Page 33 of Bite Sized Bride
Vexia sees him coming. The look on her face is not fear. It is annoyance. Her spell, meant for me, changes its target.
“You have become a liability, beast,” she snarls.
She thrusts her hands forward. A spear of pure, black energy, crackling with lightning, erupts from her palms and slams into Kael’s side. It is not a shallow cut. It is a grievous, mortal wound. It punches through his hardened hide, leaving a smoking, cauterized hole the size of my fist.
Kael stumbles, a choked, agonized sound escaping his lips. His momentum carries him forward, but his charge has been broken.
He should have killed Vexia last time, it’s all my fault for being weak.
Vexia does not press the attack. She gives me one last, promising smile. “I will have you both, eventually,” she says. Then she blinks out of existence, teleporting away to safety.
The clearing falls silent, littered with the broken bodies of the Miou.
Kael stands for a moment, swaying on his feet, his amber eyes finding mine. The storm is gone, replaced by a dawning horror as he looks down at the smoking wound in his side. Then, his eyes roll back in his head, and he collapses to the ground with a sound that shakes the earth.
I rush to his side, my brief moment of power, my impossible discovery, forgotten. All that matters is the monster lying broken at my feet. The monster who just sacrificed himself for me.
His blood is a dark, spreading stain on the glowing moss. Our trust in the world, in anyone but each other, is a casualty lying among the dead. We are alone. And he is dying.
18
KAEL
Darkness.
Not the familiar, hollow darkness of my cell. Not the quiet, watchful darkness of the forest night. This is a new darkness. A thick, syrupy void that has a weight and a sound. The sound is a high, thin scream that I vaguely recognize as my own.
I am floating in an ocean of fire. The wound in my side, a gift from the sorcerer Vexia, is a sun of pure agony, its heat radiating through every part of my cursed body. The black magic of her spell is a poison, a living, writhing thing that coils around the tattered remnants of my soul and squeezes. The red storm is back, a hurricane of pain and rage, and I am drowning in it.
This is the end. The beast has finally broken, and the darkness will swallow what is left.
Suddenly, there's light.
It is not the harsh, sterile light of magic torches or the cold, distant light of the moon. It is a soft, gentle warmth that presses against my cheek. A touch.
Her touch.
“Kael.”
Her voice is a thread of silver in the roaring darkness. A single, steady note in the cacophony of my pain. I cling to it. It is the only real thing in this burning hell.
“Don’t you dare leave me,” she whispers, her voice raw, desperate. “Don’t you dare.”
I try to open my eyes, but my body is no longer my own. It is a vessel of agony, a ship being torn apart in a storm. I am a ghost, trapped inside, watching the destruction.
I feel her hands on me, small and surprisingly strong. She is pressing a cloth to the wound in my side. The pain intensifies, a fresh wave of fire that makes the darkness behind my eyes flash with white-hot light. I roar, or I think I do. The sound is lost in the storm.
She presses harder, her voice a low, fierce chant. “Stay with me, Kael. Stay with me.”
Something shifts. The fire in the wound changes. The raw, agonizing heat is met by a new sensation. A coolness. A gentle, spreading warmth that is not the heat of the curse. It is the warmth of a hearth fire on a cold night. It is the warmth of the sun on my skin.
I feel it emanating from her hands. A soft, silvery light begins to glow behind my closed eyelids. It is her. She is doing this.
The darkness recedes slightly, enough for the dreams to begin.
They are not the usual, fragmented nightmares of the hunt. They are memories, sharp and clear, pulled from the depths by the strange, soothing power of her touch.
I am a boy. Not Kael, the warrior. Just Kael. I am chasing my brother, Grak, through the snows of the Stonefang valley. Our laughter is a cloud of white in the crisp mountain air. My father, the chieftain before Grommash, watches us from the entrance to our longhouse, his face one of stern pride. He is amountain of an orc, his beard thick with frost. He is alive. He is whole.
