Page 85 of A Kingdom of Lies

His response stopped me dead in my tracks. “I know.”

I gained closer. Erix stepped back, his pleading becoming frantic. He raised his hands before him, as if that could keep me away. “Please, just wait.”

I was steps away from seeing the truth that hid in the shadows. This close I could see torn bits of material flapping as my cold winds reached him. Whatever Erix wore was ripped, hanging off his frame in tatters.

“Who do I speak with?” I asked, breathing laboured.

“Me. I’m… fighting it – fighting him.”

His words didn’t make sense.

“Doran, go on, Erix, tell me what he wants you to do with me.”

“I feel nothing but agony,” Erix replied, voice tortured with sadness. “Yes, I can sense my father, but his voice is quieter than it has been before. A whisper that is easier to ignore at most times. These moments don’t last long, so please, I beg that you hear me out before you do what it is you require.”

I shouldn’t have believed him. Now was the time to act and deal with Erix as I first believed I had. But that small kindling of hope that the person before me was in fact the Erix I had known made me hesitate.

“You are expecting me to believe that he does not command you now?” I asked, nails cutting half-moons into my palms. “I find it hard to see the benefit in letting you roam freely.”

Erix’s outline shifted. He raised a contorted hand and pressed it to the side of his face. “I’m changing. Ihavechanged.”

“Step forward, Erix. I won’t ask again.”

This time Erix did, slowly moving from the shadows of the forest until he was bathed in the silvered light of the moon.

My breathing faltered. Gasping, I tried to claw back some air which the horror before me had stolen.

Erix had indeed changed. His limbs were longer, fingers ending in sharp, bloodied points. His skin no longer held the colour of life but was washed out and grey like a corpse. Wings hung limp at his sides, one larger than the other by a noticeable amount. As his outline had suggested, his clothes hung from him in tatters, as though the impossible growth had overwhelmed him in such quick and surprising power. But it was his face that shocked me most, hardly a whisper of what it had been before. Cheekbones stood out, pushing through skin to the point of breaking. His mouth was full of jagged teeth, overlapping lips I had known as well as my own.

And his eyes, once as silver as the blade he carried proudly, far brighter than any jewel those with coin could afford, were no more. Pits of pure darkness surrounded by some softness, as though there was some humanity left amongst his monstrous appearance.

As I studied him something clicked within my mind. A truth of what stood before me.

Not Erix. Not a berserker.

“Gryvern,” I spluttered, voice faint beneath the rushing winter winds. Seeing the truth before me pieced together the horrifying puzzle that had presented itself days ago.

“Yes, Robin. Gryvern.”

“That’s what happens to Doran’s children, isn’t it? Why he can control the creatures to do as he wishes? Because they are simply his children doing anything to please their sire.”

Erix bowed his head in confirmation, wings twitching irritably. “Metamorphosis, from one monster to another. The Berserker was a name given to the creatures by Doran’s court. The namehegave them was gryvern.”

It made sense, more than anything else in that moment. The gryvern I’d killed outside of Ayvbury, some had the small points of half-human ears and others the points of the full-bloodied fey. They were Doran’s creations, what happened when a berserker followed the silent control of their sire and mutated.

“I can’t believe this,” I muttered, taking steps back.

Couldn’t believe that he was alive, that he was really the monster he’d once protected me from.

“My father is a man with greedy tastes. And look where it led him. Now you can understand why Tarron was so precious to him. The perfect boy – not afflicted by this disease that Doran passed to the rest of his offspring because of his mother. Elinor Oakstorm… healed him. That was her power. The rest of Doran’s offspring were not so fortunate, but why would he stop? The more his seed spread, the further his control would. Humans, fey, it does not matter to him.”

“Why are you telling me this?” My chest ached as I looked upon him; all hope for the Erix I had wished to return was gone. Although his mind, right now, seemed his own, his body was not. Erix stood on the precipice, looking into the abyss at the pending monster he was going to become.

“So you know all you need to finish him,” he said.

The winds picked up as I willed them, air thick with frozen ice that made each breath hard and full of prickling discomfort.

Erix lifted hands, pointed nails clawing at the air between us as if he longed to reach for me. “I understand I am not in the best of positions of putting forward requests to you. Not after wha – what I have done. But there is something I feel you deserve as much as what I need.”

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