With every word, his voice gets louder, sharper, and my adrenaline pumps. My bones ache already as if they anticipate him breaking each and every one of them.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
He lashes out, hand wrapping around the back of my neck, yanking my head to angle up toward the perched birds. “This is why you haven’t risen to be a king,” he spits at my face before shoving me away. “Because you are wasting time flocking with the peasants!”
At the snap of his finger, the shed ceiling splits, and an outcry of distress shoots from the throats of the birds. They immediately bolt, flying out of their enclosures in a panic, running into walls, a couple smacking into my head as they try to escape.
My father drops them one by one with his magic. Necks snapped, they land in piles, feathers bursting up, screeches filling the air.
The hatchlings’ cries pierce my ears, and the mother starts to flap her wings, baring blunt teeth at my father in vicious protectiveness. He doesn’t kill her, but breaks her wing instead, snapping it and making her cry out so horribly that panic pounds in my ears.
The hatchlings scream.
“Stop!” I shout, spinning in a circle, distress eating through my heart. He’s tearing off chunks of it and tossing them onto the floor in bloody heaps.
My father steps up to me, halting my movement as he grips me by the collar. “You will erase this weakness of caring, do you understand me? You are a Cull—we cull the weak.Including what we find in ourselves.” He removes his hand to shove me toward the table. “Rot them.”
I blink, head whipping from the hatchlings and back to him. I can’t think—not with the way the mother bird is screaming in pain. Not with how loud my hate pounds through my veins. “What?”
“You heard me,” he says darkly.
“I don’t—”
“Rot them, or I break them. Bit by bit. And it will be slow.”
I suck in a breath, his threat culminating into shards that seem to stab all over. There is nothing that oozes out more than my hate for him.
When I hesitate, he lifts his hand to go through with his threat, and I instantly react.
Rot spews out of me, lines traveling through the grains of the wooden table and engulfing their small bodies. Every single one of them drops, withering like scorched plants, shriveling up and collapsing in on themselves.
The mother’s cries crescendo, screaming at me for what I’ve done, until I silence her too. Wishing I could silence the pounding of my heart. It feels like someone’s taken a hammer to it, cracked it open and forced me to bleed.
Forced me to hurt.
The shed has gone completely silent. The only sound is my hard breathing as I stare down at the needless death.
After a second, I lift my head and look him in the eyes, letting him see the hate in mine.
He stares back at me with cold emptiness. “Good,” he says, pointing at my gaze. “That is what it is to be a Cull.”
My father turns and walks out then, leaving me behind in the destruction.
Leaving me behind in self-loathing.
When his footsteps fade away, I turn back, eyes blurred as I look at the seven hatchlings scattered on the table.
What would my mother think if she saw this? If she saw what I did?
Shame fills me.
If this is what the past Culls did in order to manifest a dragon and become king of the skies, then maybe that’s why the goddesses took that ability away so many generations ago.
My father thinks he’s so superior, thinks that cruelty is the way to power, but he’s wrong. Cruelty isn’t what drives me.
It’s hate.
Hate for him…and love for my mother and brother.
