Kinlear nodded.
So, the monster moved forwards as if on air. Shadows trailed after it like slithering snakes. “I can see your soul, Princeling,” it hissed. “It aches to know me. But it never will...not until you are strong enough to See.”
“I’m strong enough,” Kinlear said. “But I don’t want to know you.”
The monster cocked its head again. “No?”
“No,” Kinlear said, inching forward, despite the roaring in his ears, despite the terror that appeared, an unwelcome arrival in his veins. “I want to kill you.”
You are Veilborne,he told himself.You are not afraid.
...he was very much afraid. But he lunged forwards anyways, slashing out with his blade.
The monster met it with sharpened claws, effortlessly stopping him. But Kinlear did not back down. They circled in the snow, in the howling wind that tossed his dark hair into his eyes.
In life, he could never win a fight. He’d trained as a youngling for years, was always the smallest, the weakest, the worst.
Butthisbody?
He trusted this dream version of himself, and he knew how to wield it, and for the first time in his life, his limbs responded as they should.
He attacked.
But before he could swing the blade, shadows swarmed him.
They overtook him, clouding his vision, turning everything black.
They slid into his mind, like living things...and suddenly he was thrown back into his own memories.
He heard the echo of every awful thing ever said to him, when he was a child.
Weak. Insignificant.
The spare and forgotten prince.
He heard the younglings’ laughter as he tried and failed to fight, and he saw Arawn’s blazing flames, the kind that the gods had never dared gift to him. He saw the furious flash of his mother’s eyes, and his father’s back, always turned away.
He smelled the putrid smoke of his own skin, burning beneath a mark of penance, and he saw Soraya...his only friend.
“You’re not good enough to be loved, Kinlear,” she said. “Not really.” And she was laughing as she burned the letters she’d written, every week, just for him.
He heard the words his mother whispered, when she thought he wasn’t close enough to hear. “He is a burden. A distraction from the gods...a way to get back at me for my own sins.”
He could feel the shadows pushing at him, begging him to listen. To fall prey to the lies – or perhaps they were truths, for most lies always held some semblance of them.
“Die, Kinlear,” they hissed. “Die a beautiful death.”
But then a voice sang louder than the shadows’ song. It broke through the darkness, broke through a lifetime of pain.
“You are Veilborne,” it whispered, and it sounded like Magus. Like the only person that had ever truly believed in him, enough to give him a gift. “You have a weapon now...and you are not afraid.”
Kinlear screamed into the darkness, listening to that voice, holding on to it. It became a song in his head, a rhythm that sidled up against his rage.
The smoke faded from his eyes, as if he’d finally broken through it.
And this time, he did not hesitate.
He swung his blade.
