A human, but mindless. She was only a thread more than a thrall could ever be. But it was enough to anchor a protection spell around Prayer and disguise Calavia’s humanity. It was enough that her mother still had blood to bleed.
Calavia did not want to kill her, nor harm her, nor do anything that would take her mother out of her life, but she was beginning to understand that it may not be up to her. That perhaps her mother’s final emotions were the only ones that remained, and the small glimpses of emotion she saw were the ones she wanted to see.
Her throat closed up as tears threatened to brim her eyes.
She was beginning to realize that she wasn’t going to trade one life for another, she was choosing life over death.
Calavia refused to look at her mother as she drew a circle with the wet willow growth, breathing a plea over it, its red chalk marring the stone where her wax used to be. If she looked at her mother, her tears would fall. Tears were not part of the spell. Grief would not help her now.
She focused on the job at hand.
First, the circle around her altar, with the widest part in front of it. Eternity, everlasting, and a homage to the moon hidden above her and the sun she had never truly seen. “Bind my will with willow, my magic with intention, and join with the curse we feed.”
Calavia rose up from her knees and went back to the altar, picking up her weathered dagger sitting atop it. She moved back to her circle and scrapped the wax off her palms with her nails. When nothing but flakes remained on her skin, she sliced into her previous wound, reopening it. “Pure blood guard me, pure blood sustain, until the moment darkness falls forever and only tainted blood remains.” She walked around the circle, squeezing and dripping blood atop the willow.
Astegur growled hungrily, somewhere out of her focus.
When she was done, and with a sour taste in her mouth, she wiped her bloody hands into the folds of her dress. She went back to her altar and started the process of removing the last of her wax and placing it in the biggest bowl atop it. She melted the wax with her hands, letting it pull the rest of the blood it needed from her to strengthen it. A green aura rose up from the circle around her.
The air swirled and thickened.
She studied the green circle for a moment; it was a miniature version of the circle of protection that surrounded Prayer. She cupped her aching hand and felt her strength waver.How can I match my willpower with my mother’s?Did her will to live outmatch her mother’s will to perish?
Tears threatened to unleash from her eyes. Calavia squeezed them shut and willed them away.I need to focus.Everything she knew about her abilities were from intuition, and her intuition had yet to be wrong.
The screams of her mother, and the jeers of the centaurs, filled her ears, telling her otherwise.
She straightened her back and met Astegur’s gaze from across the room. “Place my mother within the circle.”
As he moved to do as she asked, she picked up her dagger and one of the bowls at her side. She flattened her aching hand above the vessel and gritted her teeth, adding another slice to her tender flesh to go with the first. She squeezed the new blood into the bowl, growing physically weaker by the second.
Astegur placed her ravenous mother before her altar and stepped out of the circle, his hands twitching at his sides, as if holding the thrall made him ill.
“Here,” she said, picking up the bowl as he moved to take his position by the door again.
He stopped and turned to her, eyeing the shallow bowl of blood in her shaking hand.
Calavia lifted it. “You said once you could defeat an army of centaurs if you were filled with pure blood.”
He stomped to her side, right outside her circle, and took the offering. She watched him close his eyes and gulp the bowl’s contents down in one swallow. When he reopened them, they were black pits in his face, glimmering with the green of her magic. He licked his lips as his muscles bulged, and his veins stood out against his skin. Heat came off him in waves.
Sweat beaded her brow.
“Calavia,” he growled low and ominous under the cacophony of noise. “You are delicious.”
He stood at the edge of her barrier like a towering demon on the verge of attacking. His breath and his heat penetrated her defenses, and she tried not to run from the frenzy building in his gaze. Astegur took a half-step toward her, smoke pouring from every one of his orifices. Fear for everything that was about to happen pooled in her gut.
“Don’t,” she whispered, refusing to look at his giant bull’s cock erect and heavy between his legs.
He snarled once. Then he took a step back, and then another, and after several chilling seconds, he prowled, bestial, back to the doorway.
Calavia swallowed her unease, her sudden desire, and returned to her work.
She moved around her altar, with her dagger in hand, wax and blood dripping down her fingers, and knelt at her mother’s side.
“I tried to save you. I will always try and save you. You once told me love is the greatest magic of all, and all that love we feel should be given to those we honor and have faith in. I love you. I have faith in you. And above all, I honor you.” Calavia caressed her mother’s cheek. “But I can’t let you die.” Her mother jerked her head back and forth and screamed. “Not without killing myself.” Calavia drew her fingers away and clutched her dagger. “Let me unburden you.” She slid the edge of her blade under the reeds that bound her mother and cut them off, releasing her. “I wish you could understand me,” she ended on a whisper.
Clawed hands snapped out, slicing at the space before her face. Calavia startled back, out of reach as her mother tore herself out of her remaining bonds. She saw Astegur out of the corner of her eye rush to her side.
