Page 44 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
Coward. The Kysillian word was nothing but an animalistic roar of fury from between my lips. The fire from the walls surged for him at my will, molten jaws wanting to devour at my command as he screamed. The stench of singed hair and burning flesh permeating the air.
My breath was heavy through my clenched teeth. Only no screams could compete with the roaring chaos inside my head.
Emrys went rigid at my back as something changed in the chaos. Something new. I felt it shift in the magic that curled around me. Harsh and vicious like a snarling beast towards a threat. That skittering from my nightmares, the sharp drag of claws against stone at the end of the hall.
Dark and bony as it moved through the smoke, all sharp angles.
Then I saw them. Dark towering creatures. Leathery grey flesh sagging from their bones. Arms too long and thin, dragging against the floor. Maws open to show sharp, narrow fish-like teeth. As the flames continued to crawl up the tapestries around them, devouring the paintings and the books in their cabinets.
Manifestations. Demons summoned from the death in the room beyond.
Emrys moved me behind him, my trembling bloody fingers curling into the back of his shirt. Knees threatening to buckle as my magic churned within me, unsatisfied. Seeking more vengeance. Burning for it.
‘Dear Emrys,’ Montagor smiled as he appeared between the creatures. Tendrils of darkness curling around his form as he fixed the cuffs of his coat. Unbothered by the destruction. Or Finneaus’s blood beneath his boot or how the boy kept scrambling backwards pathetically. ‘It appears you’ve run out of bargains.’
‘This madness won’t end well for you, Varin,’ Emrys warned. ‘Your sire should have taught you that.’
Varin. That name. One of the princes from beneath.Where Serus brought honour, Varin brought wrath and ruin.
‘Oursire,’ Montagor replied without even a blink of hesitation, as I saw the darkness curling across his skin, pressing against it like insects scuttling beneath.
Another one of the King’s summonings. Montagor was made like that too.
The fire pulsed and twisted from the walls. My magic feral in its need to consume. To finish off Finneaus and the rest of them.
‘You killed them,’ I panted, fingers curling more tightly into Emrys’s shirt.
‘Did I?’ Montagor’s smile was predatory, his eyes filled with dark mirth as they met my own. The creatures behind him screeched and gnashed their teeth. Held back only by the slight twitch of Montagor’s dark-stained fingers. So similar to Emrys’s.
No. They weren’t similar at all.
‘They want your little pet, Serus,’ he warned, coming a step closer, smearing Finneaus’s blood across the ruined marble. ‘And they aren’t pleased you denied them their feast.’
Feast. That was all that pit had been.
I was torn from the horrific thought as more screeching came from the opposite end of the hall. The Council chamber. Wild and demonic.
He hadn’t killed those lords in the chamber with the explosion. The dark had just come to claim them.
‘You think you can outrun your fate?’ Montagor mocked, a darkness rippling between his fingers, and I hated how familiar it seemed. ‘How strange it always guides you back to me, brother.’
‘He isn’t your fucking brother,’ Gideon sneered, a lethal nature coming over his features, a charge of magic simmering around him.Witch casting. There was only a moment before chaos reigned again and then I learnt why they called a witch’s aetherhavoc.
Gideon’s fists glowed pale blue with aether, crackling in the air with the sharp static of it. It had no rhythm, wild and sharp as it twisted up his forearms. As his eyes burnt with it.
‘Move!’ Montagor commanded but it wasn’t quick enough as those demons screeched, saliva dripping from their fangs as they surged to charge.
Gideon thrust his aether forwards, it slammed into the supporting columns of the arched hallway. A horrid crash, the ground shook. I was pressed down with the weight of Emrys wrapping around me. Stone clattering against marble but between my fingers pressed over my face and through the white cloud of ash and dust, I saw the hallway collapse.
Over the chaos came the skittering of demonic claws. The howl of something hunting. I twisted in Emrys’s arms, seeing the other end of the hallway, dark shapes stumbling through the smoke like reanimated corpses. More souls the darkness had stolen.
More creatures Montagor had summoned.
This was a trap. It had always been a trap.
One of Montagor’s making.
My fingers dug into Emrys’s forearms; by the bite of his magic around my skin, he felt it too. Saw the new threat.
