I run. My feet pound against the soft earth, the river glistening ahead of me. My heart is lodged in my throat. This is the final trial. We need to win this thing, and every second we linger in this twisted space is a second closer to failure – or worse.
The cool night air whips across my face, chilling the sweat on my skin as I reach out to Taron. I touch his shoulder and he spins round.
I flinch. The face I know is gone, replaced by a mask – his features slack, drained of every emotion, like he’s trapped in some silent scream.
Before I can blink, his hand is clamped around my throat. I’m lifted off the ground, my body weightless in the face of his strength. The world spins, and my lungs scream for air.
I claw at his wrist, panic roaring through me like wildfire.
“Taron … stop…” I croak, but my voice is a strangled whisper. The pressure around my neck compresses. His grip is like iron, unrelenting.
My feet kick uselessly beneath me, my strength no match for his talents. He doesn’t respond, eyes glazed over,far away. They’re still fixated on Mei, beckoning him closer across the river. Taron’s lips move, muttering things I can barely make out. Words about strength and freedom. A path that the Soul Wraith is offering him.
“Please … it’s lying to you…” The words come out in a rasp.
My vision blurs, and the jungle around me becomes a swirl of dark shapes. The looming Soul Wraith gets closer. Its presence is a sharp freeze that crawls through my veins and burrows into the marrow of my bones.
Taron is struggling. His control wavers as the whispers seem to pull at him, his body rigid with resistance.
She holds your leash now, Taron, but I can turn you into the wolf.
He can’t hear my pleas.
You were never meant to kneel. Let me show you how to rise.
His grip tightens around my throat, and my vision starts to tunnel. With the last dregs of energy I can summon, I reach out, tapping into the pool of negative energy revolving around him. It’s thick, intoxicating, growing stronger the closer he gets to the demon. I can feel its malevolence coursing through him, feeding on his doubts, twisting his thoughts.
It has a cloying taste, sickly sweet like honey that coats the tongue, but with an undertone of something rancid, like burnt coals.
I draw his energy into me, and it feels like a craving that gnaws at the pit of my stomach, never to be satisfied, no matter how much is consumed.
Fighting the black spots dancing at the edge of my vision, I mould the energy into a thin chain. I drop it at Taron’s feet, and it coils around his ankles, drawing taut until he’s pulled off balance.
He stumbles and releases me. I hit the dirt, quickly scrambling to my feet.
Taron is still out of it, on his knees, dazed. I throw myself at him, wrestling him to the ground and straddling him, arms pinned over his head.
His chest rises and falls with ragged breaths, but his eyes – those frosty, vacant irises – are still fixed on Mei’s figure looming across the river.
I raise my hand and slap him hard across the face. “Taron!” I scream, panic making my voice raw. “Are you in there? Wake up!”
No response.
He doesn’t even flinch.
I grit my teeth. There’s only one option left. One that I dread, mostly because I’m afraid. Of what else I might see. Of the way Taron would look at me, knowing I’ve been inside his head. But I know it’s the only way.
I take a deep breath, ignoring the trembling in my hands, and close my eyes. Then I let myself sink into Taron’s energy – his fear, his doubt, his pain – and I pull it into me.
It floods my senses, an overwhelming wave of raw, violent emotion. Fear that squeezes inward on my chest, anger that burns like acid, guilt that weighs me down until I’m drowning in it, gasping for air.
It’s everything he’s been bottling up, all of it pouring into me, threatening to suffocate me. But I hold on, drawing it in, absorbing the worst of it, until I can’t take any more.
The vision overtakes me with the force of a gale, sweeping me into a whirl of memories. Taron’s memories. They flash before me, fragmented yet vivid, each moment bleeding into the next.
Moonlight pours into a long corridor, casting eerie pale beams on the cold stone walls of what looks like a mansion. Taron is younger here, leaner, a teenage boy. His heart thunders, his breath short and ragged. He steals down a staircase, one careful footstep after another, each creak of the wood seeming louder than it should be.
His fists are clenched, nails biting into his palms. He can still feel the residue of something dark in his chest. His stomach is roiling, thoughts flashing back to the pleas of a merchant before his life was snuffed out. Guilt is pressing on Taron like a noose around his throat. The horror of it all has settled into his being, a sickness he can’t purge.
