He felt it when she trilled. Sound vibrating in a miniature chest, it was a brief warning of what was to come.
Panic sweat bloomed across every inch of his skin, triggered by the mere memory of that tri-toned, warbling cry. Bracing, fist clenched, his arm extended as far from his person as he could manage, the Omega male tried to clasp one palm over his ears—the other ear pressed tight to a bunched shoulder. Teeth clenched in preparation of that wretched, piercing howl.
Silence fell for a single precious instant…
… before the males fell away, screeching. Spines twisting, they rubbed their muzzles into the stone floor and left gouges in stone as they scrambled to do more than shiver in agony.
Bewildered, he looked to his clenched fist, and saw Sultana in all her ferocious glory. Frill fully open in a crimson flare, her jaws sagged around an unheard scream. A brutal song turned on those wretched peasants who dared to question her rule.
Her frill was directional.
He laughed, then. Giddy with the realization thatthishad been his test. Sultana—and her consorts—were his prize, for with a single stroke from a palm still tacky with the noxious liquid of the brood mother, Sultana was silenced. The other clutchlings free to stagger to their feet, dazed, panting in the aftermath of so brutal a weapon being used upon them… but alive.
Enthralled once more.
This time to a new master who would see them rise.
“Come, Sultana,” he cooed, petting his queen with the point of one obsidian claw, enticing her frill to tuck neatly under her chin once more. “There’s work to be done.”
14
Uneven jaws gaping, Balkazar panted through a sagging maw. Thethump-patof his footfalls lost amongst the cacophony of a thousandthousandmarching at his back.
No longer hunted… he was being driven.
To what orwhere, he couldn’t begin to guess. Not with the swirling, dancing colors casting illusions he couldn’t quite see. What had begun to rot, had instead grown hard. Calcified tumors riddled his brain and body, cementing those gruesome changes in place. All that corruption and decay made permanent. The burden of irregular weight distribution now supported by boney growths that made what had once been his left arm—reaching all the way back and around from his shoulder blade to his fingertips—a cumbersome shield at the head of a battering ram.
He’d been transformed.
Utterly.
Swampy lungs belching up a bubble of phlegm, what was left of Balkazar’s mane bristled as he trundled through dense brush. Forcing his waythrough,he no longer bothered himself to lash out at the saplings. Couldn’t hear their mockery and was no longer slowed by their trickery, the insidious whispers demanding that he join the Legion.
He was they.
They were he.
Swallowed whole in a single gulp, most of what the war chief once was, had been consumed. Made an asset to the many. He ran for days without thinking of food or drink. Stopped to eat a passing mouthful of festering flesh when the horde stumbled across a titanic dead thing in a swamp. Bloated, legs sticking straight up, knees locked in place as it baked in the heat of the mid-day sun, it had died naturally. Picked over by the carrion eaters until the rumble of the approaching horde had chased away all competition.
Jaws working with mindless abandon, Balkazar sought only to fill his empty belly so he might fuel his hideous growth. Chomping on anything warm that squelched.
Mud.
Bone.
Flesh—living, diseased, or very,verydead.
It all went in without a thought, until the horde pushed forward.
There was but a single act of love that kept him separate, allowing one shining blue eye to skitterbackas he plodded onward. Back to where he’d come… where a one-eyed prince had risen from the dark with a burning crown atop his head…
… only to find himself eclipsed in the shadow of another. One who burned with a thousand times his brilliance.
Giaus. A mighty king, crowned in starlight and onyx.
If Balkazar had thought slaughtering a nesting brood mother was an impossible feat, it was nothing,nothingin the light of what Giaus had done to the horde.
Black flames swirled in his wake, a crackling halo that flickered all around him. The king had made a mockery of the horde fodder. Obliterating them by the dozens with a wild grin, he protected the brothers Balkazar had meant to die for. Poetry in slaughter, it was art in motion. Grace in the elegant twist of spilled entrails, in severed limbs and pools of clumpy gore.
