I didn’t answer with words. Instead, I launched into an attack sequence I’d never attempted outside of practice yards, moving with a fluid grace that came not from my own training but from something else. Something flowing through the claiming mark, guiding my muscles, enhancing my strength. I felt them then. My unexpected brothers across the veil. The beasts who shared Isabeau’s heart with me. Their power flowed into me, savage and pure.
“Father,” I heard Theron say, his voice tight with urgency. “Call off the men. We cannot win this battle against these creatures, and they are helping Alain.”
My father hesitated only a moment before giving the command. “Fall back!” he ordered, his voice carrying the weight of royal authority. “Disengage and regroup at the forest’s edge!”
Those of his soldiers who could still move obeyed instantly, breaking off their hopeless fights against the magical guardians. Some had to be carried, limping on legs hamstrung by clever fox teeth or sporting burns from phoenix fire. None had been killed, I noted distantly, my primary focus still on Gaspard’s increasingly desperate defense.
“Your reinforcements abandon you,” I told him, pressing my advantage as the shadows around him thinned, stretched between too many points of attack. “Your master is occupied with Isabeau. You stand alone.”
“I am never alone,” Gaspard snarled, and the shadows surged upward, enveloping him in a cocoon of darkness that my blade simply passed through. When they receded seconds later, he stood transformed. His hunting leathers had been replaced by armor of what looked like obsidian, each plate edged in crimson that pulsed like heartbeats. His sword had elongated, the metal now black and etched with runes that hurt my eyes to look upon directly.
“The Dark Lord provides for his faithful,” he said, his voice deeper, resonating with power that didn’t belong to him. “What does your witch give you beyond a warm place between her thighs?”
The crudeness of the taunt might have enraged me once. Now it simply confirmed what I already knew. Gaspard had never loved Isabeau. Had never even seen her as human. She had only ever been a prize to him, a possession to be controlled and used.
“She gave me truth,” I replied, standing my ground as he advanced. “She gave me purpose beyond the royalty of my birth. She gave me brotherhood with beings you could never understand.”
“Brotherhood with beasts,” he scoffed, swinging his transformed blade in an arc that would have cleaved me in two if I hadn’t leapt backward. “How the noble have fallen.”
I felt the claiming mark pulse again, stronger now, insistent. A warning? No, an offering. Power waiting to be claimed, if only I would accept it fully. I’d embraced the bond physically with Isabeau, but I’d held back from the magical implications. Had kept one foot in my old world, unwilling to fully step into hers.
No more.
I closed my eyes for just a heartbeat, just long enough to mentally reach for the connection I’d felt when Isabeau had claimed me. The golden thread that linked me not just to her but to the three others who shared her heart. I felt them respond instantly. The oldest with steadfast strength, the middle with clever precision, the youngest with fierce passion. They poured into me through the bond, their essence merging with mine.
When I opened my eyes, Gaspard took an involuntary step backward. I couldn’t see myself, but I felt the change. A golden light emanating from my skin, pulsing in time with the four-part heartbeat of the claiming bond. My sword gleamed with the same light, the ordinary steel transformed into something else, something ancient and powerful.
“Impossible,” Gaspard breathed, true fear flickering across his face for the first time. “The curse prevents them from reaching through. The barrier—”
“Is weakened,” I finished for him, advancing steadily. The bog soil beneath my feet no longer squished and sucked at my boots. Instead, small patches of healthy grass sprouted with each step I took, the corruption receding from the golden light I exuded. “By Isabeau. By me. By bonds you could never understand because you’ve never loved anything but yourself.”
He attacked in desperation, his shadow-blade whistling toward my neck. I parried with ease, the golden light flaring where our weapons connected. His blade hissed and smoked at the contact point, the darkness recoiling from my light like mist before the sun.
“You’re nothing,” he spat, attacking again and again, each strike becoming more frenzied than the last. “A spare prince. A placeholder. Second to your brother, second to those monsters in her heart. Second in everything!”
“And yet,” I replied calmly, blocking each wild swing, “I’m the one she chose. The one she claimed. The one she trusted with her body, her heart, her truth.” I stepped inside his guard, too close for him to use his longer blade effectively. “And you? You’re just the nightmare she’s finally waking up from.”
With a roar of incoherent rage, he abandoned all technique, swinging his blade in a wild arc that left him completely open. Time seemed to slow as I saw my opportunity. The golden light surrounding me condensed around my blade as I drove it forward, straight through the center of his obsidian breastplate.
The armor shattered on impact, black shards exploding outward before dissolving into oily smoke. My blade sank deep into his chest, the golden light racing from the steel into his body, illuminating him from within. His eyes widened in shock, then horror as he looked down at the wound.
“You can’t,” he gasped, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. “I’m protected. My lord promised—”
“Your lord lied,” I said simply, twisting the blade before pulling it free. “As lords of darkness tend to do.”
Gaspard fell to his knees, dark blood pumping from the wound in his chest. But it wasn’t just blood. Shadows poured from him as well, twisting and writhing as they tried to hold his body together, to repair the fatal damage. For a moment, I thought they might succeed. Then the golden light still clinging to my blade seemed to ignite within him, burning through the shadows from the inside out.
He screamed then, a sound no human throat should have been able to produce. His body began to convulse, his back arching at an impossible angle as darkness erupted from his mouth,his eyes, his ears. The shadows coalesced above him, forming a crude approximation of his face, twisted in rage and disbelief.
“What have you done?” the shadow-Gaspard howled, its voice a distorted echo of the man now collapsed on the ground.
I stepped back, watching with grim satisfaction as the last of his life bled out onto the bog soil. “Fulfilled my part of a bargain,” I answered, though I doubted the shadow could hear me anymore. “Just as you fulfilled yours.”
The ground beneath us began to tremble. Subtle at first, then with increasing violence until I had to widen my stance to maintain my balance. From Gaspard’s corpse, cracks spread outward through the soil, revealing not earth beneath but a bottomless darkness that glowed with the dull red of banked coals.
The shadow-Gaspard tried to flee, stretching thin as it reached for the forest’s edge, but tendrils of fiery light shot from the widening cracks, wrapping around it, dragging it back. It screamed again, the sound echoing across dimensions as it was pulled inexorably downward.
“The price for failure,” my father murmured, having approached without my noticing. He stood just beyond the spreading cracks, his face ashen as he watched the shadow being dragged into the abyss. “The Dark Lord does not forgive.”
