Page 77 of A Kingdom of Lies

The gryvern caught up with me quickly, bodies slick as they cut through the sky, wings more forceful than my mundane limbs. I turned, throwing my hands up to touch the creature that reached me first. My goal wasn’t to remove myself from its line of attack, but to greet it. Power pooled around my hands, crackling and frozen. As soon as my fingers gripped the mangled, bone-thin limbs of the creature’s arm the pale skin hardened to ice. All it took was a touch – a thought.

I threw myself sideways, watching the blue-tinged glint of my ice as it completely devoured the flying creature. By the time it hit the ground there wasn’t an ounce of soft flesh left. The gryvern cracked on impact, body exploding in splinters of frozen blood, flesh and bone.

There wasn’t a moment to marvel at the destruction I’d caused before the next gryvern was on me. But at the back of my mind, I felt satisfied knowing I had taken one down alone, killed yet another one of Doran’s puppets, all without releasing the full storm within me.

I ran onwards, putting as much distance as I could between Ayvbury and me.

I got a few steps before more reaching talons clawed at my back. Skidding to a stop, I turned to face the horde. Gryvern clambered over one another as they flew towards me, fighting each other as though they were starved, desperate for the last piece of meat to fill their bellies.

I greeted them with a smile, breath coming out in misty clouds. “Come and get me.”

It was easier controlling my power with a physical movement, like a horse being controlled by reins, I held onto my control with a firm grip, casting hands upwards so the force of winter followed.

Blades of jagged, mountainous ice speared up from the frozen ground. The earth split as the knife-edged talons reached for the gryvern that flew above. They had no time to act, not as I impaled them like pigs over a fire, others crashing into the ice without a chance to move out of the way. Many died in that split second, blood hissing as it dribbled down the spikes of ice. Others were trying to break free to no avail, wings torn apart by my ice-made blades.

The sky broke with the keening screams of monsters.

So, you feel pain.The thought was dark and terrible.Suffer.

The horde was more than halved now, the remaining beasts forced to change course to careen around the death between us.

I didn’t want to look away from the scene. It was glorious to watch. Each gryvern flew with the face of Doran, as twisted and hideous as the fey king’s soul. And seeing them captured in death was a beautiful thing. If only Doran was here to witness it. I wouldn’t let a single one return to him. Their absence would tell Doran what I needed him to know.

He failed,again.

I picked the gryvern off one by one, toying with them as I ran only to stop and unleash more frozen horror. It was a game of chase, one where the prize was survival. And I would win. A trail of bodies was left in my wake, providing me a clear path back to the village without the need for a map or compass.

Each one I killed, I killed for Abbot Nathanial. For the humans who I didn’t know, the ones the gryvern had slaughtered in search for me. This was for them – all of them.

And more than anything, it was forme.

There was no requirement for a weapon made of metal, not when I was one created from flesh, bone and fury. I released the full extent of my magic, sharpening flakes of snow to tear at leathered skin and turning any gryvern foolish enough to reach for me to glass. I fought so hard, delirious with power, that I hardly noticed when their advances stopped.

Blinking, I looked before me to see nothing but empty skies. Unlike Ayvbury’s red stained streets, the ground here was stained black, the smell of death pungent in the winds that coiled around me. Gryvern littered the ground, limbs not even twitching as a fresh layering of snow fell upon their stiffening limbs like a blanket.

I called the magic back, willing its return into every corner of my being. The world seemed to calm before me, whereas the thumping of tension in my head persisted, the feeling melting from one of pleasure to discomfort after using so much magic.

Blinking, I saw the devastation before me from a different view, one no longer fuelled by power and fury. I looked to my hands, clean of blood and evidence of the horror I had caused; then I looked back to the bodies which caused a clawing of dread to slice through me.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, a gryvern splayed out across the ground, body covered in cuts and gashes that spilled black gore in a pool beneath it. One of its wings was ripped from its back, lying at an angle to its side. Its chest heaved with rasping breaths, blood splashing from the creature’s mouth. I stepped up to it, the tips of my boots an inch away. Those wide, endless eyes flicked towards me as the creature weakly snapped its jaws in my direction.

Despite the many I’d battled against, there’d never been the opportunity to study one up close. What I noticed astounded me. It was its ears. Much like my own they ended in pointed tips, not the round, human-like curves I’d seen on the others. My mind raced, flicking through memories for some hint that I had noticed such a thing before. No memory rose to aid me.

Doran had convinced the world that the gryvern were human-made. Whereas they shared the features of the fey.

I left the dying gryvern, moving between the bodies as I searched for a reason to believe myself crazy. But my exploration only caused the dread to tighten in my gut. Many of the dead gryvern had the pointed ear tips, much like myself and the fey King who had sent them, but others had the curved edges of a human. I knew little of the pack-driven creatures beside their want for fey blood and the truth of Doran’s control over them.

But I’d believed their origins to be linked to the humans in some way.

I was wrong.

A darkness hung over Ayvbury, the cloud of smoke and ash blotting out what little sun there was.

With the back of my blood-stained hand, I cleared clumps of ash as they clung hatefully to my eyelashes. At first it had disgusted me, knowing that each flake of ash was caused by the burning of flesh as a great fire devoured the bodies of the gryvern beyond the village. But the thought alone was not as horrific as the smell. It clawed at the back of my throat, stung my eyes and twisted my gut into knots.

Ayvbury was silent for the most part, all but the sudden wails of humans as they uncovered their loved ones beneath the mounds of snow and ash. It set me on edge.

“There is nothing more to be done here,” Duncan said, voice dull of emotion as he studied the hell before us. “It’s been made clear that our help is no longer required. We should leave before their grief sharpens and turns its focus on us.”

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