Page 60 of Bound and Tide

“I don’t fucking care what her name is, and neither should you—she’s a mongrel whore.”

“Don’t call her that.” He took a shaking breath, all of him shaking, but he spoke anyway. “If Evangeline is a worthless mongrel because she’s half human, then so am I.”

“Exactly!” Birzuma let out a frustrated huff. “You’re both cobbled together rubbish, and you, Xander, are only worth something because of me. Now carve that fucking summoning circle into your skin and get me out of this bloody plane, or I swear to all that is dark and unholy I will thrash you within an inch of your life.”

“No.”

The chamber hollowed out and even the noxscura stopped sloshing. Silence filled up the space, pushing the noxscura into the walls and holding it hostage there.

“No?” she chirped.

Ah, so he had said, No. Apparently, though, she was confused, so he repeated himself. “No. I will not be carving anything into my skin for you.”

“That is all your miserable half life is good for,” she spat, and the pure noxscura in the basin floundered with how she threw herself toward him. “Now bring me there this instant, so I can—”

“No!” It was a wonder feeling anger—true anger—at Birzuma. Xander had dabbled in the feeling plenty of times, but it was always as weak as she insisted he was. Yet now it welled up within even stronger than the pure arcana sloshing in the rift betwixt them.

Then, he laughed.

“What the fuck do you think is so funny?”

Xander lifted his bloody and bruised arms to gesture to the tiny room, taking up the space within, a grin splitting his face. “You need me.”

She made a sound that could have been words but barely counted—not that it mattered what she had to say.

“You’ve…you’ve always needed me. You said it yourself—I exist to serve you, but do you exist at all without me?”

“I am Birzuma the Blasphemed, Ninth Lord of—”

“—the wastes and the tower and blah-de-blah, yes, yes, but you’re there, and I’m here, and, well…”

The truth was a wonderful thing, so brilliant he didn’t mind the shadows looming ever closer or the twisting in his guts. It blanketed over him and wrapped him tightly and whispered kindly in his ear that everything would be all right.

But it was only a half truth.

“I didn’t want to have to do this,” she said as her pointed teeth caught the last of the light in a grin he dreaded to see, “but you’ve left me no choice.”

The torchlight went out, and the small chamber was plunged into darkness. The breath was drawn from Xander and a constriction in his chest strangled his heart. His legs went weak, and he fell to his knees on the rocky earth.

Pain, excruciating and all-encompassing, ruptured all over his body as the noxscura ripped itself away from him and returned in dagger-sharp strikes. His own screams filled the hollowness around him.

All he could do—all he had ever been able to do—was tuck himself into a ball until it was over. Terrifying memory batted up against terrifying memory: being forced to practice the same spell again and again, each failure another lash, the laughter of the fiends that were summoned to make him into a man, how they’d beaten and humiliated him until he was finally strong enough to fight back, the feel of so many blades being experimented with on his skin, cutting, slicing, severing…

“Stop,” he finally managed to cry, mouth pressed to his knees. “Please, Mother…please stop.”

The aching didn’t recede, but the slashing and beating halted. His breath came back, but blood dripped from his mouth as he tried to fill his lungs. So much blood, all around him, deep crimson catching the glint of the arcane light that barely filled the room.

“Now do you understand?” Birzuma’s voice echoed somewhere above him. “I may require your service to be summoned, but you require my mercy to live.”

As his breathing slowed, Xander unfurled. If she was capable of such a thing when she wasn’t even on the same plane let alone in the same room, it was a gift that she’d not done it to him sooner. But why hadn’t Father Theodore warned him? And why had no other blood mage ever experienced such torment?

“Get up!” screeched his mother, and his body once again obeyed though it shook.

When he peered down into the silvery noxscura, he saw her face, saw the callousness, and he saw himself, weak and pathetic and made for only one thing. With no other choice, he pulled his obsidian dagger out.

Trembling, he blinked down at his forearm, already slashed to pieces and blood soaked. Would carving in the true summoning circle be exponentially agonizing, or would he even feel it, numb now to the pain?

Around his neck, the vial hung, and he wondered if he had simply imagined the memory of receiving it as a kindly gift from her. It was foolish to ask anything then, but the question came out anyway. “Did you ever love me?”

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