Page 22 of Eldritch
“If you are a friend, why don’t I recognize you?”
“I knew your parents. The Lord and Lady Rydainn.”
Strange that he knew his parents. Stranger still that he’d managed to slip into Zevander’s mind. “If this is Caligorya, as you say, how are you here?”
“I have…abilitiesthat allow me to reach your thoughts.”
The light shifted toward where Zevander’s arms rested at his sides. He lifted them to find skinny lines of symbols burned into his wrists—symbols that hadn’t been there moments before. “What is this?”
Agony scorched the back of his neck like a white-hot iron pressed to his skin. The flame licked his spine and down the back of his legs. Zevander cried out, falling to his knees.
The stranger let out a growl, also falling to his knees, his outstretched arms showing the same symbols etched into hiswrists. “You mustn’t…focus on…the pain! Close your eyes! Close them now!”
Zevander shuttered his eyes, as commanded, and in that darkness, the pain dissolved, slinking away like a vaporous nightmare. He let out long, easy breaths, calming himself, and when he opened his eyes again, the light moved over the stranger. “How is this possible?”
“Darkness is easier on the mind,” the stranger said, placing a palm to his knee and pushing to his feet. “The light is harsh and punishing.”
“The markings on my arms. What are they?”
“A spell. To keep you from using your magic.”
“I have no magic. I was born a spindling.”
The stranger let out a dark chuckle. “Is that what they told you? Yourgoodandlovingparents have denied you the power that slumbers inside of you, have they?”
“I have no power.”
“If that were true, you’d have perished to your brother’s spiders that day when he attacked you.”
An unsettling curiosity palmed the back of Zevander’s neck. How could he have known about that?
Still, it was true. Prodozja was a protective form of magic. He couldn’t have summoned his scorpions had he been born a spindling. Spindlings possessed no magic, but if truth be told, Zevander had always questioned what he’d been taught. “How do you know so much about me?”
“I know many things. I know that you possess the most ancient and destructive power there is. An extraordinary gift of the gods.”
Zevander frowned. His father’s bloodline magic was forging metal. A long line of blacksmiths and farriers. His mother was an empath, a grief eater who also possessed the gift of readingminds. “There is nothing ancient, nor extraordinary, about my bloodline.”
“Yours is not derived from the sun or moon. It lives in the heart of Aethyria. It is the molten blackness that pumps through the veins of our world. Few gods take physical form, but this one lives within you.”
Zevander puzzled his words. “Who?”
“Deimos. The god of sablefyre and destruction.”
Zevander’s laugh began as a slow and dissonant chuckle, but the more he thought about the old man’s words, the more ridiculous it sounded in his head.
“You don’t have to believe what is truth. It does not change your fate,” the stranger snarled.
Harder, the boy laughed, his skin prickling. He howled and wheezed, until his throat was raw and his eyes wavered with tears.
The surrounding darkness flickered in his periphery, with images slipping in and out of focus.
Ropes. Blood. Tools precariously hanging on the wall. Trembling limbs and sharp breaths.
“You must stop! You mustn’t leave this place!”
The stranger lurched forward, and Zevander closed his eyes over the watery shield that shimmered in them. When he opened them again, a scorching heat tore across his back on a crackling sound. Zevander peered down at a gritty floor only a meter or so below him. Hard to tell with the slight blur in his eyes. Trembling, he managed to turn his head just enough to see that he was suspended by ropes, attached to iron posts, which held him up off the ground. Same must’ve been true for his legs, though he couldn’t move to confirm.
“Let’s see you run now, boy!” A loud crack rang in his ear, and pain slashed across his spine.
