Chapter 2
T he moldering, wretched stench of a poor soul deceived into a damning deal filled Garrik’s nostrils as something wet and grimy dripped onto his cheek. Another seeped from his neck, underneath his battle leathers, and tainted his icy skin. It had to have fallen from the bodies hanging above his head, strung up by rusted chains.
Ripples of glowing green light cast dancing rays across the crypt, but he did not move. Did not draw his sword or care to wipe his cheek. His silver eyes only stared expectantly at the vile creature mere feet in front of him.
The shape of Mercy was … sculpted in madness.
Sculpted by the gambling of faeries. By its addiction to pain. Sorrow. Hopelessness.
Soulless death.
Desperation brought all faeries, low or high, there. Paths and lives nothing could free them from. When there was no other choice, no other way, fate would meet them down there and push them toward reluctantly making a deal with a monster who was gluttonous for pain.
No one actually wanted to be there.
And no one would expect a demon to buy his own path to hell. But there Garrik was, ready to bargain.
Like a glitch in time, Kerimkhar moved in spurts across the space. His figure spasmed from one stone, only to appear mere feet away. His former location held a slow-moving illusion of him until it caught up with his true self.
“Do you like them? They make the most excellent company.” Kerimkhar snickered, drawing his prismed eyes to the hundreds of faces laden in stone surrounding the crypt and buried deep in the watery abyss.
The faces moved, their voices joining his when that rotten mouth opened. “Have you come to offer yours to my collection?”
Garrik paced with a dismissive, uncaring expression, his magic sending warning pulses through his veins.
Kerimkhar’s decaying finger stretched out as if to touch him. “Such a pretty face.”
“Make a deal with me,” Garrik growled. He was not asking.
Kerimkhar glitched across the space, landing steps in front of Garrik. “And what would the Heir of Darkness offer? Pain? A memory? His soul?” His rotting tongue licked across black lips. “His face?” The prism of his eyes morphed to ruby and widened in hungry delight.
“Pain.” I have more than enough to give.
Kerimkhar hummed as he closed the short distance between them. The decaying, peeling flesh on his finger outstretched and brushed across Garrik’s cheek.
Without even as much as a twitch, Garrik’s eyes succumbed to oblivion before he released a destructive airwave barreling into Kerimkhar.
It sent Kerimkhar stumbling backward, tripping on the hems of his robe. The loose flesh of his face warped at the impact.
“ Do not touch me .”
But Kerimkhar smiled. The skin on his face shifted. “Your pain is … delicious . I smell blood on you, Savage Prince. Of the millions you have killed. Those living and those whose lives were stolen without a chance at life. I smell their fear, their disgust, their hatred. You carry it everywhere you roam. I may be stuck in this prison, but it is you who walks with chains. Even I would not wish to live such as you.”
Kerimkhar glitched, fazing backward. The slow movement of his body caught up to the rest of him mere steps away, melding together with a wicked smile.
“How much more pain can you offer me? I am starving.” A blinding light pulsated from the pools. The waters rippled as Kerimkhar sauntered toward an edge and took a long, greedy inhale. “Your scent.” He leered, face twisting in rotten disgust. “It’s repulsing . Many hands have left you … vile. Tainted. Their touch laced into every inch of your skin.”
Garrik did not give him the satisfaction of responding. Kerimkhar had a way with his words and knew how to use what others confessed against them. Garrik’s endless abyss for eyes meticulously watched the being take a calculated step closer to the pool’s edge.
The crowd of voices hissed, “My brother, I smell him too.”
Kerimkhar cocked his head, a predator stalking its prey.
Garrik stood stone-faced. His magic railed against his calm exterior, on edge.
“Allseeah,” ten thousand voices released his twin’s name with a long, pondering drawl. “He released you.”
Kerimkhar took a measured step around the pool. Decaying, peeling skin rippled like his swamp waters. Flesh shifted as if it were transforming into a new likeness but returned to the same rotting, black teeth and deteriorating membrane. “Oh, but you are not yet free, are you, Whore of the Snake?”
Mercy had been tricked and traded for cruel pain and damning knowledge. And with the wisdom of the past, Garrik knew Kerimkhar’s words—scheming—were carefully laid paths of misery turned for cold deals of selfish gain. Beyond the bite of the truth, Garrik remained a stone wall. Unmovable. Unbreakable.
It would not work on him. Pain filled his entire existence already.
This was nothing.
“I am here to trade for a debt, not speak on what has passed. Tell me what is required to break another’s bargain so I can leave this rotting shit-hole.”
Pacing in drawn-out steps that ruffled the decaying hems of his cloak, Kerimkhar’s ruby eyes flashed to honey-gold, then feathered to crimson. “What is her name?”
“Nezlelle. A grandmother who traded her afterlife for her grandlings.”
Kerimkhar shifted his wicked gaze and snickered. “It is not the peasant’s name I require. Speak it, Savage Prince . The name of your master, she from whom the monster was Made, and I shall release the debt in which you came to trade.”
No. Garrik paled. His veins prickled. He wouldn’t.
“The most savage in Elysian is … afraid ? Oh, Beast Made for Magnelis, your mother would be ashamed,” Kerimkhar singsonged. “Do you think she knows her son is rendered useless at the hands of a female? Brought to his knees to serve her every whim for pleasure instead of pain?” Kerimkhar cocked his head, boring his enraptured eyes into the nerve exposed and bleeding.
But Garrik grinned and lazily exhaled a laugh, as if it did not bother him at all. “You disappoint me, Kerimkhar. Asking for nothing but a name. I expected more.”
The echoing sounds of heavy steps tapped across every hardened surface and crack within the stones. Dragging the hems of his robe behind him, Kerimkhar paced the crypt’s floor. “Do not tempt me, Bastard of Darkness. Now, tell me her name. There is no other way.”
As if commanded to, shadows from every corner of the crypt tendriled down the walls and across the stone floor, filling the space with Garrik’s rippling power as he roared, “ Do not test my patience . What else would you bargain for?”
That wicked grin expanded. A demon drawing power from the pain. “Only her name,” Kerimkhar taunted with seething delight.
“No.” Garrik’s heart raced, and he forced himself not to tremble. Not to see her face. Not to feel what her hands?—
He refused the urge to tear into his armor as his abdomen tensed with searing agony.
“The one who stole your worth. Her name. Say it.”
The walls of the crypt seemed to crawl closer, drawing themselves in. Unable to stop the trembling, Smokeshadows pulled Garrik’s hands. His face, arms, and torso became clouded by them, desperately working to calm him. But his rage only grew—grew toward her . The serpent with daggers for nails and eyes that haunted his every nightmare.
“Her name.” With an echoing snap of his finger, Kerimkhar side-eyed a dark corner of the crypt.
Dust and rock shards fell from the ceiling as scales and claws and bone-crushing teeth escaped the shadows. The glowing crimson eyes of a fiery beast blinked, and a rumble that shook the walls thrummed from the darkness as a dragon emerged, lowered its head, and chuffed a blazing heat as scorching as Alora’s powers.
“Or I will send my dragon to claim the peasant now.” Kerimkhar outstretched his decaying hand and patted the beast on its head.
Knuckles white in furiously balled fists, a muscle ticked in Garrik’s cheek. He could not speak.
Not that name. Never again.
“ Her name—give it to me !” Kerimkhar snarled.
His dragon blasted a breath of intense heat.
Garrik’s thunderous roar cracked the stone foundation, splitting through symbols of the hidden language from wall to wall like branches of lightning. His eyes, wholly consumed by blackened abyss, promised death as he mournfully growled.
For the first time since he woke as himself on that starsdamned icy mountain, he cursed the one who ruined him.
The serpent’s foul name almost shattered his soul. If he still had one.
His body felt numb and loose and … vile as his mind brushed over each letter and vowel. As her name alone sent phantom hands rubbing down his body.
Garrik shuddered, whipping his head to Kerimkhar, who stood with a lust-filled haze in his eyes, as if he had stumbled upon a banquet dinner fit for a starving king.
Ten thousand voices whispered with a revolting grin, “Say it again.”
“ One name was asked .” His voice shook with wrath. “One was given. The bargain is satisfied.” Garrik gritted his teeth and willed every spent nerve in his body to relax as he turned and moved to leave.
But the merciless presence hissed again. “Oh … you are like him.”
Shards of ice tore through Garrik’s veins as he stalked to the stairway. I am nothing like Magnelis.
“My. How you even look perfectly like him, your father. Doesn’t he, pet?” The echoes of decaying fingers scratching along scales were like talons down his spine. “A mirrored image. Darkness lives inside you, yet you know nothing of this power. Caged and waiting to be unleashed.
“Tell me, would you like to know what Allseeah told me? Magnelis’s future … I know something you don’t know,” his voices goaded in a teasing melody.
Taunts and trickery. That was all this was. Once the face of Mercy, he now gorged himself on pain, sinking his claws deep to find each wound that festered. Words that meant not-a-starsdamned-thing to Garrik. Magnelis’s future would end in the depths of Firekeeper’s realm— that he was certain of. Everything else? He did not care.
Garrik felt tempted to roll his eyes but would not exert himself further for the sake of the High King. He barely desired hearing about him from his mother when she, even in her desolation, spoke compassion for the male Magnelis supposedly once was.
He had obtained what he came for. The release of the grandmother’s afterlife for the fucking serpent’s name. He would not entertain another word of this scheme. But as his boots met the threshold, every muscle in his body went taut.
The stairwell glowed.
Translucent entities flaring in green light hovered down the stairs, dripping putrid water and smelling like the swamp.
Souls.
He had been against far worse odds before.
But how in Firekeeper-filled-hell do you kill something that is already dead?
It would take one touch to turn into one of them. One.
“There is only one pathway out, Savage Beast, and I’m not finished with you yet. You see, Made for Magnelis, it is because of him that I am trapped here. And it is you who will set me free.”
“Why the hell would I do that?” Silver narrowed on the souls floating down inch by inch.
An icy chill that could freeze over Firekeeper’s realm sent shards of frozen glass through his veins as Kerimkhar’s ten thousand voices whispered one damning name.
“Alora.”
Shadows slammed into the being’s throat.
Garrik’s powers turned their bodies into the darkness he commanded, into ash and smoke. He ripped them from reality, inside the darkness of the Dawnspace, until a distinctive crack resounded against the farthest stone wall of Kerimkhar’s tomb.
Kerimkhar’s weathered body hurdled out of the shadows, hundreds of feet across the crypt floor, with Garrik made entirely of shadows, locking his fist around the being’s throat.
The dragon shrieked in its corner of the crypt, bound by an invisible wall, Garrik’s shield. Thrashing and clawing and frantic. Like a lover fighting to protect its master, it released a fiery inferno that scorched every stone—a lethal promise of what it would do should it have Garrik under its teeth.
Ever-so-sweet and satisfying grunts choked from Kerimkhar’s throat.
Garrik’s grip tightened. Half shadows, half High Fae, as he squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.
But the voices choked out, “Kill me and you’ll never save her from Destiny.”
The dragon’s shriek rattled the crypt.
Skin pulling tight, sharpening the bones of his cheeks, and cutting his teeth to lethal tips, the Savage Prince razed, “ Speak .”
Kerimkhar grinned.
Garrik’s fingers sank into the decaying robe, thirsting to pierce the skin over the being’s heart, threatening to mist into shadow and rip the life out.
“ I do not ask twice .” He pressed, and the tips sank into fabric and flesh before Kerimkhar’s voices gurgled.
“Take me to a memory, Savage Bastard. You know the one I seek. For Daughter of the Evening Star … her life … depends on it.”
“ Take your damn misery and tell me what you know .” Garrik’s voice shook the stones of the mountain inside his memory that he drew them into, standing on darkened graystones of a balcony he had spent countless nights bleeding on.
Twenty years. Twenty painful years had passed, and his feet had never once stepped again on these stones overlooking the haunting sea. His blood permanently stained each crack, not even rain could wash it away.
Garrik’s eyes pierced the darkness of a bedchamber filled with the heaviness of death and despair. He stepped back, knuckles whitening around the hilt of his sword as if preparing to sink into freezing flesh or obsidian eyes. Either would do.
The sea below the castle raged with the intensity of a tropical storm. The briny cold of his mother’s oceans carried to him but brought no sense of comfort as the darkened night in his eyes locked onto the blackwood door inside.
Something unsettling tickled his ear as if someone had breathed on it. The sickly sensation curled around the outer shell. An invasive phantom seeking access.
That touch. Garrik fought a shudder.
Then the thousands snickered, “You came into my home. So, I will escape into yours.”
“ This is not my home .” Garrik’s growl exuded catastrophic wrath.
He spun on his heel and met Kerimkhar face-to-face. The view of the endless sea over the bloodstained balustrade and claw marks from the female of his nightmares were still etched within a blurry haze behind him.
Garrik snarled, “You are hostage to Alynthia’s mountain by your own foolishness. Do not steal into my memories to find an escape. You will not receive comfort here. Now, tell me what you know about Alora.”
“Mmm, you’re m … mysterious white-haired. Daughter Born of Starfire. Tell me, how did you ensnare such purity when this very bedchamber was your greatest shame?”
Metal hinges creaked as the blackwood door inside the bedchamber inched open. Garrik watched as a shadowed silhouette stood inside. Her serpentine voice sent his body rippling in an ache as blackened veins expanded across his skin.
‘Put him over there. Use the shackles.’
Garrik’s wrists began to burn.
The silhouette emerged from the doorway. Three others followed.
Two tall figures dragged a writhing body through the light until they transformed into darkness like ink dripping into a crystal glass of water.
Garrik stumbled a step back and shook his head from the memory.
“A powerful weapon. A star capable of destroying worlds—or saving them. Daughter of stars, ice, and sea. The wind, crystal, and fire, shadows, earth, and flow. She is magic, commander of all things. Tell me, how did you weave your claws and find her trusting you, Prince Made from Darkness?” Kerimkhar turned his head to the cloudless sky as if to speak to the sleeping stars. “Did she have a taste of his shadows?”
The thousands of voices turned back to him. “Starfire couldn’t resist that which haunts the light?”
Eyes wide in shock, Garrik fought for words. Alora not only had fire magic …
She had starfire .
The very magic rumored to be woven into the creation of Elysian.
His eyes flashed to Kerimkhar, who pierced his prismed eyes into the darkened bedchamber, listening to the sounds inside.
“Haven’t you wondered why her burn upon your flesh hasn’t healed? Why, with everything she makes, every use of her magic has come with the burst of white flames? Oh, Whore of the Snake, how na?ve, when your powers manifest everything you desire with smoke and shadow. She is the same.”
The burn under Garrik’s armor…
Kerimkhar was right.
Though he hid the blistering pain brought about with every brush of his armor, it still festered. With his fast-healing High Fae blood and Calla’s healing balm, it should have healed overnight. But morning had come inside Alora’s tent, and it had still sizzled like the moment she had laid her flaming hand on him. It burned like …
A weapon. A burning, raging inferno laced with the most powerful magic in Elysian.
Kerimkhar’s face rippled, his skin shifting as if attempting to change form.
“You say she is a weapon?—”
“ She is not the weapon, you fool.”
A male voice screamed behind them, ‘Do not touch me!’
Garrik tuned out his own screams from within the darkened room. “Then what the hell is?”
“My freedom depends on that which she carries. Obtained by a deal, steel as dark as night holds the shimmer of Life, Blood, and soulless Death. But when Blood and Death are missing, Life slowly takes.”
Fucking riddles and trickery. “Out with it. I do not have all night,” Garrik snapped.
Kerimkhar paced the balcony stones, glitching forward three steps. “The obsidian dagger that left your slow-healing wound will be the High King’s damnation. Fated by Destiny, together the white-haired and weapon will destroy him entirely. But, Made for Magnelis, the dagger is futile without its three sisters. And I see two are not united with Life.”
Garrik’s brows pinched. Alora’s dagger . He had been at the mercy of it enough times to remember even the slightest details. Its off-balanced weight because of the missing gemstones in its hilt. They thought it only a mere dagger. A stunning piece with ruthless purpose alone. Not a weapon. Not a powerful one.
“Life, Blood, and Death. They are the gemstones?”
“They are the sister spirits.” Kerimkhar’s rotting smile widened.
“And if the dagger is used incomplete?” The wound at Garrik’s neck burned in answer.
“No Blood to take, no Death to steal from Life. Only a wound, the life remains.”
“The dagger cannot kill without all three gemstones.”
“Indeed.”
“Where are the missing sister stones?”
“Ah, ah, ah, Bastard of Darkness. For great information comes great sacrifice. And I am starving. Step deep inside the bedchamber for payment. To the door.”
Eyes black as night glanced over his shoulder. Another deal.
How many more before he would offer his life? Slowly peeling his skin bit by bit until he was raw and exposed. But he had no choice. If Alora was fated to use this dagger to damn Magnelis to a soulless death, to never return, he had to bargain once more.
So, he turned, rigid muscles flexing in the movement until his boots carried him to the bedchamber’s threshold. Garrik’s eyes raked over the frame of the door, fighting off memories of his smashed skull against them, staring at the cracks in the stone that his bones had made.
“Inside, to your master , Whore of the Snake,” Kerimkhar demanded. “Find her, she who Made you who you are.”
But Garrik did not hear him. Drowned out by rhythmic sounds of movement inside the memory, his insides churned as they did every peaceless night. Smokeshadows cascaded from his body, entering the room before him, a wall of protection as one boot suffered another stepped inside.
Garrik gripped the hilt of his sword, nearly cracking the iron underneath.
The female was not truly there. He knew that. And instead of focusing on the sound of the screams, he looked at her, imagining his hands around her throat. Imagining his sword shoved through her back and watching blood trickle down in streams of justice on her pale, ice-cold skin.
Kerimkhar must have noticed, because a sound of displeasure bellowed across the bloodstained graystones.
Garrik stalked to the door and leaned his back against it, knee bent and boot pressed flat against the blackwood. A crooked grin twisted on Garrik’s face as he crossed his arms, staring through the balcony threshold, and sneered, “You will have to do better than this. Now, where are they?”
Cocking his head, a storm of darkness coiled around him, turning him into smoke and shadow and ash before he manifested as his born form on the balcony beside Kerimkhar.
Ten thousand voices chided, “Look for payment high and deep, where four is in one.”
Another fucking riddle.
“In the mountain surrounded by unstable seasons, there you will find Blood.”
“And Death?” Garrik asked.
Kerimkhar was silent.
“ Death ? I fulfilled your bargain. Where is she ?”
“Payment is what you bargained for. Payment you received.”
Starsdamned lies and trickery. Garrik gritted his teeth.
“Find the crimson sister—Blood—payment. Join her with Life. Together, perhaps they will find she who is missing. For Life is the balance, Bastard of Darkness. She protects the balance, aligning with Destiny. And when two lives are linked, Blood takes her payment from who holds the dagger until all is drained. Death is ruthless, claiming the soul in which the blade has struck. Forever stolen, the soul can never return. Abolished from existence.”
Garrik stiffened, face bleak. Blood… Blood takes until all is drained…
Kerimkhar slowly nodded. “When Daughter of the Evening Star wields the dagger cradling the sisters three, she will die for Elysian, and I will be set free.”
She will die for Elysian.
“It is the only path, Savage Prince. There is no escaping this fate. The white-haired lioness is bound by Destiny.”
“What if I took her place?”
For the first time since Garrik walked into the crypt, Kerimkhar’s face fell expressionless. “ You ? Made for Magnelis, you are foolish . Not even I hold the power to change one’s fate.”
Garrik’s mouth twisted into a wicked grin. “No … but Allseeah does. Where is he?”
Kerimkhar’s decaying lip curled, baring rotted teeth, yet remained silent.
“ Where ? You conducted the deal with Magnelis. By blood or name, he could not thieve powers which were not his, damning me to infernal torture by your bargain. You wish to escape your prison? Tell me where to find Allseeah, or I vow upon every Celestial I will keep Alora from Magnelis until we are old and dying, thousands of years from this day.”
Kerimkhar’s ten thousand voices hissed, “It will require more pain.”
“Goodbye, Kerimkhar. Enjoy your prison.” Garrik simply closed his eyes and allowed his shadows to gather.
Mercy lurched forward, outstretching his rotten hand as he cried out in defeat, “ Wait !” Then paused, grinding his teeth before continuing, “My biggest betrayal never dwells in the same place. His movements are … widespread. Go to the ice mountain in which you were awakened. It is the last place I heard he dwelt. But be warned, Heir of Darkness. Destiny only changes once. You are wasting breath. The Daughter of Starfire will seal Magnelis’s fate.”
With a wolfish grin, Garrik’s shadows swirled as he gloated, “Luckily for me, Allseeah prefers my company over yours, seeing as he trapped you in this mountain.” He turned toward the sea and closed his eyes once more, summoning his magic to release them from his memory.
“Oh, High”—his conniving, thousand-voiced mouth tsked at the final word—“ Prince ,” he elongated the ‘s’ sound as it hissed off his rotting tongue.
Garrik opened his eyes to find Kerimkhar’s hands rushing to his leathers.
Gripping them, and with unearthly force, he lifted Garrik off his feet, opened his rotting mouth inches from his face, and whispered, “She possesses the power to do great and terrible things. When stars burst, little can escape their ire.” Kerimkhar lunged forward, swinging his body and arms with the force of constellations colliding. “Better to snuff out her flames before she becomes your undoing.”
Garrik flew over the bloodstained balustrade and plummeted to the ocean below. Kerimkhar’s final words contained the power to devastate as he focused on one thought.
Too late.