RE: Monarch

But both his arms were armored in black chitin that reflected the constant blasts of fire and electricity. Cruel black blades jutted from the elbows of the cauldrons, the fingers of his hands extending into vicious claws. Shadow wrapped around him like a slinking, malevolent wreathe, and jagged horns formed a strange, oversized crown around his head. He floated in the air, several feet above the ground.

Ephira and Ralakos saw him simultaneously and stopped short.

Ralakos looked terrified.

The arch-fiend looked in my direction and I ducked down behind a boulder on the outskirts of the battlefield, invisibility be damned. I felt his eyes, searching, scalding, like the heat of a lumen searchlight.

The heat dissipated. And I peeked up over the rock just in time to see the creature move. His hand barely left his side.

Ephira fell, clutching her neck, throat slit with a crimson gash.

Ralakos tried to cover her, but the archfiend pushed him back. Every time Ralakos tried to form a spell, the fiend moved his left hand with a dark glow, and Ralakos’s spell fizzled out.

Ralakos pulled his sword and imbued it with a glowing white light. The fiend didn’t try to cancel it, just watched with muted interest, like a predator observing trapped prey.

My hand squeezed on the hilt of my sword. I’d coated it in rose oil beforehand, but I knew from my experience with Kastramoth that demon-fire would do next to nothing for me in this situation. I had my alchemical flash powder and molten smoke, but Ralakos was surrounded by a legion of demons. They weren’t waiting politely, either. Every time he would drift too close to the edge of the circle, they would swipe at him.

Ralakos dove at the arch-fiend, sword swinging in impossibly fast patterns only to be slapped out of the air. He landed on his side, and the arch-fiend’s hand glowed blue, forcing Ralakos into a kneeling position.

“Take him.” The arch-fiend’s voice was loud enough that I felt it resonate in my lower back, a vibrating fire that shuddered down my spine and through my sciatic nerves.

Through the terrifying fog, I had enough conscious thought left to realize the discrepancy.

They were taking Ralakos captive. Why?

Logically, it had to be him. All other possibilities had been slaughtered. Ephira was close to Ralakos in skill, if not stronger. So, why take him?

The arch-fiend’s head snapped over towards me. I dove to the ground and swore when I realized I could see my hands.

The invisibility had worn off. In a shaking, sweating panic, I pulled the teleportation scroll from my side and unrolled it, pouring mana into the rune. It must have taken only seconds to fill, but each one ticked by agonizingly slowly.

I felt that spotlight heat on the back of my neck again.

Slowly, I looked up. The arch-fiend was watching me wordlessly, floating above the rock.

”Don’t make me chase you.”

My entire body vibrated with the sound. For a moment, I almost considered it. It was over. But then I remembered what Nethtari had said about demons and royal blood. Somehow, I didn’t think they would just let me die. The random Greater Demon that killed me the first time in the enclave likely did so on instinct.

This one was different.

There would be other things in store for me.

I finished channeling. There was a snapping whoosh and I felt my body being flattened and pulled all at the same time. For a moment, the arch-fiends face disappeared, and I was pulled into a shimmering blue light.

Then, from below, I felt pain. A monstrous black hand had reached through the distortion and grabbed my ankle. It yanked me backward, and it felt like the skin over my entire body might tear itself loose from my muscles and deglove.

I hit the ground, a whimpering, shivering mess. I was back behind the same boulder as before. The scroll had failed.

Two demons hauled me up by my arms. They cackled and giggled like sadistic children. The arch-fiend looked on, impassive, as they dragged me away.

“I told you not to run.” The arch-fiend’s eyes bored into me.

----

I hung upside down from a chain, slowly swaying from side to side. The chamber was somewhere under-ground. For now, the agony had receded into the cold, cool, annals of shock. Droplets of blood trickled down the back of my neck through my hair, dripping steadily onto the floor.

I had thought that I no longer feared death. That pain—while horrible and never something I could ignore—could eventually be shrugged off. After I died, the pain would go away. It was rational. What had happened with Kastramoth happened because everything was still so new. I wasn’t used to it yet.

I was wrong.

I think, it’s probably better to leave some of the details sparse. I’d rather not relive them, any more than you want to hear them. But I can’t just omit what happened to me completely. So much of that night has stayed with me, even after everything else.

The sound a ligament makes when it is severed.

How the open air feels on the uncovered nail-bed of a finger.

The metal scrape of pliers on teeth.

How it feels to breathe when you no longer have a nose.

The unbearable pressure of a thumb on an eye, and the squelching sound it makes as it ruptures.

The sound of my voice, begging for it to stop, only I don’t remember speaking the words, only hearing them.

I was reminded that no matter how many times, tens, or hundreds of times I told someone that I had lived more than one life—that was why my soul was strange, why something about me was off—that they would never remember, and take the lapse in memory as silence.

And eventually, I learned to identify that strange peeling sensation as the mind disconnects from the body and watches, as someone you don’t know is brutalized by someone who doesn’t matter, watched by another someone whose name you cannot recall.

”You have to remember, Cairn.”

I blinked. Sunlight streamed down between the trees.

Startled, I tried to sit up. Soft hands pushed me down. Lillian’s chocolate brown eyes stared down at me through a canopy of mussed hair.

It was one of the fields we frequented for picnics, far from the castle, about a mile from the Everwood proper. It was Auburnswell, likely the first few weeks, as the leaves had faded to burnt orange but had not yet begun to fall.

“I’m dreaming.” I said.

“Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. Does it really matter?” Her voice was music. I looked down at myself. The skin on my left arm was intact. My fingers were whole and uncrushed. Over a distant hill, the distinct trill of a pine warbler echoed across the clearing.

“What matters is, you have to remember.” Lillian insisted. Her fingers danced across my forehead.

“Remember what?”

“The name of the arch-demon.”

As soon as the words ‘arch-demon’ were spoken my head began to ache. I looped an arm over my forehead, grimacing. “I’m trying.”

“I know you are.” Lillian said. “My dear, sweet, forgetful Cairn.”

“I’m not the forgetful one here,” I groused at her. “Miss apothecary-who-never-remembers-what-her-ingredients-are-called.”

“True. I’ve forgotten the name of a plant or two—”

“—Or two.” I chuckled at the understatement.

“But you, my darling, are much worse. You have forgotten more than most people have lived.”

I tried to sit up and look at her. “What does that mean?”

Lillian stayed silent. Her dress had slipped down her left shoulder, revealing a mass of freckles that speckled her collarbone. It was a familiar sight, one that had once filled me with longing and invited my lips.

But now that feeling had dulled to mild throb.

I looked away, into the forest, sadness building in my chest.

“Do not feel guilty my love.” Lillian hugged my arm to her chest, planting tender kisses down my shoulder.

“How can I not?” I whispered.

“Look at me.” She took my chin in her hand and tilted my head towards her. “You will always be my Tristan. And I will be here for you, if you need me. That will never change. But I am no longer your Eloise.”

I wanted to deny it. But it was true. My mind had been so full of magic, and languages, and demons, that I had not thought of Lillian in months.

“If I remember,” I asked, my voice catching, “Do I have to go back?”

“Yes.”

“Can I just stay with you here, instead?”

“You can.”

“But you’re saying I shouldn’t.”

“Yes.”

I laid back on the blanket, staring up at the cloudless sky. Slowly, I breathed in the mana, letting it fill me, the chaos of my mind fading into serenity.

“His name… is Ozra.”

I snapped back into the underground chamber the second the name left my lips. Everything hurt. I tried to scream, but a bloody, bubbly hack came out instead. I continued drawing the mana, trying to clear my mind and only partially succeeding. With my remaining eye, I panned the room.

There was a table with bloody implements to my right.

They’d tied my wrists together with ropes, as they were two swollen for manacles.

Immediately, I tried to summon the spark, but it fizzled out.

After what felt like hours, I managed to free a hand

The door creaked open and I began to whimper. A small body was tossed through, legs and feet bound.

A demon stepped through the doorway—it was one of shadowy greater demons, the same sort that had killed me the first time. She pulled the hood off the infernal’s head.

“Guess who came looking for you.” The demon whispered.

Only then did I see his face.

Jorra was hyperventilating. His eyes were dyed an excruciating pink, and trails of snot dripped down from his nose onto his chin.

“Jorra.” I said. It came out more like “Jooaaa.”

Jorra started weeping, his eyes glistening in the dim light. “Cairn? Cairn! Please. Please. Tell me you have a plan. Cairn they’re going to kill me if you don’t tell them what they want to know.”

I froze. He was bound, I was bound. My gaze went to the tools on the plate.

“Ki. Thh Staa.”

Kick the stand.

“What?” Jorra asked, his eyes wide, “Oh my god. Oh, gods. What did they do to you? Cairn, your face—“

I repeated it again, and this time he got it.

With a bit of rolling a maneuvering, he could kick it an inch or two towards me. Though my whole body screamed, I began to shift my weight from side to side, swinging the chain, arm outstretched desperately. The thumb and index finger on my hand were both still good, so it’d be less of a grab, more of a pinch.

I heard the demons voice outside. She was talking to someone, their voices carrying a low, mirthful tone.

Metal clinked beneath my fingertips. I was aiming for a saw, anything to cut through my binds but came up with the short, sharp blade of a scalpel instead.

I swore, and started trying awkwardly to cut through the rope that held my other hand, the blade biting into me repeatedly as I sawed. Slowly, the hope drained out of Jorra’s face.

He saw it before I did. We weren’t getting out of this.

I heard the clink of keys outside the door.

There was only one way I could help Jorra now.

“Clo yoh eyes.”

Close your eyes.

It comforted me that he listened.

No one saw me cut my own throat.

It took two tries.

The first time I pulled back right before the vein. The second time the blade struck true and warm red gushed down my throat, past where my nose used to be, into my eyes and splattered in a torrent onto the floor.

I heard Jorra cry out before the world went black.

Again.

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