Page 238 of Blood Feast

“I’ll fight you…with everything I have left.”

She hurled her relic dagger at Lio. The attack scratched through his mind. He caught the hilt midair.

Your thirst for knowledge will be your undoing.The Collector’s voice in Miranda’s mind seemed to infiltrate Lio’s own.There is nothing more destructive than secrets. Why do you think they are my weapon of choice?

Lio felt sick. He was holding Miranda’s chain in the palm of his hand. But he knew what he had to do.

He drove the dagger into the door. Stone split stone. The door cracked open for the relic blade, and the final barrier in Miranda’s mind fell to Lio’s Will.

Lio stood in afield that had been green, but now the tender crops lay trampled, and the mud ran with blood. He stared at the hues of orange and red that drenched the sky as a glowing ball descended toward the horizon. It was sunset on a battlefield in Tenebra.

A lone warrior stood with his boot propped on a corpse, the gore drying on his armor. In the distance, other men in his colors patrolled the field, piling bodies to be burned. But this man held himself apart. Waiting.

He reached up and pulled off his helmet. His blond hair was plastered to his head with sweat. When Lio saw the burn scar on the man’s jaw, a shock of recognition hit him.

He was witnessing a moment from Lucis’s past.

Lio found himself walking forward. He had no control over his own body. Panic stirred in his mind. He looked down at himself.

A black robe. A long beard. A quicksilver pendant in the shape of an Eye of Hypnos. He was experiencing this memory through the eyes of an undertaker.

A shiver moved through Lio’s own consciousness. This was no remembrance of Miranda’s. It had happened before Lucis’s hair had turned white, when she and Cassia had not yet been born.

Lio opened his mouth and spoke. The Collector’s voice came from his own lips, and he wanted to retch.

“I see that the last free lord who would oppose you lies dead under your heel. There is still the formality of the Full Council, of course, but allow me to be the first to address you as King Lucis. Congratulations.”

Lucis pulled his sword out of the corpse and stepped forward. “My part is done. Are you here to uphold your end of the bargain?”

“I have already been generous.” There was a faint warning in Kallikrates’s tone. “The Orders would have discovered your magic long ago, had I not aided you in concealing your power all these years.”

“And I’ve carved my way through every fucking swine who wants a crown, just as you asked.”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it.”

Lucis’s abrupt laughter mocked the dead men around them. “My reign has begun well enough. But I won’t have it end like that of every other man who has called himself king—in the royal crypt. Or worse, with my head on a spike in the court of mysuccessor. I need the power you promised me to become the next Mage King. I’ve seized the palace for us; now tell me what magic lies in the barrow under it.”

The barrow. Was that what the doors had been guarding all along? A burial site?

“I will raise you above the so-called Mage King.” Lio could taste the malice in the Collector’s words. “But the only way to do that, my friend, is to destroy him.”

Lucis barked another laugh. “Will you have me deface his statues and replace them with my own?”

“Oh, yes. I will take great pleasure in watching you erase his legacy. But better still, you will help me kill him.”

Lucis’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. “What necromancy is this?”

“Not necromancy. A spell by the witch he took to wife. Through her power, he has made a bid for immortality. He lies sleeping in the barrow she sealed around him. I have waited sixteen hundred years to remind him he is mortal.”

Lio’s own heart pounded somewhere in his distant body. His carefully thought-out theories had all been nonsense. A mythical tale was the truth.

The Mage King was still alive.

Lucis’s face flushed, and heat wafted off him. “I’ve given half my life to our bargain, and all this time, you’ve been chasing an old wives’ tale?”

“Calm yourself. The songs of the slumbering king are all true, I assure you. Haven’t you seen enough impossible things in my company to take me at my word?”

Lucis’s hard blue eyes glinted with wariness, but the heat faded to warmth. “Explain.”

---