Page 95 of Empire of Wrath and Ruin
Stop, I begged, but even my inner voice was changing, becoming hungry. This isn't—
Look at them all, I thought, and the thought was entirely mine now. Sixty thousand sheep, bleating in the stands. They deserve to burn. They deserve to suffer. And I have the power to give them exactly what they deserve.
My humanity crumbled like ash. The love, the hope, the desperate desire to be good—all of it burned away, leaving only a cold, perfect hunger for destruction and death.
I lifted the crystal high above my head, and when the dragons responded with screams of anticipation, I smiled.
I pushed my will through the network, overriding the collars, freeing the dragons from their lifelong oppression, and subjecting them to my own command, my voice carrying the authority of a god.
"Burn them all."
30
The world seemed to slow and fade away as I heard Taveth’s words. The dragons circled overhead, their throats glowing with the promise of fire, waiting for his command. Sixty thousand people packed into the stands, some screaming in terror, others roaring approval, all of them about to die if I didn't act. The prisoners in their cages pressed against the bars, reaching toward us with desperate hands, begging for salvation that would never come."Burn them all," Taveth commanded, in a voice that was his and yet not his. He stood in the centre of the arena with that cursed crystal raised above his head like a sceptre of the damned, and he wasn't my brother anymore. Blood streamed down his cheeks from eyes that burned with a white fire. Shadows writhed around him like living serpents, and when he smiled—gods help me, when he smiled—it was with the cruel joy of something that had never known love or mercy or any emotion softer than hunger.
I felt something break inside my chest—not ribs, though they ached like I'd been trampled by horses. Something deeper. Somelast fragile hope that maybe, somehow, we could all walk away from this arena alive.
"Taveth," I whispered, the name tearing from my throat like a prayer. Like a farewell.
Those black eyes turned toward me, and for just an instant—one heartbreaking moment—I saw him looking back. The real him, trapped somewhere behind the madness, screaming silently as his body moved without his will.
"Taveth, no."But he couldn't hear me anymore. The darkness had swallowed him whole.The dragons above us responded to his command with a sound I'd never heard before—not roars of rage or pain, but something like ecstatic relief. Their collars blazed with sickly light as whatever hold the Emperor had on them shattered, replaced by something infinitely worse. They wheeled in the sky like vultures, their eyes fixed on the crowd with predatory hunger.Around me, my companions were still fighting, still trying to cut through the guards who pressed in from all sides. Marcus's sword carved through armour with desperate efficiency while Septimus danced between blade thrusts, but I could see the futility written in their movements. We were outnumbered fifty to one, and now we had to face not just the Imperial soldiers but the very dragons we’d come to set free.
My brother was gone. The man who had suffered nightmares about every life he'd taken, who had wept for dragons enslaved against their will, who had kissed Livia with such desperate tenderness—that man had been consumed by the darkness he'd carried for so long. This wasn't my brother anymore—this was something wearing his face, something that smiled with his mouth while radiating malice so pure it made my skin crawl, a vessel for centuries of accumulated madness.
And he was about to murder everyone in the capital.
Guards were pouring into the arena from every tunnel, but they might as well have been ants for all the good they could do. Taveth commanded dragons now. Taveth commanded the very shadows themselves. I had perhaps three heartbeats before the dragons would descend with flame that would turn the arena into a funeral pyre. Three heartbeats to save sixty thousand lives. Three heartbeats to kill my brother.The thought should have paralyzed me. Should have sent me to my knees with grief and horror at what I was about to do. Instead, I felt a cold clarity settle over me like winter frost, sharp and clean and utterly without mercy.I loved him, and I had only just found him. But love sometimes meant making choices that would destroy you from the inside out. And if I had to carry the weight of his death for the rest of my days, if I had to live with the knowledge that I'd put my blade through the heart of the person I cared for most in this world—so be it.Better that than watch him become a monster like our father.
The first dragon opened its throat, and liquid fire poured down toward the stands.
Screams erupted from the crowd as people trampled each other in their desperation to escape. The marble benches cracked and blackened under the heat, and I could smell burning flesh even from here. A second dragon joined the first, then a third, their flames washing over sections of the arena like molten gold. In the Imperial box, I could see Emperor Valerius backing away from the edge, his face twisted with rage and fear.
My legs moved without conscious thought, carrying me across the blood-soaked sand toward the creature that wore my brother's face. Around me, the battle raged on—steel clashing against steel, the screams of wounded men, the thunder of sixty thousand voices raised in terror and confusion. But all of it felt distant now, muffled, as if I were hearing it from underwater.
"Tarshi, no!" Livia's voice cut through the chaos, sharp with understanding. She'd seen where I was going, what I intended to do. I felt her desperate gaze like a physical weight between my shoulder blades, but I couldn't turn around. Couldn't let her see what this was costing me.
"Brother," I called out, my voice somehow carrying across the chaos. Taveth would want me to stop him. The real Taveth, the one buried somewhere beneath the madness, would beg me to end this before it went any further.I reached him and grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around to face me. His eyes were pools of liquid ice now, no trace of the warm black of our people. When he looked at me, it wasn't with recognition—it was with the idle curiosity of a predator deciding whether I was worth the effort to kill."Hello, brother," he said, and his voice was like honey poured over broken glass. "Have you come to watch the show?"
I raised my sword, the point aimed directly at his heart. One thrust, one moment of steel parting flesh, and it would be over. The dragons would be free of his command, the city would be saved, and Taveth would finally be at peace.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
I moved to strike—and then something hit me like lightning, a jolt that ran from the base of my skull down to my fingertips. For just an instant, the world went white. My hand tightened on his shoulder, and I felt it—the connection that had always existed between us, twin to twin, soul to soul. It was still there, buried beneath layers of shadow and madness but intact. And through that bond, I could sense something else: the raw, terrible power flowing through him from the crystal. Power that was consuming him from the inside out, burning through his sanity like acid through flesh.
But it was power. And power could be shared.Whether it was recklessness, or whether I was guided by the gods in themoment, I didn’t know, but instead of driving my blade into his chest, I dropped my sword to the bloodstained sand. I tightened my grip on his shoulder, I pressed my other hand against his chest, right over his heart. The shadows recoiled from my touch, hissing like serpents, but I pushed deeper, following the golden thread of our connection down into the maelstrom of his mind.
I closed my eyes and reached out with that strange sense I'd never fully understood, stretching toward the connection I'd felt between us since birth. The moment I touched the edge of his mind, agony exploded through my skull like molten metal poured directly into my brain.
Gods.The voices hit me like a tsunami of madness—thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, all screaming at once. Shadow mages who had given in to the darkness over the centuries, their final moments of sanity preserved in the crystal like insects in amber. I felt their rage, their despair, their hunger for destruction, and it nearly drove me to my knees.
Blood began pouring from my nose, hot and thick, and my muscles convulsed as the psychic weight of centuries tried to crush my mind into powder. I felt my knees buckle as the weight of it nearly drove me to the ground. But I also felt something else: relief. The burden that had been crushing my brother alone was now shared between us, and for the first time since we'd found that cursed thing, the pressure seemed manageable."What are you doing?" The thing wearing Taveth's face snarled, but I could hear uncertainty creeping into its voice. The shadows around him flickered and wavered as his absolute control began to slip."What I should have done from the beginning," I gasped, pouring more of myself into the connection. I reached deeper through our bond, past the screaming voices and accumulated madness, searching for whatever remained of my brother's true self. The crystal's power was like acid in my veins, burning away pieces of my sanitywith each passing second, but I held on. I had to.There—buried beneath centuries of corruption, I found him. Taveth. My twin. Trapped and terrified but still fighting. But even as I felt the flicker of his consciousness, I felt him starting to slip again, felt the darkness rising like flood water, and I knew the connection between us wouldn't be enough. We needed something else, something stronger than brotherhood, something that could anchor him to who he used to be.
Bondmate!Sirrax’s voice roared through my mind, and in that instant I realised he had shifted to his dragon form and taken to the sky above us, trying to draw the dragons away from the crowd.Stronger together! Use bond!I understood, and opened my mind further, allowing the dark power to flood along our bond into Sirrax. A mighty roar filled the skies as it hit him like the rush of spring flood and I felt his pain and panic for a moment, before he rallied his own strength.
The relief was immediate and overwhelming—what had threatened to tear my mind apart was suddenly bearable, distributed across three souls instead of crushing one.
The thing that had been consuming Taveth snarled in frustration as its grip weakened. The shadows around him writhed like dying serpents, their movements becoming erratic, uncertain. I felt Taveth stir deeper in the connection, his consciousness rising toward the surface like a drowning man fighting toward air. The real him, the brother I'd thought lost forever, was still there. Still fighting.
