Page 26 of Craving Their Venom
But my soul rejects it. The cold stone in my gut remains. It feels… sharp. It feels like the edge of a blade. And it is pointed at them. At Varos. At Zahir.
This feeling is a distraction. A poison. I cannot afford it. While they tear at each other over the vessel of the prophecy, the true serpent, the hidden threat, continues its work in the shadows. I have allowed my focus to be pulled from the path.I have become entangled in the emotional chaos, when my purpose is to see beyond it.
I rise, my movements stiff. The internal turmoil must be set aside. Duty is a colder, cleaner fire. I must find the source of the poison dart. I must trace the assassin’s path back to its nest.
I begin the ritual. I walk the perimeter of my sanctuary, my bare feet silent on the cool stone. I choose the herbs from the clay bowls that line the walls. One for clarity of sight, its leaves a pale, silvery green. One to pierce the veil of deceit, a dark, gnarled root that smells of damp earth and thunderstorms. And one for protection, a sprig of mountain gorse with thorns as sharp as needles, to keep the darkness I seek from seeking me in return.
I crush them in a marble mortar, the scents releasing into the air, a potent, sacred perfume that finally begins to chase away the lingering stench of rage and lust. I mix the powdered herbs with salt mined from the deepest, most ancient caves, and draw a circle on the floor, directly beneath the oculus. A perfect, unbroken line of protection.
In the circle, I place my scrying bowl. It is a simple thing of black, unglazed ceramic, filled with water from a spring that runs deep beneath the palace, a spring that has never seen the light of day. I place it so the starlight from above pools in its dark, still surface, creating a liquid mirror of the cosmos.
My focus needs a connection, a tangible link to the event. I retrieve it from a small, silk-lined box. It is a single, splintered thread of midnight blue silk, torn from the tapestry that the assassin’s dart struck. I found it myself, after the court had been cleared, a tiny, insignificant piece of a much larger puzzle.
I kneel before the bowl, outside the circle. I hold the thread between my thumb and forefinger, close my eyes, and begin to breathe. My breaths become slow, deep, matching the rhythm of the turning stars above. The world of the palace, the sounds, thescents, the cold stone at my knees, all of it fades away. There is only the darkness behind my eyes, and the single, fragile thread of connection in my hand.
I let it fall. It touches the surface of the water, and the starlight ripples, the darkness in the bowl seeming to deepen, to pull me in. I do not resist. I let my consciousness drift, following the echo of the assassin’s intent, a trail of cold, venomous energy.
The vision does not come as a clear image. It is a chaotic assault on my senses.
A flash of a hand, not my own, not Varos’s or Zahir’s. The scales are a dull, mottled green-brown, like swamp moss on a rotting log. On the third finger is a ring. A serpent of tarnished silver, eating its own tail. The sigil is ancient, one I have only seen in the oldest, most forbidden scrolls. The sigil of the Tikzorcu family.
The scent of stagnant water fills my nostrils, a brackish, suffocating smell. The cloying sweetness of swamp lilies, the kind that only grow in the fetid marshes of the south. The taste of rot is on my tongue.
A whisper, a guttural phrase in a harsh, regional dialect I have not heard since my acolyte days, studying the fractured history of the lesser noble houses. It is the dialect of Jalma.
And then, a feeling. A cold, ambitious cruelty that is utterly devoid of honor. It is not the Prince’s calculated ambition, which is rooted in a desire for order. It is not the General’s brutal rage, which is rooted in a twisted sense of martial pride. This is a completely different kind of evil. It is the cold, patient evil of decay. Of a thing that seeks not to conquer, but to corrode. To bring everything down to its own level of filth and ruin.
The vision shatters. I am thrown back into my own body with a violent jolt, as if from a great height. I gasp, my lungs burning, my body slick with a cold sweat. I stumble back from the scryingbowl, my legs weak, my head spinning. The ritual has taken its toll. The darkness I sought has left its cold fingerprints on my soul.
I lean against a pillar of scrolls, my breath coming in ragged gasps. The pieces of the vision swirl in my mind, fragmented and chaotic. But they are not random. They are a map.
The mottled green scales, common among the swamp-dwellers of the south. The scent of the Jalman marshes. The harsh, guttural dialect. And the ring. The sigil of the Tikzorcu. A family from Jalma, notorious for their cruelty, their dabbling in forbidden magic, and their ancient, festering hatred for the Vhasma line. A family whose treacherous daughter, Vippera, was killed after plotting against another of the royal bloodlines. A family with a fresh reason to seek revenge.
It is them. The serpent in our halls is not just a faceless faction. It is a noble house, with resources, with power, and with a deep, historical well of poison from which to draw.
The knowledge settles in my gut, a block of ice replacing the sharp stone of jealousy. The threat is real. It is specific. And it is far more dangerous than I had imagined.
I look at the scrying bowl. The water is still, the starlight once again a placid, silver pool. The thread of silk lies at the bottom, a dark, drowned thing. The prophecy is not a distant, academic puzzle. It is a blade at our throats.
My own feelings, this strange, new ache for the human woman, are a luxury I cannot afford. They are a discordant note in the song I must now conduct. I must take these two forces of nature, this Prince of ice and this General of fire, and forge them into a weapon. I must make them see beyond their own pride, beyond their own possessive hunger for the woman who has become the heart of our world.
I must make them see that if they do not learn to stand together to protect her, they will be the instruments of herdestruction, and the kingdom will fall with her. The path ahead is no longer shrouded in mystery. It is a razor’s edge, and we are already bleeding.
18
KAELEN
My place is tainted. A psychic wound festers in the palace, a discordant shriek in the celestial harmony. It is the echo of Amara’s ordeal, a brutal claiming that has left her spirit bruised and frayed. I feel it as a physical ache behind my eyes, a coldness that my deepest meditations cannot warm. Varos and Zahir, in their blind, prideful rage, have claimed her ruthlessly. They have driven a spike through the epicenter of the prophecy, pinning it to a board of their own base desires.
They think they have marked her as theirs. The fools. They have only deepened the shadows around her, making the small, defiant light of her soul flicker and dim. The Oracle’s words haunt me.A hearth to be shared.They did not warm their hands by her fire. They tried to smother it with the weight of their own darkness.
A feeling I have only ever read about in ancient, tragic poems coils in my gut. It is a cold, sharp-edged thing, a feeling of possessiveness that is utterly foreign to me. It is not the General’s brutish need to own, nor the Prince’s strategic desire to control. It is a fierce, protective ache, a spiritual jealousy for the sanctity of her spirit, which they have so crudely violated. Imust go to her. Not to claim her, but to mend her. To remind her of the light they have tried to extinguish.
I find her in the Prince’s cold, silent chambers. She is curled on the pallet of furs, a small, still form in the oppressive luxury of her cage. She is not sleeping. I can feel the frantic, wounded energy coming from her, a bird with a broken wing hiding in the dark.
She sits up as I enter, her eyes wide with a new, deeper fear. She expects another assault, another claiming as I am in her room. She sees me, another naga male, and her body braces for a fresh violation. The sight of her reflexive terror is a blade twisting in my soul.
“I am not them, Amara,” I say softly, my voice a quiet hum in the tense silence. I do not approach her directly, but move to the center of the room, lighting a small stick of calming incense I have brought from my sanctuary. The clean, herbal scent of silver-leaf and mountain gorse begins to push back against the stale air of the chamber. “I have not come to take. I have come to heal.”
