Subsequently, Damien equated living with the fulfillment of the prophecy that had plagued him most of his life. Evil was an inevitability, even after he professed to Amma she’d turned him good. Things would be easier if he were already evil, which he was, or, were, or would be again? The subjunctive verb conjugation was rarely used correctly in Key, and sometimes he got it confused with Chthonic, but the point remained the same: there was a state—evil—and Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne was destined to be evil or to be dead.
“Do you still have the pendant?”
At his side, Amma turned to him, wide-eyed but with a tightness to her features she’d been carrying around all morning. He really thought he’d wrung all of that out of her the night prior, and she had been as wild for him as he’d hoped then, but the twenty-third brought its own tension to them both. Inthe greying late afternoon of the plains beyond Buckhead, she was still a bright spot, intent on moving forward and insisting nothing could go wrong even if they were following the Grand Order of Dread’s commands.
She nodded, smile stiff, eyes unblinking.
“May I see it for a moment?”
Amma went into her pouch and held up the pendant by its chain. It caught no light in its cloudy, crimson surfaces, but his own shadow reflected over it. “See?”
Damien held out his hand.
“You said not to.”
He curled his fingers back. “Just testing your memory.” Though he hated the thing, it felt better knowing it was in her hand, and as she slipped it into her pocket, he was calmed enough to focus on the way ahead again.
Quaz was rabidly running across the plain, springing around brambles and rocks, and tumbling over his paws more than half the time. The newest imp had taken to being a cat as well as a cat took to water, which wasn’t very good, but still somehow capable of finding a way to survive.
Damien pulled out the map again, their moving dot finally overlapping the ominously marked destination. Aszath Koth was not so far from where they stood, though an inlet of the Maroon Sea and mountains lay between. “So close to home,” he said. “How did I not know this place was here?”
But looking around, it seemed fairly obvious: there was nothing to know about at all.
The land was flat, the peninsula stretching out away from the city of Buckhead nestled into the base of the mountains. The shore would be somewhere farther off, but it could be neither seen nor heard where they stood, the landscape only made bleaker in the briskness of late fall. A bare tree dotted the horizon on occasion, but no sign of cultivated life sprung upamongst the tall, brown grasses.
“Are we sure it’srighthere?” Amma’s voice was taken on the wind into the space where the temple and its pit were meant to be.
“Perhaps it must be revealed.” Damien took careful steps, the ground below him solid unlike it had been in Krepmar Keep. He would have expected a crumbling, ancient structure that had once been the site of worship for some formidable being, but there was nothing, only the two of them standing out in an open field.
Damien’s stomach twisted at the thought of reaching out with arcana, neither wanting to feel It nor wanting It to feel him back.
“Catacombs!” Amma jumped in front of him. “Roman’s map, the four corners were marked on it, and beneath The Temple of the Void, it saidcatacombs.”
“Buried dead? Underground?”
Amma was nodding, eyes wide, expectant, excited perhaps, but mostly terrified.
Damien took a deep breath. “Quaz, do you think you can find us an entrance?”
The imp snapped his head up to Damien, whiskers twitching, tongue poking out with delight as Vanders rode on his back, tiny paws clutching his fur. He fell low to the ground, nose snuffling right in the dirt like a hound, and he scurried off, leaving a trail parting the tall grasses in his wake.
Quaz serpentined, doubling back over his own path twice as fast as they could follow. That familiar foreboding hemmed in on Damien, carried in on a briny wind that brushed back his hair, the sensation of wings both fresh and adrift in his memory.
For the brief time that Damien had arcanely been a bird, he experienced a single, desperate compulsion: find Amma. Now that she walked along at his side, nudging rocks with her bootsand looking so carefully for impending destruction, he imagined if he never had, chest hollowing out at the thought.
It would be like that eventually, he feared, and the guilt flooded him at not sending her home to Faebarrow when he’d had the chance. But selfishness had won out, just as it had the night before. He used her for companionship, just as he’d used her to transport the talisman, the pendant, his own morality, and what kind of evil creature kept someone they cared so deeply about in so much danger when safety was such an easy option? Someone who had buried herself inside him deserved more. Someone who had given him such goodness in return for less than nothing, someone who made him think, even if he knew it was impossible, that he could actually love.
By all that was grim and unholy, when had it happened? In the streets of Aszath Koth when her hands had tended to his self-inflicted wound? In the shadowed halls of the Grand Athenaeum when she’d proven herself a thief? When she had allied herself with him as they fled for The Wilds? Or in the Everdarque, vowing to protect him and never once wavering? Perhaps there was no moment, nothing that defined the lines between loathing and tolerance, friendship and love, but there he stood, incapable of stepping backward once they’d been crossed. He told her he wanted to be consumed, but he already had been, his ensnarement as permanent as the noxscura that ran through his veins.
It may have not been in the way that humans were meant to, but he loved her.
So, what in the bloody, fucking Abyss was he supposed tosay? That festering blight he’d met in The Wilds and Krepmar Keep was stabbing at the edges of his arcane sense—this could be his only chance to tell her, butwhat? She had broken him for the better, this she knew despite how pithy he had always been about the strange, new choices he made in longing for herapproval and happiness, but he had not admitted tolovingher because that…that was a lie he was deluding himself into, wasn’t it?
There was a prickle at the back of his hand, and he didn’t have to glance down to know it was noxscura seeping out, telling him that leaving the fantasy unsaid was best. If he died, she would be free of him, but if he lived and went on to do the unspeakable things he was meant for, it would be better if she were not beholden to a demon spawn who had lied to her. He would be no better than Cedric Caldor then—a monster she was bound to.
Because if he did say the words strangling him to be free, and she responded in kind, then what? She said she was his in a fit of passion, admitted to selfishly keeping him near, but not that she loved him. If he did hear those coveted words from her, that she loved him even though he was a blood mage, son of a demon, prophesied to bring destruction to the realm, wouldn’t he do the absolute worst just to hold onto that sliver of goodness?
The noxscura seeping out of his palms told him,Yes.
