Why should I be surprised?
We moved swiftly, though the tunnels, narrow as they were, were inefficient for this number of people. We’d prepared ourselves for potential confrontation down here—we couldn’t know how much of the tunnel system Septimus had discovered—but didn’t encounter a soul. A stroke of luck. Any battle within these narrow passages would be a disaster.
The halls were too dark for my human eyes, but the Nightfire at my blade lit the way. I didn’t consciously intend to run—but my steps grew quicker and quicker the closer we got to the heart of Sivrinaj.
Once we encroached upon the inner city, we started to hear the clashes above.
The sounds started off muffled and dull, the distant rumbles of cracking wood and crumbling stone, the sporadic blasts of explosives. Ketura’s troops, traveling over the streets above us, breaking down the barriers between us and the castle with the help of the demons and the Nightfire explosives.
The sound raised goosebumps on my arms—in anticipation, not dread. This was what we were supposed to be hearing. That, at least, was the sound of progress.
Soon, those echoes grew louder as the tunnels grew wider and better lit. We were reaching the inner city, moving steadily toward our final destination.
That was when things started to change.
The noises from above were now loud enough to vibrate the walls, the worst of them sending waterfalls of dust and dirt falling from the ceiling, the Nightfire flames shivering with the impact. A knot of unease started in my stomach, though I told myself that we were expecting things to get harder as we progressed—we were prepared for this.
But when a particularly loud BOOM made the ground itself lurch, sending both Jesmine and I stumbling against the walls, we exchanged a wary glance.
Jesmine walked faster, shouting urgent commands to those that followed us, but my steps faltered.
It wasn’t the sound, exactly, that did it. It was something deeper, something in the air itself, that I couldn’t put a name to. It buried under my skin, more persistent than the anxiety of battle. A force pulsing against my magic. A toxic smoke clinging to the inside of my lungs.
It was silent, it was invisible, and it was everywhere.
Fifty years ago, a volcano on one of the Nightborn islands erupted, killing every living thing on it—every living thing except for the birds, which all disappeared six hours before, flying off in one sky-darkening flock.
Was this, I wondered, what the birds had felt like that day?
I doubled my pace, catching up to Jesmine, then overtaking her. She shot me a look that had me wondering if she’d felt what I did, too. I’d never seen her show anything close to fear. And still, this wasn’t fear—not quite—but it was close enough to be almost as unnerving.
“Did you—” she started, but I cut her off.
“We need to get up there.” The words flew from my lips before I knew exactly how true they were. “We need to get up there, now.”
58
RAIHN
I’d lost track of just how many men I’d killed. I was in the Kejari all over again, thrown into senseless, indiscriminate, unending violence.
Maybe I wasn’t any better than Neculai, or Vincent, or Simon after all. Maybe I was just another cursed king.
Because I fucking loved it.
I barely felt the scream of my muscles or the bite of my wounds. Something more primal took over. Rational thought disappeared. My magic surged in my veins, grateful for the opportunity to finally be set free, fully unleashed—and this was what it wanted to do. Kill. Reclaim. Possess.
I wasn’t relying on sight anymore, and that was a gift, because I couldn’t see anything even if I’d tried. Through the smears of black blood in my eyes, my field of vision became nothing but fragmented flashes of wings and weapons and steel buried in bodies. The blinding black-white of my Asteris followed my every stroke. Defeated enemies hurtled to the ground like limp rag dolls, falling onto the roofs of the buildings below.
Time, physicality, space ceased to exist. I thought about nothing but the next strike, the next kill, the next inch of ground I could gain toward that castle—my castle.
Until him.
The shift was immediate, so strong it actually managed to knock me from my bloodlust—so strong it made my muscles freeze at the most inopportune moment, interrupting my counter against the Rishan soldier attacking me and earning me a vicious cut over my shoulder.
I grabbed the soldier, skewered him, and let him fall to the ground, but I wasn’t looking at him anymore. Instead, my gaze flicked up.
Up to the castle.
Simon was there, standing on the very same balcony where he had tried to kill me. Even through the carnage, through the endless bodies, I knew he was there. I knew it because I felt him, the way one felt ripples in a pond when something terrible circled beneath the water.
And this was something terrible.
I had never sensed anything like this before, but that certainty ground into my bones immediately. I’d awakened something primal in myself, and now, that beast was recognizing a threat—a threat that did not belong, here or anywhere else.
What was that?
I was too far gone to be afraid. I’d spent too damned long fearing Simon and the people like him, even if I refused to admit it to myself or anyone else.
I was pushing through the warriors before Vale even had the chance to call after me. Cutting through bodies, wings, weapons—anything standing between me and him.
I was going to fucking kill him.
He stood on the balcony waiting for me, amber wings spread, sword drawn, hair pulled back tight in a way that emphasized the hard, cruel planes of his face.
I didn’t slow down as I flew for him. Instead, I pumped my wings, surging faster, so fast I couldn’t see anything but his slow, predatory smile, split seconds before we clashed.
We met in a deafening thunderclap of steel and a burst of magic, my Asteris dousing us in a mantle of black light. Our bodies slammed against each other. His sword met mine, metal screaming against metal.
Immediately, he countered. He was a strong warrior, even after all these years. Despite his age, he met me strike for strike, step for step. Even my magic didn’t seem to deter him, even though, spurred by hatred, it poured from every stroke of my blade, punctuating each clash.
I was wounded. I was tired. My body didn’t care.
I was going to kill him.
Through the red of my rage and the black of my Asteris, Simon’s face looked so uncannily like his cousin’s. It was my former master who sneered at me in the seconds between strikes and blocks, taunting me, urging me on.
How many times, back then, had I imagined what it would be like to kill Neculai?
Countless. Seventy years. Twenty-five thousand days to lie there in bed and close my eyes and think about what he might sound like with blood filling his lungs, think about what it might look like to peel his skin back inch by inch, think about whether he’d piss himself in his final moments.