Page 29 of Of Serpents and Ruins
But this… I choked, my hand pressing against my throat. This was who I was supposed to be. As terrifying and tumultuous as all of this had been, at last, it was becoming real. Things were somehow starting to feel right even if they did still feel wrong in some respects.
I was becoming who I had always been meant to be.
Then I noticed the bruises where Brandt had choked me. Despite the magic of Elias's medicine, they were not fully gone.The piercing pain and crushing ache returned. The bruises had darkened and faded significantly, but they were there, dull marks on my skin.
His eyes flashed back into my memory. Not the rageful heat when the curse took over. Mournful eyes wet with the tears of loss and sorrow.
Pressing my hand over my heart, I sank down onto the edge of the bed.
I felt empty inside.
Brandt.
For the first time, I was able to sit and contemplate what had happened. His name was heavy on my lips and tongue. My eyelids shut as I shielded my throat.
He had tried to kill me.
That didn't feel right, but it had happened. It didn't feel real, but it was. As right as everything else was, that had been wrong.
The hollow ache intensified. I wanted to be with him.
My hand pressed harder over my heart.
I had to reach him again. I needed him.
BRANDT
Scarlet, a red and black mini raptor, nudged my knee. Her ruby-like eyes glittered, and her narrow charcoal-speckled jaws nipped at my leather trousers. Absently, I dropped my hand down and stroked her triangular head as the droning dialogue continued in the inner throne room of Castle Serpentfire.
A council representative—Tile, an older fire-haired arcanist with a cleft in his chin and a nail-bitingly dry voice—spoke on about the dangers to Sepeazia. He stood in the center of the room, gesturing with one arm toward the assembled council members.
My head thundered as if a triceratops had kicked me full-on. I could barely focus—my mouth dry, chest heavy, vision blurred.
Tile's heavy droning pressed in on my ears and fuzzed around the edges of my mind.
Stella.
I'd almost killed her.
My heart. My love. My all.
The one whom I had vowed to protect with my blood, soul, spirit, marrow, bone, and sinew.
The dark walls of the throne room merged with the floor. The black stone hid the creases and cracks caused by the curse devouring the very life force and magic of our land, but they were there, the curse simmering in the very souls of both Kropelki and Ognisko, the two nations that made up the single kingdom of Sepeazia. Many things had united us over the years, but this curse was one of the worst. Though torches and bronze braziers cast golden light upon the scooped and sculpted stone, the chamber had a red cast from the lava suspended in columns and contained by magic that wove and propelled them through the specially cut shafts into the floor and ceiling.
If ever our magic failed completely, the castle would become a death trap. That likely would not come until the end when the curse devoured the last of the life force of Sepeazia and undid the heartstones as it had with Taivren, our former capital.
Every fiber of my body ached and pulsed, aware of the emptiness that came from being separated from her and knowing that if we didn't find a solution, I would either murder her or go insane. Perhaps both.
Somehow in the midst of this, we had to find a way to end that curse and the one that loomed over the entirety of Sepeazia. Even if I found a way to save Stella from myself, we were all going to die if the curse against Sepeazia resumed, and we couldn't stop it.
Scarlet nipped at my fingers. The other mini raptors and tiny pterosaurs that clustered and fluttered about the throne room were in similarly bitey moods, nibbling and nuzzling as they struggled to understand the source of tension. Two red-and-orange-feathered mini raptors hopped around on the massive hourglass that displayed the curse's progress.
Not the curse that condemned me to murder the one I loved above all others.
No, no.
Because one curse from the Gola Resh wasn't enough.
