“Choose,” the monster hissed. So cold, so heartless. “Choose a path.”
“No,” Kinlear growled. “That’s not how it works.”
“It is,” the monster whispered. “Because the One deems it so. You must choose, Little Prince, to step into the plan laid out for you. One holds greatness and glory...power and freedom and the only true chance you’ll ever have to live. The other brings darkness eternal...where you and the woman you love do not exist.”
It wasn’t a choice, not really.
Had he everhadchoices? Had he ever even stood a fighting chance?
“Choose,” the monster whispered.
“No,” Kinlear said, sobbing into the night. “I can’t.”
“You must.”
A pause. A sigh of the wind, and he swore, in the distance, he heard the cawing of a raven.
Ezer.
Ezer…she deserved to live. To have power and pleasure and all the things that, like him…he had never been given the chance to experience.
“Will it hurt?” he asked. “When…when she switches sides?”
The monster smiled through his fangs. “It will feel like falling, at first...and then, Little Prince? Then it will feel likeflying. She’ll be unstoppable. She’ll be the greatest threat the Five have ever known, and you will stand by her side. You will have her. For eternity.”
A claw lifted…and wiped a single tear away.
“Weakness,” the beast said. “You won’t have to feel this anymore. Choose.”
Death…or eternity.
A choice that was rooted in darkness…but so was fighting for the Five. The liars. The monsters he’d spent his whole life waiting to save him...but it was only this monster. This beast, a darker version of himself, that had come to offer him a chance at greatness.
“The first one,” Kinlear whispered. He sucked in a breath, realizing what it meant. For him. For her. For Arawn, who’d once paid his penance. Who would not understand. Who would fight Kinlear, fight Ezer, until his very last Sacred breath. “…I choose the first.”
Something shifted in his soul, then.
He could feel it, could sense the transformation inside of him, as the monster tore its claws from his chest.
He gasped as he found himself pulled from the woods, and back to the Acolyte’s throne room.
Where Kinlear Laroux, a darksoul made new, showed him the way his choice would go.
He sawallof it.
Every fragment of truth.
The Acolyte was Ezer’s father...and she?
She was to be the next.
And Kinlear knew now, that she had to die in order to live.
He wanted to scream at her, to warn her of what was to come, for some part of him knew it would feel so utterly wrong.
But he’d decided.
He’d decided, and if it meant she did not die…then he hoped, someday, she would forgive him for it.
