CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
Though, neither was accessible to her while she had no soul-born magic.
Which was why she needed Ronan, why he was there. They were using each other. And either both or neither would survive it.
Tortured screams shuddered through the ground beneath them.
Ronan glanced down, fixating on the cracked floor, willing to see through it. “Seems you’re already spreading terror,” he rasped, glare locking on hers.
She only grinned, leading him deeper into the fortress until they came upon a steel-bar door, an unnatural chill leaking through its seams where she halted before it.
A faint, rusted stench wound over him when she turned, tracing a finger down the line of his throat, then dragged it lower, over his chest.
His breath did not falter. But hers did when his hand shot up, seizing her wrist before she could rip cloth, or flesh. “Aren’t you?”
Laying her free hand atop his, she smiled, leaning into him. “Let me have my fun, while you have yours.”
Ronan pulled back, severing the contact. “What is your plan? I kill the Viper for you. You get the Kaida. But for what, Isolde?”
She whispered, “You already know.”
The air split with a screech, iron against stone, where a skeletal witch emerged through the door, bowing low.
Isolde moved to slip from his hold, but his hand clamped tighter on her arm. Knuckles white. Grip unyielding. This time, he did not let her go. The witch gasped, rotted teeth gnarling against her sunken jaw.
“Ah, but you are a witch,” Ronan said. “Where most have one plan, you have many.”
Isolde laughed, uncurling his fingers from her arm before sneaking free and drifting past the steel door. “So dubious.” Her voice trailed like incense down the stairwell. “A trait from your father, maybe?”
Fury snapped in his chest. “You do not speak of him.”
With a flick of her wrist, she beckoned him onward, into the womb of darkness.
His gut twisted, yet still, he followed, his leash tightening with every step.
It lilted like a lullaby when her voice came, echoing down the throat of the stair. One sung beside a grave—
“A sickness will rampage with death as desire, a blindness inside that leaves none the wiser.” The walls pressed close, wet with rot. He shivered. She did not. “Deep, deep, deep it goes—” She giggled, as though mocking his skin where the mark seared into it.
A reminder of why he was bound to her.
He paused when she dissolved completely into the dark, only the linger of her voice droning off the walls.
The bloodoath pulsed at his wrist and he knew the twin mark on hers burned in answer.
A tether of power and promise. That if Ronan fulfilled the prophecy, if he killed the Viper, she would regain her magic, all of it.
And in return, she would set Ryuu free of an heir, release him from the throne.
And give him the one other desire he needed most.
The truth.
Even knowing witches were deception wrapped in flesh. Even knowing her kind wove names from lies and worse, still, he had sworn the vow.
Because the curse was not just a threat to her bloodline. But fated to be the one true threat to their entire world.
And Ronan, forged strictly for destruction and death, was destined to kill the one who held it.
There was movement, a flicker in the dim, and she was there, forming back together in front of him like the shadows were done with their play.
A stench thickened, like rotting copper and curdled blood. It scraped down Ronan’s throat as Isolde pushed through another door.
From beyond it rose the sound he had heard above, groans that vibrated loud enough to bellow through stone, wails clawing the walls, pleading for mercy.
Her fortress was no palace. It was a harvest nest, messy and cruel.
Ten wooden tables stretched in rows, each holding a living host where mortals were bound so tightly their bones seemed to crack beneath the ropes.
Some had no eyes, only black pits staring into nothing. Some had little flesh left clinging to their frames. Only breath, faint and rattling.
And none bled red.
What seeped from their veins was black and slick, dripping into bowls like poison drawn from a spring.
The smug delight slipped away when Isolde’s expression shifted. Concern shadowed her brow as one of her witches uncorked a vial, its liquid glowing milky blue in the dim.
A drop was tipped between a man’s lips and his body convulsed, head shaking side to side in sluggish refusal.
Then another drop. Another.
Each shake of his head getting weaker and less.
Ronan stepped closer, looming over him, his frame swallowing what little light still clung to the cavern ceiling.
The man blinked, then begged. Not for life, but for death. For clemency. For release from this torment.
Behind him, Isolde said nothing. Only watched, waiting to see which mask he’d wear. Would he end the mortal and grant mercy? Or stand aside, obedient to her hand?
He understood the game well enough. And flames curse him, he couldn’t even fault her. He wouldn’t trust himself either.
“Is this,” Ronan inhaled, “what the precious blood I’ve reaped for you has been for?”
The man’s eyes dimmed at that. At the truth that Ronan was not his savior.
“I can’t seem to get it quite right.” Isolde snapped her fingers, summoning another witch.
“It must be the dosage.” The scrape of stone on stone resounded as a slab was dragged open along the ground, revealing a hidden, circular hole beneath.
“I’ll need another batch quite soon,” she mused. “I’m nearly down to my last.”
Ronan swallowed, jaw locking tight. It was hard to look at. Harder to accept the blood on his own hands. Still, his focus fell, because it always did.
The last Kaida he had brought stared up at him. Immobile and small, its eyes blinking rapidly. Too off and uneven.
He avoided eye contact, as it made no sound, no movement at all, while the stone slid back into place above, sealing it away.
Fury curdled in his chest as he turned, storming up the spiral stairs, needing distance. Needing to be away from her.
But she followed, her footsteps as light as deceit. When they reached the top, he spun, smoke ripping from his body as he seized Isolde, slamming her into the wall hard enough for stone to crack.
“If any of what I just witnessed ends up in Ryuu,” veins rose along his forearms, his neck, his forehead, “I will bathe in the blood you tried to drip down my throat after I tear you to fucking pieces.”
Her smile came all too knowing as she said, “You would make a marvelous king.” As if shedding old skin, she peeled herself from the wall, gliding toward her throne of bones, a hand snapping in dismissal. “Get out.”
Ronan didn’t bow or even look back. Not at what he had done. Not at what he had allowed. And not at what he had let himself become.
But as he stalked through her lair, the sickness of it followed him. The faces. The cries. The Kaida’s eyes fluttering like a dying flame.
This was the necessary work he had chosen. The inevitable bargain he had struck. So why did it feel like it was gutting him out from the inside?
He told himself it didn’t matter. That he couldn’t care. That power didn’t grieve the ruins it left behind. It only learned to live with the cost.
The wind on the Isle was warmer than expected, its salted breath rolling in from the sea, brushing against his face like a sigh.
Ronan had found himself here often lately. The place reminded him of home, if Ryuu had been forged from stars and clouds instead of stone and fire.
Though his wings didn’t belong in a palace crowned in white.
There was no one left here to tell him so anyway. So, he spread them wide and let them taste the air. Let them remember what rapture was supposed to feel like.
Only a few places were left where he could set the weight down. The Angels’ ruined realm being one of them. He sat at the cliff’s edge, legs dangling into the endless mist, and wondered if his father would be proud of the sacrifices he’d made for their kingdom.
The truth was he didn’t care. He didn’t need pride, only needed his father to be wrong about him, about what he could become.
A sound stirred below, tiny wings flitting through the fog as he rubbed at his wrist, where two small bite marks beaded with fresh blood.
The space tightened, humming with a new scent. Ronan scorched his flesh, searing away any trace of Isolde. Better burns than her mark lingering on him. He didn’t turn when the inevitable footsteps approached.
Elysian always found him. Ronan was only disappointed it had taken so long. And disappointed he had come at all.
Smoke pulsed into the stone, the floating edge easing back toward the mountain it belonged to. Quickly, he wrapped a leather band tight around his wrist, covering the bites.
Finally, he turned. “You really are a hound.”
Elysian stepped closer, hands clasped neatly behind his back. “Aero is very concerned, Ronan. The Kaida’s numbers are dropping rapidly.” His voice carried more than burden. “Since when can we not keep them safe?”
Everyone knew the worth of the Kaida. Not only to Ryuu, but to all of Selvarra. Their essence ran too pure, too valuable, too rare, to be left untouched. And sometimes, a fortune wasn’t met in coin or gold, but lives.
Ronan rose, dusting dirt from his leathers, his stare cutting to Elysian. “The land is dying everywhere,” he said. “We’re doing what we can to save it.”
Elysian bared the cusp of his teeth, sharp against the light. “You think it’s the land? Be realistic. If it were the land, we’d find bodies. Bones. Something.” The air chilled. “But every day their numbers fall,” he spat, “with not a single trace of where they’ve gone.”
Ronan stood in silence, his face betraying nothing, though guilt seethed under the stillness.
“Ronan,” Elysian pleaded.
When he didn’t answer Ely feigned a laugh that rang flat in the charged air.
“I will make sure Ryuu stays safe,” Ronan said at last. “That is why I hunt the Viper. Why we search for the lost heir.” Elysian shook his head, eyes cutting upward, to the sky.
“I will fix this,” Ronan promised. “And once the three kingdoms are reunited, the land will heal. The Kaida will replenish.”
For the briefest moment, he felt more king than prince. He meant it, the promise, to his kingdom and the friend he had freed.
Elysian’s nostrils flared as he stepped forward. “There’s a reason you aren’t as concerned as the rest of us, isn’t there?” His features shifted when the truth reached his senses. “Why I find you here, of all places on this continent?”
Ronan moved closer, the haze peeling back for him alone. “Do you not trust your crown?”
Elysian let out a brittle laugh. “If you want to be king, Ronan, then be it. But don’t shut me out. Not when I’m the only one keeping Aero from rioting with the rest of Ryuu.”
Ronan stilled. He hadn’t considered that. That even Aero might crack. He asked, “What’s changed?”
“Your dragons are lost. And you keep wandering further from us.”
He pressed a hand to Elysian’s shoulder.
“Stop searching for the Kaida.” Elysian drew a sharp breath, stare moving past Ronan, down toward the pale shimmer of the Sapphire Sea.
“Tell Aero to shift his focus on the Bale. On what it has already destroyed.” Ronan’s hand dropped as he turned, walking into the barren expanse.
Behind him came the rasp of Ely’s breath, the crack of words torn from him. “What madness have you stirred?”
Ronan didn’t look back as he said, “I’m saving us.”
Wings unfurled, shadows tearing wide. He leapt from the cliff’s edge, swallowed whole by the clouds, Elysian’s question heavy even long after he was gone.