Page 248 of Eldritch
I snapped my head to the side, catching his form in my periphery. “To murder at your behest? To infect the innocent and turn them into mindless creatures that feed on the living?”
“The way the living has fed on the weak? The poor? The powerless? Have you forgotten your past so quickly, girl?” A hint of irritation clung to his voice. “The hate and vitriol they cast upon you?” The steady clack of his footsteps told me he was pacing behind me. “Tell me, if I were to go back to the moment when you sat in that cell, after they picked and prodded and beat you…what would that girl choose? Mercy? Forgiveness?”
How could he have known what I’d suffered?
I lifted my gaze to Zevander. “Yes,” I said without hesitation. “If it means sparing them, myself, from becoming one of your monsters, then yes.”
He paused alongside me, his proximity setting my nerves on edge. “Is Zevander a monster? Did Aleysia appear as a monster?” A glide of Moros’s palm down Zevander’s arm stirred the scorpion on the back of his hand to life. “Zevander has been infected his whole life. Branimir, too. Without balance, a weakness, he would’ve been more powerful than any creature in existence. There is no element more destructive, nor chaotic, than the flame.”
“The flame was never the cause of Zevander’s affliction?”
“The flame is all that keeps the infection from consuming him. A balance, so to speak.”
“And Branimir?”
“If Branimir didn’t possess a small bit of sablefyre, Aethyria would look quite a bit like Mortasia.” Again, he lifted a lock of my hair, the tickling at my scalp sending a jolt through my muscles.
I turned away from him, shrugging to release his hold but, unfazed by my reaction, he kept on with his fondling and explanation. “Branimir controls his spiders, keeping them contained. So, you see? Not everyone becomes a monster.”
“Why me? What do you want?”
A cold finger brushed across my throat as he swept my hair from my shoulders. “A trifecta of power. Disease. Destruction. And Death.”
“If it’s death you want, all you had to do was ask.” I raised my palm but he swiped out with his arm, catching my wrist before I could summon a single glyph.
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten what would happen if I were to perish.” His rough words, spoken through a growl, never faltered the unnerving smile on his face.
“The same fate as if you live and Zevander burns down the Umbravale.”
“Wrong. I am the only thing that stands between Aethyria and a vengeful god. Without me, you will become the monstrosity you fear and find yourself at his merciless command. Become my queen, and I will protect you and those you love.”
“I choose death.” I spat in his face and grabbed his fingers still clutched around my wrist.
The sound that tore from his throat was a cross between agony and fury as his fingers crumbled to dust. His good hand slammed into my chest and the ground rose to meet my back with a painful crash.
Lips twisted with a snarl, he stared back at me, his face twitching, changing, morphing again, as the bones sank into his skin and his skin hardened to bark. “I’ve been too merciful. Too patient. I will take what’s mine.” He waved his skeletal hand toward Zevander whose eyes snapped open, his pupils wide and dilated. A void of black that seemed to look right through me. Spidery black veins laced the eye above his scar where infection had climbed into his sclera. As the sticky white strands holding his arms and legs dissolved, he stepped down from the web.
“Zevander?” I kicked myself away from him and when his gaze cut to mine, gleaming with malicious hunger, I jumped to my feet.
Ragged breaths tore out of him and those depthless eyes shone with an evil I didn’t recognize. He’d fallen into fits before and I’d seen his eyes turn, but not like this. Not in such a way that had me convinced there was nothing for me to grasp. Nothing that could pull him out of it. Something ravenous clawed inside of him, begging to be cut loose.
I spun around and ran.
“After her!” Cadavros bellowed behind me.
Ahead stood a dark passageway, beyond a cavity that looked like the one I’d passed through to get inside the tree. I dashed inside of it, and a frigid blast of air sank its teeth into my skin. Slowing my steps, I glanced around, found crooked branches looming over me like ancient sentinels, muted by a veil of fog.
Where am I?
Through the blackness above, I couldn’t discern if there was a sky overhead, whether I’d escaped the tree. There was only the green pulsing glow across the ground that offered any light. My boot struck a hard surface and I tripped forward, falling onto a green patch where something crawled. Hundreds of tiny, slithering, worm-like creatures wriggling across patches of lichen and moss.
A scream tore out of me, and I scrambled backward, pushing to my feet.
Chills palmed the back of my neck, and I felt eyes watching me from overhead, waiting like silent spectators in an arena.
“Raivox!” I called out. “Raivox!” My voice echoed, as it would were I in a cave.
Trapped.
