out upon the burning remnants of Stone’s Refuge. All around him were scattered tomes and broken tables, the study room torn apart in a past tantrum.
“Your queen purges my people like a vermin infestation,” he said, his back to Sariel. His words rumbled, as if each syllable were voiced by grinding stone. “Were they truly so terrifying? Does the slightest change frighten you so greatly?”
Sariel lifted Redemption for a killing thrust. There was barely enough space to do so in the cramped tower.
“Kneel, and I will limit your suffering,” he said. “It is better than you deserve.”
Laurence chuckled. He wore his finest, a crimson tunic trimmed with gold, black trousers and boots, and a fine leather belt that held his sword. His crown rested upon a head of thick, curly black hair. That he could seem so… normal upset Sariel in a way Alise did not.
“Kneel?” the king asked, and turned. “No, immortal one, I will not bend my knee to anyone, not even you.”
His eyes were solid white, and within them sparkled stars, golden and vibrant. He smiled, and his teeth were fanged.
“You intrude upon my castle, and so to you, I say, kneel .”
Sariel’s right leg gave out. His knee hit the ground, and with it, a spike of pain amid a deluge of horror. He should be impervious to commands born of radiance. No one, not even his siblings, could force their will upon him. To be commanded by a human …
“Aylah told me of your lives,” Laurence said, his arms crossed behind him as he remained by the window.
“Death cannot claim you. Your gift, and your curse. You think it makes you special. You think it makes you superior. But you are like us, immortal one. You are the culmination of your muscle, bone, guts, and veins, and yes, your blood. Your precious blood.”
The king approached, the golden stars in his eyes shining so brightly they burned their image into Sariel’s sight. A strange mist wafted from their edges, and it, too, sparkled like gold dust.
“Your eternal dance is no different than our own reincarnations. You are just blessed to remember them.”
He uncrossed his arms and held them before him. Like Alise’s, they were coated with white serpentine scales. Unlike hers, they remained human in shape. No claws, just silver fingernails. They reached for him eagerly. Hungrily.
“But you are lambs before us lions.” He knelt before Sariel, his smile growing. And growing. “You are stars, and we are the sun.”
His mouth opened, the bones of his jaw unhinging. His teeth swirled in a circle, rows upon rows about a gaping gullet. The mouth of a leech. A scarred strip of flesh that resembled a tongue waggled in its center as he spoke.
“We are the future, and you, the past.”
The teeth sank into Sariel’s neck. Flesh parted.
His blood flowed. Amid that helplessness, Sariel focused on his rage.
He remembered Aylah’s emaciated figure, the brokenness in her voice, and the scars upon her throat.
He remembered Faron on a pyre, surrendering once more to death to blunt the pain of loss.
He remembered the tattoos on his arm, and the vows he swore one shameful night almost four centuries ago.
He did not fight the flow of his blood. He gave it freely.
Radiance was many things. A mastery over nature. A mending of flesh. A view of the world stripped of lies. It was truth, and creation itself, but it could also be something else. Something pure.
Fire.
“Drink,” Sariel said, and used every last shred of his draining strength to command the radiance within his blood. “Taste of your superiority.”
His blood burst into blue flame. Laurence writhed, his teeth sinking in deeper, but Sariel would not be stopped.
The fire burned hotter, seething with all of Sariel’s contempt and rage.
The king’s flesh bubbled and peeled. His teeth unlatched, and he howled as smoke belched from that gaping hole in his face.
The blood was burning him, even within his belly.
Sariel slowly stood as the control over him faded. He held his bleeding neck with his free hand, stanching the flow with his fingers as he glared at the king.
“You will suffer,” he seethed. “You will burn. And when you are reborn, you will have nothing, nothing , left of the power you stole.”
So much blood had spilled across Laurence’s face and neck that it burned away his human flesh, revealing the true scales underneath.
His hair charred. His crown melted. His legs were feathered, not scaled, and they burned all the faster.
Sariel thrust his sword straight into the king’s open mouth, piercing the space between the writhing teeth to pin him to the wall.
“I have seen the color of your soul,” he said.
“When you are reborn, I will find you, Laurence, and I will murder you again. You and your wife will never know peace. I’ll tear the memories from your soul so you remember this moment.
You’ll relive this burning before you die, again, and again, and again. ”
Sariel slid closer, and he pulled his hand from his neck to paint Laurence’s forehead with another stripe of burning blood. Fire seared the scales to reach the soft flesh underneath. Stars swarmed in Sariel’s eyes, dark and silver. The proper, untainted hue.
“And I will enjoy it. Every. Single. Time.”
He ripped Redemption free, cut the head from the king, and then left the body to burn to ash in the inferno consuming the wretched pyre that was once the Grand Castle of Kanth.