Page 36 of Bound and Tide

Xander grinned. “Good, now again, and faster.”

Their target raised his head but said nothing. Smart, that one, and elven too if his ears told them anything. His eyes did meet Xander’s, though, and in them there was something familiar, something deeper, baser. Instead of igniting a rivalry or inspiring him to team up, Xander felt his innards turn yet again.

Costa took a breath, and on his second attempt, the noise in the pit grew as the other prisoners realized what was going on.

“Hey, kid, c’mere!” one of the voices whispered harshly in the dark.

“No, over here!”

“I’ll gut ya if ya don’t get over here!”

The third slash at the chains completely missed its mark, and stone beside the bolt shattered.

“Get it together,” Xander snapped.

Costa did not get it together. Instead, he shook even harder, throat bobbing with a swallow, eyes going glassy.

“Don’t you dare.” Xander spun him by the shoulders so they were face to face and bared his teeth, words coming out of him instinctively. “If you fuck this up, I swear to the deepest Abyss I will summon a real reason for you to cry, do you understand?”

Costa’s head nodded, but everything else said there was no way he was going to comply even as he held back the tears Xander threatened him over. The air felt heavy and the noise rose around them, and as Costa worried the trinket in a shaking hand, Xander felt a phantom hand wrap around his own throat.

Do the fiends need to teach you a lesson, or do I?

“I-I can d-do it,” Costa sputtered.

In the deafening chaos of the pit, it was clear he could not.

Then bleed it out of the fucking coward.

The blood mage’s fingers flexed into Costa’s shoulders, and he watched the boy flinch, felt him tense, saw the terror flood into his dark and familiar eyes. That was it—that was exactly what he would have to use to get what he wanted.

Xander ripped his hands through the air, calling to every shadow he could. Darkness closed in, deeper than the night, deeper than the Abyss itself, and wrapped around the two of them, plunging them into silence and pressing in on their backs. Any tighter, and he could have wrung the life out of the trembling weakling before him.

Xander’s hands came back down onto Costa’s shoulders softly. He didn’t know that he knew how to be soft, but it had only been recently that he’d truly been taught. The silver of the noxscura swirling around them gave them just enough light to see.

“You are strong enough to do this,” he said, tempered and quiet. “And you must.”

The boy finally blinked, but the fear didn’t recede. “But I’m scared.”

A lurching in Xander’s heart thrust his mind back to another time when he had been in a darkened prison, forced to play the role of consoler despite how utterly betrayed he himself had felt. In Costa’s dark eyes, he could see Bloodthorne’s—no, no he was just Damien then, and he was so small. They were both small, really. Far too young for what Birzuma had hoisted onto Xander’s shoulders, certainly.

For all the evil that his mother had demanded of six-year-old Xander, he had managed to do some good too; holding Damien’s hand, telling him it would be okay even if he wasn’t sure himself, trying his best to mean it.

The boy who was the closest thing Xander had to a brother had hugged him then. The blood mage remembered it plainly because the sensation had been so strange. He’d certainly seen hugging but to experience it? The memory and sensation were some of the most palpable he had.

“It’s going to be all right,” Xander said. “You will be all right because I will make sure that you are.”

Even in the blackness he had created around them, Costa’s eyes lightened. This time when he nodded, Xander believed him.

“Thank the bloody gods,” he muttered, swiping hands through the air and dispersing the shadows. With them so went his strength, and exhaustion heaved itself onto Xander’s back. He grabbed Costa’s shoulder to keep from falling over, covering the move by giving the boy a shake. “Get on with it.”

Costa was resolute, and his next slice of icy water through the air was exacting. It cut into the chain around the prisoner’s ankle, severing it, and then kept going right into the stone wall. A crack formed, crawling upward, and the rest of the prisoners fell silent. It reached halfway up the pit’s edge and then stopped.

“See, I told you.” Xander nudged him with a smirk, but then they were both knocked sideways as their newly freed target bolted for the ramp.

Xander wavered, calling up another shadow to keep him on his feet. It was half-assed but did the trick, and he was able to grab Costa, spinning him toward the woman in the corner. Costa worked quickly, even under the rising noise of the others, but with speed came sloppiness, and he broke into the wall once more.

Xander turned toward the prisoners and called up more shadows to silence them. It wasn’t as effective, his own hands shaking.

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