“Is this your curse?” I asked. “The Bloodborn curse?”
A shiver of shame. My hand was still pressed to his chest—our bodies nearly entangled. In my surprise, I’d let my weight settle onto his knee, and his grip on my wrist had me practically curled onto his lap. Despite his impenetrable self-control, this close even he couldn’t hide his truth from me.
I knew he didn’t want to answer.
“No,” he said. “It’s something more than that.”
“A curse, though. An… additional curse.”
He was hesitant. “Yes.”
“How did you—who—”
I pressed my hand harder against his chest, lost in my morbid fascination. It was probably some of the most advanced magic I’d ever seen. No, it was, without equal, the most advanced magic I’d ever seen.
“What—what is this?”
I couldn’t help reaching deeper, pulling it apart with my magic. I was now fully in Atrius’s lap, but no longer noticed the awkwardness of it.
He asked gruffly, “Can you help?”
Weaver, what kind of a question was that? I didn’t even know how to answer it. My gut instinct was, Absolutely not. No one can. Whatever this is, it’s incurable.
I chose my words more carefully.
“I—I don’t know. I think it would take a very powerful healer to cure—”
He let out a growl of frustration. “Not cure. I’m not a fucking fool. Just—”
I had been so transfixed by this—this thing inside of him that I had barely been paying attention to Atrius himself. Not until now, when I felt something strangely vulnerable from within his presence. It was so innocent, so guarded, that it almost seemed wrong for me to sense it at all.
He let out a breath. “Time. I need time.”
Desperation burrowed, carefully hidden, into all the little crevices of his soul. I swallowed a stab of sympathy—sympathy, for the conqueror of my home.
Weaver fucking help me.
And yet I wasn’t sure if it was all an act when my voice softened in my answer.
“I’ll try,” I said, and beneath my palm I felt Atrius let out a long, slow exhale of relief.
I shifted awkwardly, suddenly conscious of my position on Atrius’s lap. I needed to scoot further onto him to stabilize myself—I’d lose awareness of my body when I did this, so I needed to make sure I wasn’t about to just let myself slump onto the floor. I placed my other hand on his chest, next to the first.
“Don’t let me fall,” I muttered, and before I could think too hard about the way his hands gripped my hips, I threw myself into the threads.
I limited my awareness to him and this thing eating him alive within—reached deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the threads. Everything else fell away, reduced to distant gray fog. I was wildly exposed for someone in the presence of an enemy, but this demanded my full focus. It was so far within him that I had to push a little further with every breath, like trying to walk against the brutal winds of a storm, hands shielding my face.
With every step, I ventured further into darkness.
The curse was deep inside Atrius—near to his heart, his soul. It was a ravenous thing, devouring all the threads of his life force into a tangled, rotting mass, pulled tight like a clenched fist.
I could do nothing about the rot. That was magic far more advanced than mine. But the tangles…
I reached for his threads and grabbed hold of one.
An involuntary gasp, as a surge of terror cracked through me. It was raw and tender, like a child’s fear. For a moment, I froze, staggering against it—against the way it reminded me of my own childlike fear, belonging to a version of myself I left behind long ago.
Keep going.
I kept my hold and continued. Slowly, I worked at unraveling the threads. Some were irreparably gone, consumed by this thing inside him, but others could be extracted if I did so gently and cautiously.
With each one I freed, images flashed through my mind. Faces—so many dead faces, black blood seeping from their lips and pooling in eyeless sockets.
Cold. Muscles in legs screaming against the exertion of a long hike. You look up and the sky seems so close, closer than you ever thought it could be.
Another thread. I gently worked it free.
Nyaxia’s eyes are the sky, a gradient of sunset that does not move with her face. Her beauty is staggering, breathtaking—painful, actually, like looking upon something you were never meant to see.
Pain pulsed at the back of my skull, in my magic, in my soul. My own threads were intertwined with Atrius’s now, working this deep. It was harder for me to focus. Harder for me to keep my grip on the threads as I grew closer to the core of the curse.
Still, I worked.
Another thread.
You fall to your knees in the snow. You can’t feel anything for the cold.
Another.
The head in your hands has his eyes still open, silvery amber, staring past you.
A sudden spike of pain, this one so intense it drowned out everything else. I froze, my body going rigid.
I lost my hold on the threads.
In a faraway world, my body fell.
I was only barely coming back to awareness when rough hands caught me, but clumsily, limbs tangling with mine. The next thing I knew, Atrius and I were on the floor together, both slumped over in the furs. I reached out and my hand instinctively found his chest again, right over his heart. His breath came heavily. The pain that radiated from his inner presence still throbbed in my own.
He was in such unimaginable pain. How could anyone exist like this? He had done so, I could tell, for a long time. This was old pain, etched deep into him, beyond walls he had constructed over the course of years to keep it in.
He started to push himself to his elbows and help me up, but before he could, I rolled onto my knees and pushed him back down.
“What are—” he started.
“Sh,” I said, gently pushing him back to the furs, my palms against his chest again.
I reached for his threads. This time, I stroked them gently—I had worked whatever I could free from his curse, but this was something else.
No, like I’d told Atrius, I was no healer. But I knew how to sedate—though usually for far less benevolent purposes than this.
Atrius went rigid. His eyelids fluttered, though he yanked them back open every few seconds. He didn’t have the strength to raise a mental wall against me, but he tried anyway.
I slid one hand down his arm, my thumb tracing a comforting circle.
“Don’t fight it,” I whispered.
“I don’t have time—” he choked. “I have to—”
“Shh.”
He was tired. So, so tired. When he gave up, he did it all at once.
His hand slid around mine, so his palm lay atop it. I could feel his eyes on me, holding on for as long as he could.
“Thank you,” he rasped, finally.
And then he let himself fall.