"I ordered you... to leave," he rasps, the words barely more than a metallic vibration against the stone. He tries to push himself up, his massive arm trembling violently before giving out, dropping his chest back against the mosaic.
"You do not get to die for my sins," I tell him, my voice stripped of all hesitation. I kneel beside his waist, my gaze sweeping the intricate lines on the floor. The drawings of ley lines that map the magic of his House.
This is all that I need. The entire, rotting architecture of this manor is the conduit. I am a Purna. The blueprint of this magic is permanently etched into my bone marrow, a horrific inheritance locked within my fractured identity.
I pull the heavy, dark-steel dagger from the sheath at Khaelor’s hip.
"Mireya," Khaelor gasps, his amber eyes widening as he recognizes the lethal, calculated intent in my posture. He tries to reach for me, his corrupted, dead-black fingers dragging across the mosaic, fighting the absolute paralysis of his failing body. "No. I forbid it."
I ignore his rasping command. I grip the blade and pull the razor-sharp edge directly across the palm of my left hand.
The pain is a sharp, brilliant anchor in the freezing room. Blood wells instantly, thick and hot, dripping onto the petrified mosaic.
"You survived a hundred years of the rot," I whisper, looking down into the desperate, agonized gaze of the man I love. "You are going to survive the cure."
I press my bleeding palm directly against the center of the Heart-Stone.
I do not draw with bone-ash or charcoal. I drag my bloody hand across the cold stone, connecting the jagged, missing lines of the overlapping heptagrams directly into the estate's central nervous system. I complete the anchor.
I close my eyes and begin the ancient chant.
The words tear from my raw throat, a heavy, archaic frequency that vibrates in the deep bedrock.The root is severed. The tether is bound to the blood of the caster.The violent extraction begins.
The bedrock violently shudders. The mosaic beneath my knees ignites with a blinding, terrifying violet light. The dead-black tracks marring Khaelor’s ashen-violet skin begin to physically lift from his flesh, drawn upward like a toxic smoke into the vacuum of the open circuit.
I force the recall inward. I demand the magic abandon its designated target and return to its creator.
The curse hits me.
It is not merely a transfer of energy. It is an invasive, necrotic violation. The heavy, rotting magic of the Vanguard massacre slams into my human body with the force of a thousand burning knives. A raw, uninhibited scream rips from my lungs, echoing off the cavern walls.
I open my eyes, my vision blurring with tears of absolute agony.
The warm, inviting undertones of my brown skin are vanishing, rapidly replaced by jagged, pulsing black veins that crawl up my forearms and spread across my collarbones. The heat is apocalyptic. I am taking the century-long starvation of the Venn curse directly into my mortal flesh.
"Mireya!" Khaelor roars, the sound tearing completely through the fading remnants of his paralysis.
I lock my bleeding hand harder against the mosaic, forcing the chant through the searing, obliterating pain, burning alive with the curse I built.
28
KHAELOR
The roar of the violet inferno swallows my scream.
The agonizing, century-old agony in my marrow suddenly, violently reverses. It is an absolute excision. The parasitic weight of the blood curse—the feral, starving beast that has lived in my bones since the day my family turned to ash—is literally ripped from my flesh. The sensation is a hollow, tearing vacuum moving through my internal organs, pulling the poison out through the pores of my skin.
The dead-black tracks marring my ashen-violet arms evaporate. They are dragged upward, pulled through the freezing air of the Heart-Stone chamber like ribbons of toxic smoke, rushing directly into the center of the room.
The rot is leaving me.
My vision clears through the haze of my own failing body, locking onto the epicenter of the extraction. The sight waiting for me is a landscape of absolute horror.
Mireya kneels on the petrified mosaic. The overlapping heptagrams she drew in her own human blood are blinding, projecting a swirling, towering vortex of unadulterated Blackflame around her small frame. She is the conduit. Theheavy, rotting magic of the Vanguard massacre slams into her. I watch, paralyzed by a terror so profound it eclipses a hundred years of dark isolation, as the luminous undertones of her brown skin are swallowed by jagged, pulsing black veins.
She is taking the Venn rot into her own body. She is burning alive from the inside out to balance the ledger of her Purna ancestors.
The unyielding refusal explodes in the hollow void of my chest.
