His wounds quickly regenerated as he swerved the specters, their monstrous, twisting forms speeding toward him at the scent of his blood.
TherealSoren, in a sea of falsehoods.
He dodged the clawed strikes in tufts of emerald mist, always on the defensive. The waves of energy gathered, like the inhaling of a breath, for his next teleportation.
He materialized closer to the inky mass in the snow, swerving to dodge the feral strike of a nightrazer and the aim of a black spike sent from its umbral barrier.
The pressure in Acacius’s chest snapped, and he fabricated above Soren, crashing down on his small, agile body. The shadowy wraiths drew back, closing in on the mass.
Pulses of Acacius’s disillusionment latched onto the trickster, raiding his mind and bending his will.
Soren cried out, flinching. His knees buckled and he slammed his hands over the sides of his head.
Acacius towered over the god. “Where is she?” He spoke through gritted teeth.
Soren cringed and whimpered, eyes squeezed shut.
Midnight-blue flared around Acacius, and from within the smoke, hundreds of death’s-head hawkmoths swarmed Soren. The insects crawled over his skin, across his mouth and up his nose, burrowing into his eyes, his ears.
His figure distorted and aslicehissed in the air.
The moths scattered, revealing the empty space.
Acacius jerked his head sideways.
More, his Ruin coaxed.
Soren kneeled across the clearing, a hand still cupping his forehead, expression winced in pain. “You hail Ruin upon the land, and you will kill the boy.”
Acacius’s eyes twisted with fury. The thought to rain destruction down hadn’t even occurred to him for that very reason. But it didn’t mean he couldn’t make the god suffer.
Soren lifted his head, and in the quarter-second it took to do so, Acacius shot forth and caught the god by his little throat.
He squeezed trembling fingers into his flesh as he sank deathly close to Soren’s face, relishing in the sounds of his struggle. “Where is she?”
Soren looked up in elation, letting the sleet catch on his eyelashes. His gaze was detached, void of fear despite his place in Acacius’s jaws. “Dead,” he croaked out.
Acacius’s heart cracked like the bulb of a peony.
No.
A loud ringing overtook his ears.
His breath shallowed as he turned his head toward the source of the shrinking nightrazers.
The ghost-like beasts floated over a dying mass of dark, divine power against the bright snow. The nightrazers, the spikes, the fog, everything began to give way, revealing the bodies buried in the snow.
Through the distance, Acacius could hear the panicked stride of the child’s mortal heart. Nothing more.
Dead.
Time slowed to a slurring pace.
Acacius squeezed his hand like a primal beast crunching its prey’s bones.
Soren’s head rolled away as his body dissolved like viridian smoke in the breeze.
Just another fucking illusion, even the blood.
