45
Kora
The storm outside raged, battering the stained glass of the balcony as Kora studied the armoire.
After Raiden’s bizarre, stupid, downright rude interruption of her sparring session with Aryn, he’d continued to train her for another two hours until she could barely walk.
Aerion had briefly joined, displaying how runed weapons also had a limit.
Like mages, a rune only lasted so long before it could be used again.
Too much power disrupts the balance created by the gods. Only a creator may harness the core of the world, Aerion’s wisdom circled her mind.
The dagger Raiden had gifted Kora for her real birthday possessed runes, but Aerion explained if she found a witch, then she could add some to another weapon.
She tsked as the rage through her bond with Raiden still burned.
His emotions had hit her like a charging horse, trampling her mind.
What had been worse was that Aryn’s leaked through as well.
A sharp slice of bitter frustration. A tornado of dual male testosterone, beating their chests to be the alpha.
Gods-damned fucking males.
What was so wrong with the skildaj bond anyway?
Kora had reaffirmed it last night, after Aryn had checked in on her.
She’d been so shaken from John and Circe’s arrival, their bloodied clothes and wild eyes propelling her back into Aldara.
Aryn’s mere presence had been so comforting, that his protector bond had snapped into place immediately, warming the cockles of her heart.
But Raiden had said there were consequences.
Aryn assured her there was nothing to worry about after Raiden had left.
Kora scoffed, rifling through the armoire.
How could there be consequences from having a protector?
It felt . . . right. Like the sun after a rainy day, warm honey dripping down toast, the final embers of firelight in the dark.
Wiping the water trickling from her body from her bath after sparring, she threw on the comfiest dress in the wardrobe, a soft brown material that hugged her torso and draped around her hips as though it were made of air.
Partnered with long sleeves to keep the chill at bay, and a squared neckline that showed off the muscle she regained in her upper body.
As Kora turned to close the armoire, she caught the K.J.
inscription on the inside at the back. She brushed over it and the wood creaked.
Curiosity sparking, Kora pushed harder, and a smooth square shape around the initials clicked backwards like a secret latch.
A ticking noise filled the chamber, counting down to something.
A small thrill filled her as she raced to the desk, the only other place she’d seen this engraving.
Fluttering her hands over the edge where K.J.
had been crudely carved in, no portion of the desk gave way.
She felt underneath, and her heart leapt as she discovered an oblong latch and pulled it forwards.
A floorboard beside her reading chair beneath the mezzanine popped up, and Kora jumped in surprise at the complexity of the mechanism.
Leaning down to inspect it, the faint K.J.
etching was marred by the scraping foot of the reading chair over the years.
Reaching down into the floorboard, Kora breathed back the sting of Agatha doing the exact same as she retrieved a leather-bound book, eerily like her previous ledgers of deceits.
A flag encased the book and Kora gingerly unfolded it. Dark blue, with a chrome trident painted across the middle. A skull rested on each speared tip, and bones lined the shaft, ending in a sharp heel that could kill.
Nestling in the chair, she opened the book with haste, eager to know what secrets her past self had kept hidden.
With the ship flag sprawled across her lap, Kora thumbed the darkened edges of the ledger like it’d been dipped in paint.
Endless scrawlings of runes filled the pages, each one surrounded by a circle.
“What?” Kora whispered out loud as she flipped through the pages.
It was all runes. As she reached the centre, the same trident had been repeatedly drawn with fury, the ink overlapping until it indented the pages.
Kora gently traced it and a cold prickle raced up her arm, circling the back of her mind.
She carried on flipping, and her gut hollowed as the pages darkened, slowly overtaken by splodges of black ink, until they fully turned black.
It was a book of a mad woman.
The scribbles were incoherent and endless. Runes Kora didn’t recognise from her lessons with Aerion were repeated on every page, even with the all-black ones she could make out the faintest mark of a quill nearly tearing through the page.
The second-to-last page made her pause. She’d certainly had a knack for drawing, a talent Kora hadn’t recovered post-amnesia.
Amidst the chaos, a cavern had been drawn, depicting darkness leaking from it, with a collection of runes erupting from the middle surrounded by circles.
Kora rotated the page, trying to make sense of it, but it was all foreign to her. Would Aerion know these runes?
With a sigh, she flicked to the final page . . . and her heart stopped.
“Lost to the void, power ignites. Torn across the land, harbour the vessel. And sacrifice to the rift,” Kora recited the scribbles, the ink of the quill splashing from writing with haste. A drop of blood stained the following blank page.
Almighty Thanos. Barron’s prophecy, but from over ten years ago. The same prophecy Bree had foretold on board Hell’s Serpent.
Still the same nonsensical gibberish that Barron believed meant sacrificing humans to rule the world. In hindsight, Kora now understood Bree had been working with Barron. But how did Kordelia once know it?
The cold prickle that’d persisted whilst Kora thumbed through the book shocked her, and she jolted back into the chair, dropping the book of scribbles as a soundless scream tore from her lips.
Darkness surrounded by a red glow crept into her vision and her limbs numbed, floating away as a cold hand grabbed her neck, followed by a sinister laugh bursting her eardrums.
“Stupid, pathetic human,” that voice echoed from Kora’s own lips. “You could never be the vessel.”
“No,” Kora pleaded in return, the conversation murmuring from her own mouth. “I stopped you. They stopped you.”
The laugh cackled. “Nothing could ever stop me.”
“I will not give in to the dark!”
“You are the dark. I would not be here if you weren’t a terrorising little murderer. I am the voice of your killer instinct. Give in, human.”
Kora moaned, ice consuming her veins, attacking her heart. In the back of her mind, a drip echoed as tar bubbled beneath her feet.
“You shouldn’t have touched what isn’t yours.
” Kordelia’s image appeared. Long hair rippled down her back in waves.
A dark red dress graced her figure, burnished with black patches, the hem coated in sticky, black residue.
She strolled towards Kora barefoot, a wide grin stretching her mouth from ear to ear, and . . . she had no scar.
Kora yelled, her body fused to the chair, tendrils of darkness latching onto her limbs, tying her down as Barron had once done.
She screamed into the bond but it was silent, a wall of shadows blocking her from Raiden’s light.
Panic set in, her control slipping rapidly.
Her water beast growled, but when Kora called upon it, the tar pit at her feet bubbled, spreading across the floor.
“You’re not real,” Kora retaliated. “You’re not Kordelia!”
She paused, red streaks in her eyes flaring with rage. “No, pet. You aren’t real. You’re the fugue, the parasite filling this body. It’s time to give it back.”
Barron’s nickname rolling off her tongue made Kora gag, her neck snapping as she craned away.
No.
She was real.
She was real.
This mirage was the imposter, the darkness, not Kora.
Kordelia leaned forward, a veil of moonlight hair blocking the room from sight. A single cold finger pressed to Kora’s scar and her eyes rolled into the back of her head, the darkness dragging her down into the depths of the void.