Page 8 of Bonded By Savages

The crowd screams and cheers. I hear yells from behind me, but I clench my jaw shut. The Priest is one of the ugly realities of the universe, but he’s powerful. I’ll deal with ugliness and rot if it gets me to my Mate.

“The woman in blue. What is her name?” Obsidian’s voice rings out, his eyes black and staring down with an insane focus that chills me. Somehow, from so far away, I’m able to see thousands, no, trillions of brilliant white and blue stars in his eyes, then they disappear, and I’m left wondering if I imagined it.

I can’t see Tan’s expression as he looks up, but I can imagine it. “I stripped her of her name when I took her as mine. My Lord.”

My head pounds as I grit my teeth in anger. My hand roams downwards towards my blade. I want to cut down the iron bars and kill this bastard myself. A drone slowly lowers itself over the High Priest.

“Woman, what is your name?”

One of the women leashed to his arm, with a dull collar around his neck, is wearing a blue dress. “My name is…Emma,” she gasps out, sobbing in terror. Her words are enhanced by the drone.

“Raise your right arm.”

She can barely do it. Her hand is shaking like a leaf in the wind. The thin dress falls back, showing the hot red welt on her arm. It’s not the torture my Mate endures, but it makes me angry, my lips pulling backwards.

“Tan, did you do this to her?”

“Yes. She was a hard one to break in, but now she’s obedient,” he proclaims, then laughs, sickly. His arrogance is total.

“Did you force yourself on her?” Obsidian states the words without emotion.

“I took what was mine. As the Old Ways promise, my God.” He puffs up his chest.

Obsidian points to Tan. I can see the High Priest swelling up with pride like he might explode, but his triad is silent, waiting and watching.

The two shadowy Aurelians by Obsidian’s side run forward, leaping over the edge of the railing. I take a harsh gasp in. They’ll shatter on the ground…

But they seem to morph in mid-air. At first I think my eyes have betrayed me. The huge black forms of his Shadows grow fur, their bones pressing outwards, huge fangs sprouting from their mouths as they turn into massive wolves in front of me.

The shadow wolf will bathe the universe in blood. The dark king rises.

I heard those words from High Priest Tan’s own mouth.

Now the gaping maws of wolves twice my size, huge, powerful creatures, open wide. The screams of the three women ring out in the arena, then the drone magnifies the sound of crunching bone as the two wolves rip Tan apart. He doesn’t have time to yell. His hand falls to the ground, detached from his body, the three chains leading to the women hits the ground.

The woman in the blue dress, Emma, faints in fear, the black sand welcoming her in an almost gentle embrace.

The wolves must be twice my size. Behind me, Fanatics murmur to themselves, watching a man they served cut down in front of them. The High Priest commanded absolute power over Obsidious and the legions of Fanatics. That one was near two thousand years old. He grew up under the last Bonded Emperor of a dying age. He practiced his dark religion in the temples on Colossus, under the watchful eyes of the human queen who stood against everything he believed.

He was one of the men who led the rift, bringing with him a third of the soldiers on Colossus to join the Old Ways, men so devoted they risked Orb-Shifting to escape the Empire. Many died.

Now he’s joined them, nothing more than meat and bone on the hungry sands of Colossus as the huge shadow wolves pace the sand, licking their lips. Even their teeth are black, as long as my forearm, sabre-tooths that look like they could rip through metal.

The tension is near unbearable. The Fanatics are confused, looking left and right, not understanding why their God cut down his highest emissary.

Obsidian speaks.

“The Old Ways mean that we own those we save the lives of. This is right and just. I was born of a Cursed Bond. My veins are filled with agony.” I watch the vein of his neck flex from above. He runs his hand over the mace at his belt, and I know he must be filled with righteous anger against his father.

A Cursed Bond. I’d heard tell of it, but never believed that there was a way to sire a son without the Bond. Some said that Scorp-Blooded tribes live far out of the reach of the Aurelian Empire, mating women and breeding them. But a child can only come of a Mating where the woman surrenders herself completely.

General Asmod was a hard man. A cruel man. He hated the Bond, laughed at it, believed that Aurelians were meant to own hundreds of human women apiece.

Of that cursed mating came Obsidian. I never heard that one of his woman had escaped. That beast of a General died when I was still in Academy, and with him, the Old Ways went dormant.

“No more will be born of this. Any man who forces himself on a woman is dead. No one is safe. Will you avenge your battle-brother?” He asks the question down to the two remaining high Priests of the late Tan’s triad. They stand with bowed heads.

“No,” comes a dry whisper from one of them. I know the pain that losing a battle-brother causes. But these Priests have waited millennia for their God to come down to earth, and they would kill even themselves if he ordered them.

---