Page 3 of Fate & Monsters
“But you will survive. Only like this can you survive the hunter.” Her eyes closed, hair fading from luscious black to brittle gray. Her shoulders slumped and her supple, youthful body shrunk, becoming shriveled and etched with folds and spots of age. “I have saved you. I have saved the last sylph.”
“You shouldn’t have.” I ran a soothing hand over her face, and the single tear leaking from her eye coated my thumb.
“Now you must run. Flee this place, sylph. Find the darkness who will embrace you. Only he can save you now.” Aradia withered into ash in my arms. The high witch ceased existing in the same rattling breath as the last air spirit fled.
Chapter 2
The wind howled with the force of a bellowing god. A heavy, thick breath rushing over a gnarled realm of skeletal trees and churning up bruise-colored dirt. A stark contrast against the amber-gold hue of the sky. The jaundiced twilight remained constant despite a fresh wave of turbulent energy radiating too thick, too adhesive through this sector of the realm. A foul burst of magic stinking of rot and death, pouring as slow as sap through the mist, sticky and evoking dread.
A snapping wind whipped the edges of my cloak into a frenzy. I peered over the edge of the jagged ravine stretching toward the horizon. An unnatural pulse hummed underfoot as the land reacted to the plague of dark magic creeping into Infernus. Cracks had appeared in the past week, oozing virulent power like festering lesions.
Something wanted in.
Maybe it had already passed through.
“It’s trembling again, master,” muttered the cat-like demon beside me.
“I didn’t ask you to state the obvious,” I snapped.
He didn’t recoil when the other scouts did. Stubborn thing.
“This fissure differs from the last,” he continued, voice lower.
“You think I don’t know that?” He wasn’t wrong, and a soft growl echoed in my chest.
I crouched and pressed my palm to the land. Where the ground met air, a subtle distortion rippled. It throbbed with the cadence of a pustule threatening to burst. Cold, angry, twisted. Foreign magic whispered in the wind, and an illogical chill raced down my spine. Whatever this was, it didn’t belong in my realm.
My tail whipped over the dirt.
A momentary lull in the wind allowed me to strain my ears in the silence. I closed my eyes and focused on the heartbeat in the ground,thump-thump-thumpingbeneath my claws. I bared my teeth on impulse, snarling at the force on the other side, battering at the veil between worlds.
Tears between realms were rare. Two in the span of a week should have been impossible. The last had been a hundred years ago, yet I had the evidence of one tear healing in the distant woods and another surging under my feet.
Where the last tear had been softer, lingering in the air between the trees like a cloud of glittering dust smelling of flowers and nectar, this one was vile and full of malevolence. My scoutshadn’t found whatever slipped through days ago, but I had no fear for my land or my people regarding that wayward creature. But this… this reeked of danger.
And it was increasing in speed. Quickening like an erratic heartbeat or a frenzied pulse. A fleeting pressure clawed at the seam between worlds and my hackles raised.
“Fall back,” I shouted. “Now!”
The scouts obeyed, scattering like insects on command.
A surge cleaved through the heavy air.
A pressure drop, a silent howl, and then—
Red magic exploded from the rift in a brutal wave. It landed like a battering ram, flinging my soldiers across the ridge like broken dolls. Even I had to drop to a knee, fangs bared, cloak snapping behind me in the aftermath.
The magic smelled of sulfur and saccharine decay. Like demon meat left too long in the sun. The rift pulsed once more, a final shudder, before sealing like a slit pulled shut by invisible fingers.
My rage rose with me.
The smoke cleared, revealing scorched rock and a dozen groaning soldiers. I didn’t check on them. I didn’t need to. They’d survive. If they didn’t, they weren’t worthy of serving me.
“Get up,” I snarled. “I’m not dragging your corpses back to the castle.”
Two of the scouts struggled to their feet. One didn’t. His skin had blistered and peeled. His thirdeye had burst.Weakling.
I strolled past him.
