The executioner ripped away with a mouthful of Finnian’s flesh. Pink meat hung in between its inhuman teeth. Blood drizzled its chin.
Finnian’s chest went light, and tingles nipped at his cheeks. More executioners swarmed around him, but he honed in on the one with a chunk of his arm in its mouth. Fury burned up his nape and tinted his vision.
He raised his arm overhead. His muscles tensed as he grabbed onto the inferno’s energy. Its power comprised a thousand suns, scorching blisters all over Finnian’s hand. He wrestled with its force, guiding its current to bend to his will.
A tremor of euphoria zapped down his spine as the windstorm of its divine power rushed in his blood. It beat viciously behind his eyes, pulsed in his fingertips like individual heartbeats. He could taste it on his tongue, throbbing in his gums—sweet and bitter and calamitous.
The flames spewed out on Finnian’s command, like a fountain from a dragon’s mouth, torching the executioners to dust.
Ripples of the hellish heat stung his eyes. He directed the channel of flames downward, melting the rock to liquid. He believed his father was located in the depths of Moros. If Finnian could not teleport, he would burn his path to Father.
He leaned into the surge of the flames' monstrous strength.
Burn, burn, burn.
An itch scraped in the center of Finnian’s skull, cringing the nerves in his jaw.
His head jerked to the side, desperate to relieve the sensation.
You must right your wrongs.
Something tickled the top of his hand.
He dropped his attention to the two brown moths crawling up the side of his wrist. Yellow markings on their thorax depicted a human skull.
The breath died in Finnian’s lungs.
Death’s-head hawkmoth.
Panic froze in his blood as more floated down and stuck onto the tattered remains of his shirt.
Holding onto the control of the flames, he jostled his shoulders to spook them away. They scurried up his neck and he shivered, his frenzy growing wilder.
The darkening cloud above drowned out the bright glow of the flames.
Fuck.
Finnian’s spine went rigid at the whirlpool of insects swooping down around him. He hauled the inferno upwards, scorching the collective of moths. Embers of their ashes caught in the tailspin of the flames.
Just as the mass of moths separated, they reanimated and banded back together.
Finnian growled, admitting defeat and releasing the inferno. The flames sucked back into the vortex of the mountain.
The moths descended in a swarm, scurrying over his skin, burying in his hair.
He batted and slapped at them. They crawled up his chin and burrowed in the corners of his mouth. He sealed his lips. Their paper-thin wings brushed his eyelashes.
They were everywhere, all at once—his arms, his legs, underneath his clothes, overwhelming his synapses.
The tiny scratching of their legs tunneling into his ear canal, reverberating loudly in his skull. They gouged underneath his eyelids, up the passageways of his nostrils. He pried at his eyes, crushing moths between his fingers. Their fuzzy bodies coated his tongue and cemented down his throat.
He coughed, attempting to force them out of his esophagus. He clawed at his neck, willing to tear apart his flesh to free them.
His knees buckled and his palms bit the hot stone. The prickling of tiny legs on his cheeks numbed. His eyes felt as if they were stuffed with cotton.
Pressure expanded in his chest, up the sides of his neck, building in his skull.
His hands curled into fists against the stone as he clung to the slipping thread of his consciousness.
