Page 90 of Devoured
I crawled over to him, each movement sending spikes through my broken ribs. When I reached him, I leaned close to his melting face. Close enough to smell the rot. Close enough to see myself reflected in his dimming eyes.
“You wanted my sorrow. My guilt.”I pressed my lips to where his ear was dissolving. “You should have asked what kind of woman carries poison in her kiss.”
I kissed him one last time and poured the last reserves of toxicity straight down his throat. Every drop of self-loathing. Every grain of survivor’s guilt ground to its most potent form.
He crumbled. Not to ash. Not to dust. But to void. To absolute absence.
The realm shuddered. All that power, all that authority was suddenly without a vessel. It hung in the air for one impossible moment. Then it overwhelmed me completely. I hit the ground hard. The power was too much for mortal flesh. My body convulsed. Blood poured from everywhere—eyes, nose, mouth, even beneath my fingernails. I was drowning in copper and fire.
“Zahra!”The Executioner’s hands clamped down on my shoulders, trying to hold me still. But I was beyond reach, caught between mortality and something else.
My back arched. I felt vertebrae crack. Then the first horn erupted from my skull,bursting through bone and brain. The second followed. Each one was a railroad spike driven from the inside out.
But through the agony, that presence returned. Stronger than before. No longer whispering but here, wrapping around me like a mother’s embrace.
You did it, child.You did it!
The air feltlike a breeze, and for a moment—just a moment—I saw her. Young, maybe seventeen. Dark hair like mine. She wasn’t transparent, almost ghostly. She was more real than anything else in this place.
And somehow, without explanation or logic, I knew exactly who she was.St. Dymphnaherself.
But the power will destroy you without guidance. Let me help. Let me share what should have been.
She pressed her hand to my forehead, and I felt it—not just the Judge’s stolen authority, but something older. Cleaner. The original blessing of this place before it was corrupted. A sanctuary for the mad and broken, twisted into a torture chamber.
Take both. His power to punish the guilty, and mine to recognize those who can still be saved.
My skin changed next. Gray spread in patches as corruption and divinity fought over my flesh. But where her touch lingered, the gray took on a different quality. Not the dead ash of the Judge’s realm, but the soft gray of dawn. Of things that exist between night and day.
“Stay with me!”the Executioner begged.
Another convulsion. My spine snapped. Reformed longer. Snapped again. My body was rejecting its own shape—no, it was trying to hold two natures at once. Judge and Saint. Punishment and Mercy.
You are both now, her voice soothed as my bones rewrote themselves. What I could never be—strong enough to fight back. What he could never be—human enough to know when to stop.
The fingernails that pushed through were black and curved, yes—but at the tips, they held a faint shimmer. Like stars hidden in dark clouds.
Then—silence.
The pain stopped so suddenly I gasped. Everything went still.
“Zahra?”I heard the Executioner call my name and opened my eyes. The world looked different. Clearer. I could see the sins written into the walls. I could taste fear. I could feel the realm’s hunger pulsing with my heart.
But I could also see something else—the faint glimmer of redemption in some souls. The difference between those who chose evil and those who were broken by it.
My work here is done, the presence whispered, fading now. The sanctuary is yours. Make it what it should have been.
I sat up slowly. My body was different. Gray skin that flickered between solid and shadow. Horns that curled back like a crown—but if you looked closely, they held the same shimmer as my claws. Beautiful and terrible at once.
I was still me. Changed. Corrupted. Deified. Blessed. The poisoned woman who married a god, killed him with a kiss, and inherited a saint’s forgotten purpose.
“My Queen,”the Executioner whispered, dropping to one knee.
I looked at my friends, broken on the floor. Marion trying to drag herself forward on ruined legs. Isaac making those wet, desperate sounds through his mutilated mouth. My first act wouldn’t be vengeance. It would be healing.
I moved to Marion first, kneeling beside her. “Be still,”I commanded, and my words carried new authority. I placed my hands on her mangled legs, and power flowed through me. Bones realigned with crackling sounds. Torn muscle rewove itself. Marion gasped as sensation returned.
Then Isaac. I touched his throat gently. “Speak again,”I whispered, and watched his tongue regrow, pink and whole. He coughed, spitting blood, then looked at me with wonder.
