Page 4 of Bound By the Beast Man
Kael, his jaw set with fierce determination, rushes forward with his father’s wood axe. He is strong and brave, and myheart lurches with a terrible premonition. He swings the axe at the nearest woman. She doesn’t even flinch. With a lazy flick of her wrist, she sends a bolt of crackling black energy into his chest. Kael is thrown backward, his body hitting the ground with a sickening thud. He doesn’t move again. A ripple of horrified shrieks rips through the onlookers. This isn’t a fight. It’s a slaughter. Panic, raw and absolute, takes hold. The villagers scatter like frightened birds, but there is nowhere to run.
“Inside! Now!” I grab Ingrid’s arm, my nails digging into her skin as I try to pull her back toward the safety of our cottage. But it’s too late. Our parents are already rushing out, my father clutching a pitchfork and my mother a long kitchen knife. Their faces are pale with fear, but they move to stand in front of us, a fragile, hopeless barrier.
“Get back in the house!” my mother yelled.
“Get your sister and run!” my father yells, his voice cracking. “Go out the back! To the woods!”
But the Purna, for that is what they must be, the witches of old tales, are everywhere. They move with a terrifying, systematic grace, cutting people down not with blades, but with gestures and whispered words. I see Elara fall, the milk pail rolling away from her outstretched hand. In the screaming chaos, Ingrid is ripped from my grasp. A Purna with hair like spun silver grabs her by the arm and begins dragging her toward the village square.
“Ingrid!” I screamed.
“Diana!” she cried.
I lunge after them, my only thought to get my sister back. But a fleeing man, his eyes wide and unseeing with terror, crashes into me, sending me sprawling into the dirt. The impact knocks the wind from my lungs, and for a moment, the world is a dizzying blur. When my vision clears, I push myself up onto my elbows, and I see it. I see it all with a horrifying, crystallineclarity. A Purna with eyes like chips of violet ice stands before my parents. My mother, brave and defiant to the end, shoves my father behind her, holding her small knife aloft. The Purna almost looks amused. She raises a hand, and my mother collapses, a single, perfect red flower blooming on the front of her dress. My father roars, a sound of pure animal grief, and charges with the pitchfork. He doesn’t even make it two steps before he falls beside her.
A strange, numb silence descends upon me. The screams of my neighbors, the crackle of dark magic, the smell of burning thatch—it all fades into a distant hum. All I can see are my parents, lying still in the dirt lane where they had stood just moments before. All I can feel is a cold, hollowing emptiness where my heart used to be. The sounds of fighting die down, replaced by the soft, triumphant laughter of the women in black.
Slowly, I become aware of movement around me. One by one, they turn their attention to me. They form a loose circle, their beautiful, cruel faces looking down at me as I lie helpless on the ground. They took Ingrid. They killed my parents. They’ve destroyed my entire world. And now they’ve come for me. I expect a final, killing blow. I almost welcome it. But it doesn’t come. They just watch me, their smiles cold and predatory. One of them, her silver-white hair braided with what look like tiny bones, steps forward. She crouches down, her violet eyes boring into mine.
“This one has potential,” she whispered to another.
“Yes,” the other whispered back. “The blood is strong in her.”
She doesn’t need to say a word to me. I know, in that terrible, silent moment, that they are not going to grant me the mercy of a quick death. My fate is something far, far worse.
5
CORVAK
My first sensation is the grating of wet sand against my cheek. The second is a fire in my lungs, a desperate, burning need for air. A violent, racking cough convulses my entire body, and I spew a lungful of stinging saltwater onto the dark shore. I roll onto my back, gasping, each breath a raw, painful thing. My world is a smear of grey—a grey sky, grey rocks, and the grey, churning sea that tried to claim me. The memory of the storm is a chaotic nightmare, but the image of the entity within it, the Devourer with its eyes of cold starlight, is terrifyingly clear.
Slowly, I push myself into a sitting position. My ornate Osirian armor is a wreck, dented and scraped, one pauldron torn clean off. I reach for my sword out of pure instinct, but my hand finds only an empty scabbard at my hip. It is gone, lost to the depths, and the loss feels like a part of my own soul has been torn away. I force myself to my feet, my legs shaking with exhaustion, my body a map of deep, aching bruises. Looming over the rocky shoreline are immense, jagged mountains, their peaks dusted with snow. The Prazh Mountains. A cold, bleak continent, and I am utterly alone.
My brothers. The thought is a jolt of pure agony. Silas, Caspian, Tarek, Ronan, Lucaris. Are they at the bottom of the sea, victims of the Devourer? Or are they like me, washed ashore on some other desolate stretch of this cursed coast? Our vow echoes in my mind, a sacred oath. But Rach is a world away, and I am stranded here with nothing. First, I must survive.
I begin to walk, my movements stiff and pained, my eyes scanning the shoreline for any sign of my kin. The tide has left a line of debris: splintered ship timbers, a torn piece of sailcloth, the stark, white horn of a Minotaur. And then I see them. Tracks. Not one set, but several, pressed into the wet sand near the tide line. Hope, fierce and sharp, surges through me. Others survived. My brothers may yet live.
I follow the tracks, my pace quickening, but my hope soon sours to a grim practicality. The footprints scatter, heading in different directions. Two sets lead north along the coast, while another veers south. A fourth set, heavier and deeper, heads directly inland, toward the foreboding mountains. I have no way of knowing who made them. To follow one set at random, into a hostile and unknown land, would be a fool's errand, a gamble that could lead me further from my brothers, not closer. A leader does not gamble with the lives of his men, even when they are not present.
My duty is clear. Before I seek my own survival, I must do what I can for them. I search the shoreline until I find what I am looking for: a large, flat-faced boulder near the treeline, a landmark that would be visible to anyone searching this stretch of coast. I find a sharp piece of flint, and with painstaking effort, my cold hands clumsy and stiff, I begin to carve into the rock. It is slow, arduous work, but I do not stop until it is done. I carve the Osirian warrior’s symbol: a stylized manticore head, and directly above it, the northernmost star of the King’sconstellation.Rally Point. North.It is a message any of my brothers would understand.
Having left the marker, I feel I have done all I can for my brothers for now. I have left them a sign of hope, a direction, a promise that they are not alone. My duty as their leader is fulfilled. Now, I must focus on my duty as a survivor, so that I can be there when they find my sign. I stand at the crossroads of the desperate paths, the cold wind whipping at my torn tunic, and I weigh my options. The coastline is a long, exposed route into the unknown. The mountains are more dangerous, more difficult, but they offer the promise of high ground, a better view of the surrounding land, and a greater chance of finding a defensible shelter and fresh water.
My training and my instincts are in agreement. I must gain a vantage point. I must assess this new, hostile territory before I can hope to navigate it. The path inland is the only logical choice for a warrior in my position. My long-term mission remains the same: find my brothers and continue our quest to Northern Rach. But my immediate mission is brutally simple: survive.
I turn my back on the grey, hungry sea and the scattered tracks in the sand. I look up at the jagged, snow-dusted peaks of the Prazh Mountains. With the image of the Osirian rally symbol fresh in my mind, a silent promise to the brothers I hope to see again, I take my first step onto the mountain path. The climb is steep, the air is thin, and I am alone. But I am a manticore of Osiris. I will endure.
6
DIANA
Ifloat in a deep, dreamlike fog. It is not a true void, but a muffled, timeless state where my consciousness drifts, untethered from a body I can no longer feel. For the most part, it is a place of profound silence, a quiet hum of the magic that holds me, a constant, unchanging note. But sometimes, the hum changes pitch, and the fog thins, allowing the outside world to leak through in fractured, terrifying ways.
In these moments of flawed stasis, I am assaulted by sounds I cannot understand. There is the soft, sibilant hissing of the Purna, their voices like venomous secrets being shared just beyond the veil.
“The specimen remains stable,” one voice whispered.
“For now,” another whispered back. “But the power within her is… volatile.”
