Tightens.
Rhordyn moves too fast for me to trace; slashing, stabbing.
Slaying.
He’s a tower of might, severing hissing heads with every cyclonic swipe of his sword, but the blackness keeps wriggling toward him. Piling around him.
Smothering him.
He’s lost in a coiled knot of squirming bodies, and that invisible hand around my neck tightens so much I can barely catch a whistling breath.
Suddenly, I don’t see snakes at all …
I see my darkness erupting through splits in my skin, lashing out at the man I love. I see him in bits all over the ground, his singed flesh plagued with weeping boils, wide eyes unseeing.
Dead.
I seemestanding over him with shadows staining my hands. With my face a twist of anguish as I claw at my chest, trying to delve a hole through my ribs and rip out the pain.
Time slows to a crawl.
That macabre death creature scurries over the edge of my internal chasm and untucks twiggy wings, legs bunched and tail dangling as it flaps my insides into such a rabid stir that every vine and crystal shard and speck of withered remains blows into a storm of toiling rage.
It tips its head andscreams.
I drop my hold on the tree and fall toward a basilisk’s head with a throat-blooding roar, impaling my sword into the crown of its skull—right between its eyes. Forcing the sharp tip past layers of leathery skin and bone before giving way to something soft.
The limp creature thuds to the ground, releasing my weapon with a wet squelch.
My sword becomes an extension of my arm as I hack through the throat of an arching beast, snipping its hiss—picturing another inky vine of scalding death decaying inside me.
Dying.
Another snarling whip of my arm, and I slash a creature straight through the head, cutting its face in two.
I turn on the writhing pile of coiled black bodies, certain I’m down in the depths of my internal chasm, stalking up to that sizzling darkness that does nothing but kill.
Kill.
Kill.
I raise my arms and drive the sword down, hacking at already mangled remains with savage blows that rake through my entire body.
Rhordyn punches free from the pile like a bloody ghoul rising from the dead, shoulders heaving, hands clawing, forging a path through the nest of black and blood—tossing chunks of carrion out of the way until he plants his feet on solid ground.
Still, I slash, slash,slash—mulching guts and gore with every frenzied strike, painting my face and arms and body in a lacquer of red.
But red is better than that sizzling black death.
Red is better.
Red is better.
Red is—
A weight settles on my shoulder.
I spin, snarling, the weapon in my hands colliding with Rhordyn’s sword in a clang of clashing metal, the cross so violent I feel the strike rattle my bones, blood splashing off our blades, peppering his hard features.
