Except…
For reasons I cannot understand, my father seems to have trouble looking away from the little rock. He tosses his head and stomps like a stallion, kicking up red dust, digging his hooves in. All around him, black fire explodes out of the nearest ground holes as if in response to his frustration.
With a curse, he bares his fangs and then snaps them at me. “You think that will distract me.”
“It’s working, isn’t it,” I wheeze back.
His glower is a promise of eternal torture. “I expected more than parlor tricks from you,daughter—”
“Stop calling me that.” I wobble to my feet. “I willneverbe a part of you. I came here to destroy you—”
The roar that comes out of him blows me back, but he doesn’t pounce. He cannot follow. He’s stuck looking at me and then back down at the stone, the latter like a precious gem that he’s about to foolishly walk away from.
The idea I’ve bested him on some level, any level, ushers in a bracing flush of courage and energy.
“Pick that up”—he jabs his finger—“and put it back in the bag.”
“No.”
“Pick that infernal rock up and put it—”
“No,” I yell back at him.
On a sudden conviction, I thrust my palms forward, and that’s when theblack fire comes out of me, so forceful that the great Dark King stumbles back. He even puts his bulging, veined arms over his head and seems to beat the air as if he’s trying to stop a storm of hornets.
And I know, without consciously knowing, where he must go.
Back into the fissure that was created for him and sealed with the Fulcrum. By my mother. Eons ago. When she collected all of the good, remaining magic from the very soil of Anathos and brought it here to keep us safe by locking him up.
She should have imprisoned me here, too, for I am as dangerous as he. But instead, maybe because she loved me even though I’m a monster, she hid me among the humans, just in case, some time in a future she couldn’t imagine, but knew would come to pass, he rose up once again.
And I was the only one who had a chance of defeating him because I am him, and he is me.
As all of this occurs to my mind, I see the fissure he emerged out of reopen in the contaminated red crust. With even greater strength, I scream again, and the dark energy coming out of me redoubles, battering at him like blows, until he is down on his knees and I’m standing over him.
“Sorrel,” he says in that seductive voice that promises darkest desires granted. “Do not do this. Together… we can have dominion over all of Anathos. Together we can make manifest the destiny I was intended for. Regard now at once my army, ready to do our bidding.”
A wave of distortion undulates through the red landscape, the black fires flaring up in a coordinated explosion that brings heat and cold at the same time—and then, as the optical show recedes, I see the horror I suspected, but never wanted to witness.
Legions of demons stand at the ready in formation, thousands of them.Millions. They stretch out as the horizon does, into a forever because there is no end. These are all the souls my father has taken, has bartered for with lies, has overpowered with unholy strength.
And Merc is among them.
Then again… so am I.
Dearest fate, no human army can defeat this.
The war is lost before it began.
Unless…
Unless, I can do more than just survive this greeting, this handshake of which the Sooth warned me so strongly. If I can finish off my father, with a wrath of my own unleashed, I can save all of Anathos.
Surely that triumph will heal me. And if I die in the process? At least I tried.
I think of the Fulcrum, and the black bands, the black flurries, the black flames that surround me.
Gathering all my strength, I pour the very essence of me into my father, not as a gift, or as something he can take, but as a terrible contamination that will corrode him from the inside out, spoil him to his evil core, rot him until he is no more capable of animation and will than the cold dead carcass of a cow taken down by one of his demons—
