Chapter 24 ~Winter~ #2
And again and fucking again.
Blood sprayed everywhere, bones crunched, pain tearing through me.
The disorientation was real.
I tried to call my power, but magic hit my wrists, snapping them and making me roar.
A heavy weight pressed into my back with such force, it drove me into the black rock.
“It’s been too long, deathborn darling,” a voice seethed at my ear, making me shudder.
“Ruxnoth,” I choked.
He ripped me back, and then I was hurtling down the mountain, spinning out from the force of his throw.
No, not just a mountain.
A volcano.
This was Krestaz.
I threw my hands out and managed to find purchase on… something.
I roared as grabbing hold of whatever it was yanked at my broken wrist and wrenched my shoulder brutally, clearly dislocating it.
Still, I held on and looked up from blurring vision to see I was hanging onto a ledge about halfway down the volcano.
“Fuck!” I bellowed out into the distance, the pained sound echoing right back to me, as I forced myself up.
Digging my nails into the rock surface, I managed to gain enough purchase to roll myself onto the ledge on my back.
I was panting and spluttering, adrenaline flooding me.
I could feel my healing kicking in, just too fucking slowly for my liking.
As Ruxnoth made all too brutally apparent when he was suddenly there hovering in front of the ledge, his glinting blue and gold wings outstretched.
A familiar gray glow was encompassing him.
The same gray of the magic that had torn me from my teleportation path.
Corrupted necromantic magic.
He’d also been using that, pulled from his Sanctus allies before the collapse, or something he’d always had stored for emergencies or whatever other fucked-up reason.
“Yes,” he said, registering my reaction.
“It provides a little extra insulation from certain tracking spells. And what you need to concern yourself with currently is that I’m using the last I have of it to conserve my own true power in order to see to you.
” He snarled and ripped open his gold coat which had seen better days.
He’d fixed it a little since I’d last seen him, but not all the way.
He’d even had it buttoned up, but now bared his chest to me, revealing so much of his skin still tinged gray from my death state infection. “You will undo this!”
I snarled up at him. “The only thing I’ll do is complete that infection.”
His eyes flashed.
And then a creepy look played on his features. “Hmm. We’ll see about that.”
He swept forward in the next second, grabbing me around the waist, then soared us up the side of the volcano, making sure to scrape me against it along the way, cutting me to fucking pieces, shredding my clothes in the process.
My amber magic sparked, trying to pry his hands off me, where I’d then use my shadows to levitate down the volcano to the ground. But with him borrowing that necromantic power, I couldn’t simply hurt him right off the bat, I had to first break through that magic protecting him.
And there wasn’t enough time, because we reached the top and then he flew into the volcano’s inner chamber and roughly released me, where I skidded across the black charred floor, stopping just inches from the crater full of lava.
I was on my stomach, able to see that it had returned to its natural state since Evira had frozen it. Full-on lava now.
Ruxnoth’s shadow fell over me a moment before he wrenched me onto my back. He put his wings away and loomed over me. “Believe me, you absolutely will undo this. How much suffering you endure before you do so is up to you.”
“You tried to break me,” I spluttered. “Failed… so good… fucking luck.”
“Foolish youngling! You rejected everything I offered you! You would have no longer been an abomination, but a god!”
“You’re not… a god. You’re a power hungry… madman who—”
His hand shot out and wrapped around my throat, and he jerked me to him.
I sneered. He was long past being able to scare me. “And I’m not… an abomination.” I smiled. “Not… anymore.”
“You think they’ll accept you? Accept what you are?”
“Yes… they will.”
His eyes blazed. He released me.
But then he slammed his fist into my face.
The force of it had the back of my head cracking against the hard floor, taking the disorientation to a whole other level.
Pain exploded all over then, as he didn’t stop, his fists flying, smashing and pummeling me into the fucking floor.
He was roaring completely irately as he brutalized me, fists driving into my flesh, breaking bones, and trying to fucking rearrange my organs in the process. There was blood everywhere, a lot of it spluttering from my mouth.
Sure, he was compromised because of what I’d done, but he was still a True Celestial, and had that insane level of strength and all the rest. With the corrupted necromantic power shielding him, it was also enabling him to do more than he should have been capable of in this state.
He was moving so fast, delivering such a brutal onslaught, that there was no way for me to focus, to get even a couple of seconds to call my power. He was overwhelming my senses, definitely my pain receptors. And my body was too focused on trying to heal to do much of anything else.
When he did finally pull back, I was a writhing mass of blood and broken bones, wheezing and choking up mouthfuls of blood all over myself.
“Had enough, miraculous boy?” he rumbled, standing over me haughtily.
“Burn… in… hell.”
“Interesting that you should mention burning.”
In the next second, he grabbed me by the throat and yanked me up against him, my feet hovering off the ground.
“Now, with what you are, you likely won’t feel the heat, however, you’ll certainly feel the agony.”
What was he—
With a burst of speed, he was holding me over the lava crater.
“I wasn’t certain you could be harmed by lava with being of death state, so I made sure to imbue this with my true power. It cost me a little, but the payoff will be spectacular.”
Instinctively, I threw out my hand and tried to break his hold.
But he just batted it away, snapping my wrist again that had barely healed. I cried out, but that was the least of it when he lowered me into the crater, my feet sinking into the lava.
Lower and lower, he dipped me into it deep, all the way up to my chest. I was barely keeping my hands high enough to avoid it, and I honestly didn’t know how long I could even manage that.
Especially when I felt the full force of the lava burning through me, melting my skin, starting to liquefy my insides, dissolve bones.
I managed to call my Wraith frost, but with me already badly injured, it couldn’t do much, trying to heal me and shield me from this… it was beyond.
All I could do was scream and scream and fucking scream as he held me there.
Twisted sounds of satisfaction from him wrapped around my screams.
And then he yanked me out and tossed me into the chamber wall.
I landed on my stomach, shaking, roaring, unable to move from the chest down at all.
He strode toward me, and I frantically fought to call my power.
I… I needed help.
I needed help now.
I managed a spark and choked out, “Subitis.” The spark floated up and out through the chamber opening, sending out an SOS.
Ruxnoth roared, “What have you done?”
He grabbed my hands and went to break them again, but before he could, I pulled.
I pulled fucking hard, drawing all that corrupted necromantic magic into me.
Not storing it, but doing what I remembered Dad showing me during part of our training before.
“Cease!” he cried, trying to back away, but he was currently tethered to me all the while I was pulling on the power attached to him. “It’ll corrupt you as well,” he tried to warn me.
Bullshit. After everything he’d fucking done to me, I knew one thing for sure now. “I can’t… be… corrupted.”
My lower body was screaming in so much agony, my hands shaking, and it was making it hard to absorb the power. But then it happened, my amber magic sparked into being. I felt my eyes flare with it, which had Ruxnoth’s shooting wide.
“You should… be afraid,” I rasped.
In a final, definitive rush, all the corrupted power whooshed into me, and I felt it held there protectively by my own power so it wouldn’t infect me.
And then I let out a roar and sent it exploding out of me in a shockwave, right at him.
It blasted him across the chamber and he landed on his ass several feet from me, groaning in pain.
Now, not only was the necromantic protection gone, but that sudden burst of so much necromantic power would have sent out another SOS as a side effect. Dad and the necromancers would have registered it for sure. They just needed a little time to track it here.
Unfortunately, Ruxnoth pushed back to his feet all too soon.
I tensed as he snapped his palms up and called his midnight-blue power, his eyes flaming at me.
I managed to call my amber magic again, but it was currently unsteady, until I healed more.
I could feel my body already getting there, one of my feet now operable, the wheezing tapering off as my ribs healed, that boiling of my organs subsiding a little too.
But a lot more still needed to be done. And the pain…
it wasn’t exactly making it easy to hold concentration, or even to just fucking think.
He went to strike me.
But at the last second he pulled up short.
I frowned as he spun toward the chamber entrance.
A split-second later, Evira burst in and fired her glacial magic at him.
He met the attack with his own power and she grunted.
In the distraction, Zayn slipped in and then skidded to my side.
“Shit… fucking hell,” he whimpered at the damage all over me. His fuchsia glow was sweeping all over me in the next moment, and he moved his hands frantically, trying to heal me as fast as possible. “Win… god, I can’t… it’s not working. It’s not…”
“It’s… okay. Shh. Just needs time.”
“No. This… the state of it… no, you’re not enduring this for ages on end.”