The energy battering the door from the inside is not the chaotic, defensive output of the relic. It is the blood curse.
It ismycurse. The exact same necrotic, black-gold rot that courses through my veins. But it is not originating from me.
I close my eyes, expanding my senses, letting my arcane awareness sink through the heavy wood and into the room beyond.
I feel her. She is trapped in the center of a nightmare, her mind violently thrashing in the dark. I feel the terror, the guilt,the absolute, blinding rage of the dream radiating from her sleeping form.
And the curse is answering her.
Every time she shifts in her sleep, every time a spike of fear spikes in her mind, the ambient magic of Venn Manor surges in perfect, terrifying synchronization. The house is not reacting to the anomaly of a human presence. The blood curse—the magic that annihilated my family, the rot that has imprisoned me for a century—is actively responding to the cadence of her subconscious.
The breath slowly leaves my lungs.
I stand before the cracking door, the absolute, horrifying truth settling into my bones.
I am not the master of this cataclysm. I never was. I am only the vessel it infected.
Mireya’s nightmare ripples through the magical lattice once more, and the floorboards beneath my boots splinter.
I am not in control tonight. She is.
And a question rings in my ears, over and over: How can she do this?
11
MIREYA
Itaste the ash before the fire reaches me.
The air is stripped entirely of oxygen, replaced by a dense, metallic fog of vaporized blood and scorching heat. The chanting echoes against my eardrums—a cadence of grief, sharp and absolute, vibrating through the bones of my skull. Shadows writhe at the periphery of an obsidian-black inferno. Elders with charred skin and glowing, hollow eyes sway in a perfect, agonizing rhythm. They don’t look at the flames. They look directly at me.
Anchor the rot,a voice rasps, echoing from the marrow of my own bones.Give it a home.
My hands plunge into the scorched earth. The soil is wet with something thick and hot. I am dragging the final line of the geometric circle, the raw magic tearing through my veins with all the force of a dying star?—
My spine violently arcs.
I wake with a harsh gasp, the heavy air of the bedchamber rushing into my starved lungs. My flailing hand strikes the heavy iron lantern resting on the bedside table. It hits the floor witha deafening clang, the shattered glass scattering into the pitch-black darkness.
A shockwave violently expands from my chest.
It strikes the walls of the room with the mighty force of a siege engine. The timber framing the ceiling shrieks. Heavy chunks of plaster and necrotic dust rain down onto the tangled sheets. All around me, the dormant Blackflame sigils carved into the masonry ignite. They do not burn with the steady, protective warmth I witnessed in the dining hall; they flash with a blinding, erratic gold, sputtering like starved torches before violently shifting to a toxic, corrupted violet.
The heavy oak door to my bedchamber splinters inward.
Khaelor is already there. He does not cross the threshold; he is the eye of the storm. He wears only a pair of dark trousers, his chest bare, his silver-white hair wildly unbound. The black-gold ichor mapping his skin is completely feral, weeping a radiant, lethal light that illuminates the thick dust choking the air.
He drops to one knee, slamming his bare, corrupted palm against the cracked threshold.
"Hold fast," he commands, the gravel-strewn vibration of his voice fighting the roar of the unstable magic.
He forces his own corrupted will into the foundation. The air sizzles, the sheer atmospheric pressure dropping so rapidly my ears pop. He is bleeding his own power into the erratic floor sigils, wrestling the manic, violently waking house back into a state of dormancy. For ten agonizing seconds, the friction between his curse and the room’s ambient rot threatens to tear the floorboards apart entirely.
Then, the erratic violet light sputters. The sigils fade back into the stone. The heavy vibration in the walls ceases.
Khaelor rises slowly. The sheer exertion of containing the cataclysm leaves his chest heaving, the muscles of his torso taut and gleaming with a fine sheen of sweat. He steps closer to me.The searing heat radiating from his skin is a simmering, heavy gravity that demands my total submission.
His eyes lock onto mine. The predator is awake, and he is looking for the source of the blood in the water.
