Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter
thirty-one
I am not dead.
But the moment consciousness returns, I begin to wish I were. For when I manage to peel my eyes open, I am no longer lying atop the ramparts. I am no longer on the Iron Isle. I am somewhere I have never been before, yet recognize in an instant.
Black sand.
Black sky.
The Husk Desert of Dymmeria.
A man stands over me, blocking out the anemic sun.
Even at midday, it is mostly dark here. His face is the stuff of nightmares.
The slitted nostrils, the deathly pallor.
His gray-white limbs, like those of his men, are mottled black.
In his case, however, those blackened veins are slightly raised like the gnarled bark of a tree.
Like scar tissue. Like my Remnant mark. His eyes are blood red, reminiscent of a vampyre from the old tales.
He has no hair. Not eyebrows nor stubble, not a single strand on his head.
Tattoos mar his corpse-like skin, strange patterns that seem to shift and change even as I focus on them.
“You’re finally awake. Good.” His lips purse as he nudges me with the tip of one steel-toed boot. “I was beginning to think that iron had lodged a bit too close to your heart.”
He bends down and twists the bolt that still protrudes from my chest.
My scream is a harrowing sound. The pain is unimaginable. I pass out again, only to jerk awake when he kicks me—a harsh blow to the ribs.
“Now, now, that won’t do, Rhya.” He pauses, studying my expression closely. “Oh, yes, I know your name. Does that surprise you? It should not. I know everything about you.”
I cough violently and taste copper in my mouth. Turning my head, I spit the gob of blood onto the sand.
He drops fluidly into a crouch and shakes his head. “Don’t be wasteful.”
Scooping up the scarlet saliva, he places it on his tongue as though it is the finest delicacy Anwyvn has to offer. He practically moans as he swallows.
“How nice to have another flavor after all these years. I admit, I have grown rather tired of your earthy counterpart of late.” He pauses, leaning over me. His face hovers only a few inches above mine. Up close, his red eyes are even more terrifying. “That is why your arrival is so perfect.”
I head-butt him.
A shame he doesn’t have a nose to break. He dodges before I can do more than graze his forehead with mine.
“Let’s not get off on the wrong foot, little bird.” His thin mouth attempts a smile, but there is no emotion behind it. Like his eyes, it is completely devoid of anything resembling feeling. “We are going to be spending so much time together, after all.”
“Just”—I swallow down more blood—“kill me already.”
“Kill you?” He laughs, a horrible sound. “Whyever would I do that? You are my honored guest. I plan to keep you for as long as I can.” He pauses. “Which is to say, as long as your body holds out. My Zariah lasted half a decade. Though she was more spirited than most of my more…breakable…toys.”
Zariah.
Is she the Remnant of Earth we saved from his dungeons? I find a shred of solace in the knowledge that she, at least, is free of this monster’s clutches.
“A shame you and your friends managed to infiltrate my favorite place to play.” He rises to his feet, soles sliding on the ebony dune.
“No matter. We have a new sandbox, you and I. This one is a bit less accessible than the isle, should my stepbrother get any ideas about heroic rescues. We shall break it in together. How does that sound?”
I glare at him. I cannot speak. The iron pierced through my right lung is agony, scraping my insides with each breath. The one by my heart sends waves of poisonous pain rippling through me each time it beats.
“Dark Emperor,” a new voice, hushed with reverence, offers as a scarlet-clad soldier steps into view. He does not appear quite as distorted as some of the others I saw at the prison. He could almost pass as any mortal soldier in the Midlands. “Excuse my intrusion, but—”
The sentence cuts off on a gasp as Efnysien’s hand flies out and seizes the soldier by the throat.
“Did I or did I not say,” he asks, voice utterly level, “that I was not to be disturbed with any unnecessary interruptions while greeting our new guest?”
The soldier makes a choking sound. His face is turning pale from lack of air.
“I’m relatively certain I did.” In a decidedly serpentine move, Efnysien tilts his head to the side, evaluating the man in his grip.
I brace for the strike—the snap of a neck, the slash of a blade. Still, I am unprepared for it. A cloud of black maegic amasses in the air, billowing like living smoke. It does not feel like my wind, or Penn’s fire, or Soren’s water. This is not Remnant power. Not natural. Not elemental.
It is something else.
Something evil.
I watch the snake of black slither down Efnysien’s taut arm, then join his fingers in a deadly cuff around the soldier’s windpipe.
The man begins to convulse as it seeps into his skin.
Already pale, he goes fully bloodless as the dark power suffuses his veins, hijacks his senses.
His gasping mouth goes slack, his terror-widened eyes go empty.
In the span of a breath, all semblance of life has been drained from his body.
And siphoned straight into Efnysien’s.
The sorcerer’s strange tattoos shift across his skin, within it, the patterns moving like shadows on a sundial as he absorbs the man’s essence.
His shoulders shudder, his chin tips back to the sky on a low groan.
Sating his dark thirst. Not stopping until he’s pumped every last shred of vitality.
Until all that remains is a man-shaped shell.
It is enough to make my blood run cold.
An abomination.
An atrocity.
Without another word spoken, Efnysien releases his grip. The emperor does not even bother to watch as his loyal subject falls, dead, to the desert sand. His crimson eyes are already turning back to find mine.
I hope my face does not betray my fright.
He can kill by contact alone.
His very touch is death.
“It’s going to be such fun, having you here,” he says, as though we were never interrupted. “You’ll see.” He jerks his chin toward someone out of my sight line. “Isn’t that right, my sea goddess?”
Melité’s svelte form presses into his side. Her arms wind around his waist as she lays a kiss against his marbled neck, then angles her head down to stare at me. Her eyes are pure ink, her smile is coy. At her waist, my golden whip is coiled neatly on a braided sash.
“Rhya, Rhya. You know, now that we’re being honest, I never did understand the fuss everyone made over your appearance in our lives.
What’s so special about you? Hmm?” Her eyes narrow a shade, gills flaring.
“But the second you arrived, it was like Arwen all over again. Everyone fawning over your presence. My brother especially. Pathetic, the lot of them.”
Efnysien’s eyes flare victoriously. “Oh, Soren will be so upset at this turn of events. He never did enjoy it when I broke his favorite toys as a boy…”
My head is swimming from the pain and the terror.
I must black out again for a moment because when I come to, Melité is crouched over me, holding a dagger—my dagger—to my face.
Before I can react, she digs the tip into the flesh of my cheek and scores a slow line down toward my jaw, grinning as the blood spills into the sand.
It hurts, but not half so much as my other injuries.
“Those stormy eyes of yours are so pretty,” she says, her exquisite features contorted into an ugly grimace.
“Always casting little looks across rooms at my brother when you think no one is watching. Always blazing with such defiance. Even now, when you’re at my mercy.
You can’t help yourself, can you?” Her lips curve in anticipation as the blade inches closer to my eye socket.
I still, not even daring to draw breath.
“Should I pluck them out for you?” she asks. “It would save you the trouble of glaring at me…No more haughty looks…”
“Come now, Melité,” Efnysien interjects. “There will be plenty of time to maim in the years to come. We want to savor it, do we not?”
She huffs out a resigned breath, then rises to her feet, skirts swishing as she stomps back to his side. “Fine. But I want her to suffer.”
“Suffer she will, my vengeful one.” He takes her place in my line of sight.
His cadaverous skin and monstrous features are infinitely more horrifying than Melité’s petulant beauty.
I fight a gag as his tongue—foul black and forked at the tip—licks the side of my face, where the dagger carved its mark.
His whole frame shudders in delight as he swallows my blood, eyelids closing to prolong the sensation.
His tattoos shimmer again, the designs warping in a way I cannot decipher.
His irises glow redder than before as they sliver open to meet mine.
“We’ll start with these,” he says smoothly, holding up a set of shackles.
I assume they’ll be iron, but they do not appear to be crafted from the familiar dark metal. Instead, they are shiny black stone, and glow faintly in the weak light.
“Now, these are no normal manacles,” he informs me, smiling like we are old friends.
“These are harvested especially from dead portals. They contain traces of the leylines within them. Not enough to travel anywhere, of course, but enough to mimic the rather…intriguing…mental effects one experiences when lost within them.”
Gods, no.
I have not forgotten how it felt to lose myself in the portal network. The way it frayed my mind, my very self. If these shackles do anything like that…
I will never survive it.
My heart’s frantic beats scrape the iron bolt as my pulse kicks into higher gear. Fresh waves of pain wash over me, a relentless tide. My lips part, prepared to beg him not to put them on me, but I manage to swallow down my pleas at the last moment. I will not give him the satisfaction of begging.