Page 8 of Bright Blinding Ruin

I kick the cell door, right near the lock. It rattles quite a bit, but it doesn’t open, so I kick it again. It takes me three tries to open the damn door, and once it’s opened, I have to go inside and pull the man out.

“Come on,” I tell him. “We need to move.”

He can’t walk that well, so we can’t move that fast. It sucks, but now that he’s free I can’t exactly leave him behind. Besides, if Laconia is still standing when we get there, at least I’ll have something to show for my journey, besides the whole,sorry I lost my magic and accidentally unleashed an ancient evilthing.

The castle has a lot of halls, but eventually we make our way up to where we can see sunlight. Fred squints and stumbles when we emerge into a hall with windows, and I reach for him to steady him—and to pull him along. We can’t wait for him to get used to the sun again. If Invictis is still nearby, we need to move.

It takes us a long time to find the front hall of the castle. We come from the opposite direction of the route I took to reach thethrone room. I don’t hear a thing, which I take to mean Invictis is gone—though I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

“Come on,” I tell him, grabbing the man’s hand as I pull him along, “we’re almost out.” I hurry us down the carpeted path that leads to the front doors of the castle. It’s like I’m leading a child. A child who doesn’t know a thing.

We reach the doors, and I use my full body to push one of them open and hold it for Fred. He stumbles outside, and the moment the sunlight touches his skin, he falls to his knees.

It’s only then do I see just how filthy the man is. His hair hasn’t been brushed in years, and his beard is far too long and scraggly. A few gray hairs are laced in the brown color, yet another sign of just how long he was trapped in that cell.

I tug at his shoulder. “Come on. We need to move.” How we are going to leave the castle grounds, however, I don’t know. Acadia has a lot of afflicted within its walls.

Fred is too busy looking at his stained, boney fingers to say anything. Or to get up.

“Come on!” I try to rally him to his feet. “Don’t you want to see your son again? You need to—”

The sunshine above us is blocked out by a shadow with six wings, and I squint and gaze up at Invictis floating in the sky over our heads. With the light coming from him and the natural sunlight, the gold that makes up his body shimmers and ebbs, as if it’s all a living thing.

“Going somewhere?” Invictis’s deep, threatening voice fills the air, and Fred howls and brings his hands to his ears, as if trying to block him out. He floats down, landing on his two metal feet. “I admit, I do not know how you still stand, but it does not matter. You will die before you leave Acadia.”

“Demon,” Fred mutters to himself, starting to rock, what must be a comforting gesture to himself. “Always there. Alwayswhispering. No!” Seeing Fred like this, it makes me wonder just why I don’t react the same to Invictis.

I glare at the golden bastard. “Before you try to kill me again, answer one question for me.”

Even though this figure has no face, I can still see his irritation growing. Good. If he’s going to kill me, the least I can do to him is annoy the shit out of him until he does. Apparently it’s the only thing I’m good at.

“Why do you have those wings if you don’t need to use them? Just curious since you can float. Seems redundant, doesn’t it?” I ask. “Seriously, think about it.” Beside me, Fred stops rocking, and he stares straight up at me like I’m doing something he never thought possible.

“You—” Invictis flaps his wings at us just to prove a point, and then he raises his hands together over his head as he lifts off the ground, like he’s going to bring forth more magic to kill Fred and me for good. He’s so entranced in ending me that he falters when a loud roar pierces the sky.

Wait. Aroar?

His arms fall to his sides and his faceless head turns toward the sky as a big, black ball heads straight for us. The black ball soars closer and closer until I’m able to see exactly what it is: a dragon.

The same dragon as before? Or a different one? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

“How charming,” Invictis sneers, whirling around in the sky to face the oncoming beast.

The dragon pumps its thick, leathery wings, on a collision-course with the golden bastard. Its powerful jaws let out another rumble just before it collides with Invictis, sending them both to the ground. Invictis is pushed down into the stone stairs, and before he can soar up into the air, the dragon lands and snarls at him.

I never, ever thought I’d be grateful to see a dragon again, but here I am, very grateful.

This might be our only chance to get away while Invictis is preoccupied with the dragon, so I grab onto Fred’s arm and say, “Come on, we need to get out of here!” We might need to find another way down, since the dragon pretty much takes up the entire walkway between the castle and the city.

But the man won’t move. He stares at the dragon in awe, a mystified look on his dirty face.

I mean, sure, the dragon is kickass and all that, but I remember just how freaked out I was when I first came across a dragon in one of those shadowstorms. It might be the same one, or it might be a different beast. Either way, it doesn’t matter. We need to leave.

The dragon bares its teeth at Invictis. Its leathery chest rumbles, heat gathering in its mouth. Fred and I are far enough away to not feel the most of it, but the air around the dragon does sizzle and crack as Invictis climbs back to his feet.

No sooner does the golden bastard get up that the dragon lets loose a thick blast of fire. The flames that would burn anything else to a crisp merely surround Invictis, engulfing him in its color but not destroying him. Still, the dragon does not let up. Its breath of fire burns the stone around him, charring it black.

“She’s beautiful,” Fred murmurs in awe.

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