Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-Chapter 27Arc 8: : The Bitten Heart
We crossed the bridge and once more forged into another stretch of forest. The fiendish trees and moss that moved like a million worms were gone here, replaced by quieter growths of tall willows gray as stone, their bark petrified and cracked to reveal wounds that seemed deeper than the trunks were thick. There was no wind here, no rustle of leaf or branch. The ground was still and dry.
Here and there, edifices of stone peeked through the trees. They looked like mausoleums in a graveyard, and on some I could even make out the faded evidence of writing. Bramble vines grew everywhere, the only source of color in that sepulchral wood, shaded in hues of carmine and amaranth. They all seemed to originate from deeper within, where the dead forest grew darker and the false sun did not stray.
There were gaps in the canopy, but no light above them as though we’d suddenly stepped into an overcast night. It eventually grew dark enough that I had to summon fire onto my axe, using it as a torch as we strode deeper in. I noted the petrified willows were grown at regular intervals, almost like columns in a great hall.
Familiar, I thought. Almost like…
The thought was interrupted when a sound began to break through the quiet. Rhythmic, deep, something I felt in my chest before I heard it with my ears. The steady drumbeat of a great heart.
“You hear that?” Emma asked me.
“Yes. Whatever it is, it’s close.”
The ropes of vein-tinted weed grew thicker and more abundant, until even the smallest strands were large around as my wrist. They pulsed like blood vessels, pumping some kind of fluid. Whatever it was, it caused them to glow dimly with each pulse. The air felt close and hot, humid, like we were walking into the core of a jungle. What I took to be floating motes of ash at first moved more like small insects, only their forms were wispy and indistinct. They shied from me as I drew close with my spirit-fire.
“There’s qliphoth here,” I said.
“Dangerous?” Emma asked. “You didn’t really explain much before.”
I almost spoke around the question again, but paused when I noted how pale Emma’s face was, how she held her broken arm close to her body. I got the sense she mostly wanted a distraction, and there wasn’t any reason not to tell her.
“It’s… I don’t really know what it is. The Table showed it to me after I swore my oath. It grows through the Wending Roads, like some kind of parasite or disease. Where it grows thickly, it can block paths. It changes the spirit world, makes it angrier. We cleared it out where we could, but it would always grow back elsewhere. Now that the Table’s gone, I’m afraid it’s gotten much worse.”
Something flitted through the darkness. I swept my axe to the side, trying to track the movement, but there was nothing. Emma took a step closer to me, her gaze passing over the stone trees with the same wariness as mine.
“It is a natural phenomenon,” Vicar said, surprising me. He hadn’t spoken since Emma’s duel with Sham. “You mortals are like forge fires that never burn out. Your souls are always producing aura. You know the effect your wills can have on the world, I assume?”
“I know that the collective focus of many people can affect the environment,” Emma said. “Change the weather and such, like during the tournament last summer.”
“That is but a trivial side effect, and temporary. It goes much further than that.” Vicar’s eyelights had appeared. They moved about as he studied our surroundings. “Human will, human faith, human fear, human thoughts… It’s all mixed in with your aura, which is always emanating from you. That goes out into the world, just like heat and light leak out from stars. Over long spans of time, it causes changes in your surroundings. The mountain that local villages worship as a god may gain in self-awareness over generations and become godlike. The ghost that peasants fear haunt the well may be given birth by that belief, even if no shade is actually tethered there. Eidolons of your imagination.”
“You make it sound like we create all our own gods,” I commented. Our pace had slowed, something about this place and Vicar’s narrative compelling me not to hurry.
“Not all of them,” Vicar told me. “Mortal-kind is young amongst the powers of existence, and yet you have more influence than you might think.”
“How so?” Emma asked.
Vicar seemed to consider for a moment. “There is a well known principle amongst alchemists, did you know? No energy is ever lost. It cannot be destroyed, only changed in form and redirected. They use this principle in many of their creations. It is the same for auratic energies. Your aura burns from you and becomes od, and the od eventually fades into a deeper layer of existence and becomes the body of the Wending Roads… Once, the Wend circumnavigated all Creation. A highway to worlds and planes beyond this one.”
I recalled then a similar theory lectured to me and the Backroaders by Delphine Roch, when she’d spoken of the makeup of Creation. This seemed to track with that. “I understand it all connected to the realm the Onsolain came from, once.”
All connected to Heaven. It felt strange to say it so bluntly, to talk about it as a fact of cosmic infrastructure. Like the Throne of God was merely a place, a capital like Garihelm or any of the other great cities of the subcontinent, rather than a mythic promise.
“Yes… Once.” Vicar’s ember eye drifted to look at the side of my face. “It was clean and pure for the most part, ever moving, like a river. But when the God-Queen of Urn closed the Wend in order to prevent more demons from entering this world from Onsolem, it became a closed system, the source stopped and the waters turned stagnant. And yet it continues to grow, fed by the spiritual echoes of this world. Where the flow of od grows particularly stagnant and begins to sicken, qliphoth is formed. Consider it like a plug in a drain, letting filth accumulate over time until it becomes thick with foulness.”
The devil’s attention turned forward into the ghastly forest. “I have heard tell that the Briar Elves draw their power from a particularly large concentration of qliphoth. Perhaps the rumors are true.”
“Maybe we’ll see for ourselves soon,” I suggested. The scenery went by us unchanging, an endless corridor of the same gray willows and the same crawling roots, the only change evident in those artery-like growths pulsing through the space. I used them as my point of direction, following them to their origin. They did seem to be converging, and I sensed we drew close to the center.
Emma forced herself along, but I could tell she was in considerable pain.
“Lisette will get you fixed up,” I assured her, glancing back at her sweating face. “I’m sure the others are fine.”
Even as I turned my attention back forward, I heard her slow. That drop in pace and her silence made me pause and half turn to look at her. My apprentice wore a troubled expression, her eyes gone distant and turned down.
“What is it?” I asked her.
She seemed to hesitate, come to a decision, and then met my eye with a calm but stern expression. “You do know that Lisette is spying on us for the Empress, don’t you?”
I returned her gaze steadily, though I felt a kernel of unease. “Rosanna is our ally, and Lisette is our comrade.”
“And yet Rosanna is also co-founder of the Accord and leader of nations,” Emma told me in that same steady tone. “And Lisette has been her agent for the better part of two years. Don’t you find it odd that she handed her over to us so easily?”
I’d believed it was because Lisette’s talents were better suited to our duties than to being Rosanna’s attendant, and because I’d needed the trustworthy help at the time. I didn’t like to think it, but…
Emma had a point. Whatever Rosanna and I might be to one another, we were also Empress and Headsman. And I was not trusted by the Accord, considered at best to be a dangerous asset to be watched and employed where necessary. Markham kept me at a distance, but I had no doubt that if it weren’t for the very dramatic appearance of two Onsolain that day of my trial, he would have ordered my death and dealt with the problem then and there.
And Rosanna probably would have let it happen, grieved, and moved on. I hoped she would do that, because it would have been the smart thing. I knew Rosanna could be emotional and brash, but that was the girl I’d known when we’d both been little more than children, an angry princess in exile seeking vengeance on her enemies and the restoration of her kingdom. She was a calculating woman, and did almost nothing without cause.
Even letting me close to her sons. That too was calculated, a way to bind my loyalty. I’d accepted that, because I knew that behind the manipulations there was some genuine trust and affection. Just like when she’d brought me into her bed the day she knighted me, really.
Even when it was personal, Rosanna Silvering did nothing without reason. And Emma was probably correct.
“Even if so… Does it matter? She’s still our ally, probably our best one.”
“So you’re alright with Lisette passing every word we say and every decision we make to her lady?” Emma asked sharply.
I wasn’t alright with it, though it wasn’t until the question was asked aloud that I came to that decision. “I thought you and Lisette were getting along alright,” I noted. “You seemed chummy enough the last week.”
Emma cleared her throat and straightened, adopting that distant, haughty look she often did when someone else scored a point on her. “It’s not that I find her company… distasteful. She is rather fun to torment, and I think that beneath that mask of self-righteous piety there is a rather complex and fascinating creature… She has a darkness to her, our cleric, and she is more competent than I thought at first.”
She suddenly turned a cold glare on me. “If you tell her I said that, I’ll gut you.”
I held up a placating hand. “My lips are sealed. And I hear a but in all of that.”
Emma sighed. “But… I also don’t let any secret affections I might hold for any of our companions get in the way of good sense. Hendry has nothing left besides this group, and is still mooning over me besides, so I think he’s safe to trust. But Lisette and Penric are another story. Lisette is loyal to the Empress, and Penric was an assassin for the old regime. They also spend a lot of time together, have you noticed?”
When I nodded, she continued in a more intense voice. “At first, I thought they might be lovers. It’s not so uncommon for young women to like older men, and she does tend to him with her Art. But I don’t think it’s that anymore.”
“…No,” I agreed. “You’re right. I’ve noticed something between them as well.”
I had my suspicions as to what it might be, but I wasn’t going to say them aloud until I’d had a chance to investigate myself.
“So long as you see it,” Emma said. “I won’t tell you what to do about it, but I did want to say something while I had the chance. Having a spy in our midst is rather taxing, but best if we’re wary of the fact.”
She did not seem particularly upset at this notion of not trusting our closest allies and friends, but that was Emma. She’d once admitted to me that she felt little sadness over the death of her own parents, and she’d never held much empathy for others. She understood emotions, felt them herself, even perceived them in others, but she struggled to feel for others without putting forth more effort.
I tried not to hold it against her. Emma was doing her best, even though she lacked some fundamental connection with other people, a trait that could make her seem callous, even cruel. Perhaps an inherited Carreon quality, or simply a product of her upbringing.
We’re all broken in our way. Who was I to cast judgment?
“Beware,” Vicar said suddenly, interrupting our conversation. “The Briar is responding to your intrusion.”
Emma and I both tightened our grip on our weapons and put our backs to each other. The darkness of the alien forest wasn’t still anymore, I realized. Things moved in the bottomless wells of gloom between the gray trees.
“I don’t suppose you have a plan?” Emma asked me brusquely. “I’m not sure how much more blood I can afford to lose.”
Something with too many legs skittered through the canopy right above our heads. I bared my teeth in a silent snarl and poured more of my will into my axe, brightening the radius of light around us. Things flinched at the edge of the island of illumination around us, letting out angry hisses.
But it wouldn’t hold them for long, and it would only hold this riffraff. It would not hold other Brothers of the Briar, or the stronger of the dark Sidhe behind them.
“Any ideas?” I asked Vicar.
“Kill a few, and one of the stronger ones might step forth to challenge. Perhaps you can get more information that way. Or perhaps just die. In all honesty, Hewer, we are in a considerably poor position to negotiate.”
Which was probably what the briarfae’s intention was by dragging us here. I focused my will into the beginnings of an Art, holding the shape in my mind until the moment it would be needed, and prepared to fight.
Yet, there was no sudden charge from a horde of nightmarish things. Instead, one of the most disturbing and strange sights I’d ever seen appeared in the distant woods.
It began as a faraway light. It burned red, like a distant ember in the forest, not unlike one of Vicar’s ghostly eyes in his current form. It grew steadily larger, and its shape was difficult to make out — it seemed to keep changing, shifting exactly like a flickering flame. Only, as it grew closer, I realized it was no torch.
I’d once seen a creature from the deep sea preserved in one of Lias’s old studies, and it reminded me of that. An amoeba, almost shapeless save that it formed an approximation of a sphere. But the body changed and deformed as it advanced, bobbing up and down in an almost excited fashion. It moved by shooting out long tendrils of sticky fluid, pieces of its own half-liquid body stretching forth to grab onto branches and tree-trunks, only to reel those lines in.
It looked like a ball of bright red flesh. And it did not produce its own light as I’d thought, but was merely reflecting mine.
It seemed lethargic in its motions, in a way that made me think it should be slow, yet it advanced with startling speed, clearing dozens of feet at once. Though the spherical body seemed almost still and was featureless, the tendrils of flesh it shot out were blurringly fast, shooting from the body and sinking back in with a sickening rhythm. Wherever one of the grappling lines detached from a surface, it left a fleshy mass that bloomed into flowers with snapping teeth.
Even in the time I understood what I was looking at, it was almost on us. “Emma!” I barked, grabbing her attention at the same time I brought my axe up into a guard.
I thought it would shoot out one of the sticky tendrils to pierce or grab at us, but instead three lines darted out far over our heads and the ball-thing moved up into the trees. I tracked the dimly glowing mass, and even as it shot out several lines to center itself in the air, the thing suddenly boiled like hot soup and sent out a swarm of tendrils.
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I extended a hand, and a shield of aura in the shape of a screaming skull appeared between us and the creature. The tendrils struck it and burst into flame, recoiling from the impact.
Never lead with your Art, I’d told Emma, but there were exceptions to every rule. For example, if you faced an arcane attack or supernaturally powerful creature that couldn’t be abjured with mere steel and muscle, then it was often necessary to counter with your own magic. This thing was nothing natural, and I didn’t bother trying to deflect its tendrils with my weapon.
In that same moment, something struck me in the back of my left shoulder. It happened fast, a punch of impact that made me stagger, followed by a warm sensation near the base of my neck. The evil sphere kept moving, having never stopped, and vanished back into the darkness with the same unsettlingly liquid movements with which it had appeared.
I was hit. The blob creature had been a distraction. A blade? An arrow? Whatever it was, it’d gone through the layered plates of my black armor and snapped a link of chain in my hauberk, sinking into flesh with the force of a bodkin arrow.
I would have cursed, but all my focus went on the immediate danger. I spun, trying to find whatever had struck me. But there was nothing there.
“Vicar, can you track it?”
When the devil didn’t reply, I thought at first that he was distracted or had perhaps returned to his intermittent states of torpor. They could happen even in the midst of combat sometimes, a consequence of maiming him in order to keep him from being dragged back to Hell. But the silence drew my notice, some change in my immediate surroundings causing my hackles to go up.
There was no presence at my side. “Emma?” I asked, turning to where she’d been standing a moment before.
She wasn’t there. Neither did I feel the weight of a fur pelt on my shoulders anymore. The pain in my shoulder remained, but there was no more swarm of hidden monsters in the dark, no nightmare-sphere. I stood alone in the middle of an island of pale yellow light emanating from my axe, surrounded by a sea of petrified woods and silent shadows.
I turned in a slow circle, sweating and breathing heavily, as I swept out with my axe to illuminate the darkness. No sign of my companions. I knew there would be none — their sudden absence couldn’t have happened by a mere lapse of attention. All I saw were stone trees framing endless corridors of empty black. The only sound besides the crackling of fire on my weapon and my own breaths came from that monstrous heartbeat in the near distance.
In the darkness, something laughed.
Do not show fear, I told myself. It’s what they want. Instead, keeping my voice calm and my light burning I said, “Nice trick, but I’ve seen it a hundred times before.”
Shapes moved beyond my sight. Claws scratched against petrified bark, twisted limbs stretched. Voices whispered just at the edge of hearing.
Then one voice curled out from the dark.
You are brave to enter here, mortal man.
Braver than most.
And a fool.
I didn’t quite manage to suppress my shudder. That voice reminded me of Yith. It was old, and held the slow malice of ages. “It was not my intention to intrude on the sanctums of the Briar. I needed information, but it was your choice to drag me here.”
We know who thou art, Headsman.
And what thou seeketh.
And what thou doth desire.
We know they are not the same.
That was a different voice. this one more feminine. It held an oddly muffled, bubbling quality, like it came from underwater. The hand that held my axe tightened in frustration. This game again. “All I seek is information about Rysanthe Miresgal and the Briar King. I want to know where they are.”
And why would we tell thee this?
Thou, who art our cherished enemy?
The first voice again, the old one. “The Alder Table is gone,” I told the briarfae. “The old order has fallen, and a Lord of the Abyss walks our land in the flesh. The war between my people and yours doesn’t have to continue as it has for all these centuries, not when we have a common enemy.”
From every direction, the darkness erupted with the sound of chilling, inhuman laughter. There were far more than just two voices.
Listen to him!
He does not even understand the war he speaks of!
Does not understand anything.
How could he? His kind have all been kept in the dark.
Poor little pawns.
Something moved behind me, close enough to brush the hem of my cloak. I whirled around, a silent snarl on my lips, but it was already gone. There was more inhuman laughter. I could hear the disturbingly liquid noise of that red flesh-sphere moving in the forest still, circling me. It was one of the voices, I realized.
These weren’t merely a mob of lesser faeries. I’d stepped into the midst of the lords of Briar and Bane, into the very sanctum where the wicked elves held council. Each of the monsters who lurked in the dark would be as old and as powerful as Maerlys.
“What did you do with my companions?” I demanded.
They did not answer, and two new voices boiled out of the false night.
You should never have come here, Alder Knight. You will not find what you seek.
…Not until he stops denying it, anyway.
“Denying what?!” I asked the voices in growing anger as they indulged in another round of titters. “Enough of these games! You know why I’m here.”
“I do,” a new voice said, this one soft and lacking the ring of supernatural volume. “I know why you do this to yourself, my knight.”
The rising rage in my veins withered to ash. I turned, a voice in my head shouting not to, yet my body moved on its own.
And she was there. Almost in arm’s reach, dressed as she had been all those years ago in the black-and-white habit of a Cenocaste nun. Her veil and wimple framed a pale, sad face, bright gray eyes peering at me with forlorn sympathy.
“I’m not an idiot,” I said quietly. “I had her shadow in my head long enough to know this trick. She isn’t here, wouldn’t be here.”
“But you want me to be, don’t you?” Fidei smiled and took a step closer, her long skirts rustling with the motion. “Tell me, my love; why didn’t you kill me beneath the cathedral?”
The question stopped me short. I’d taken a step back when she’d advanced. I don’t know why I answered, but the words formed on my lips and I heard my own voice as though at a remove. “I was injured. There was fighting everywhere, it all happened so fast—”
I flinched as a flash of heat surged up my throat and prickled at my tongue, like I’d just swallowed a searing piece of meat straight off the fire.
“You can lie at your convenience now,” Fidei said as she took another deliberate step forward. “But it still burns when you tell lies about what remains close to your heart, doesn’t it? Even well fed, the evil spirits you’ve gathered seek to punish you. Or do you want to punish yourself?”
“You’re not her,” I snapped. “You’re just some Briar nymph wearing her face, and I won’t feel bad about cutting you down.”
“Then do it.” She gestured to my axe, then spread her arms out wide. “Slay me once more.”
I slowly began to raise the axe. Auratic fire still crawled across the black blade.
Was I wrong? Did she know I would be here, arrange this meeting? I’d been waiting for just such a thing, after all.
My scars weren’t hurting. It wasn’t her. This was elf trickery. That fact infuriated me even more, that I could finally see her standing there and speak the words bubbling up in my throat, yet she wouldn’t actually hear them. The irony was sickening.
“What is the purpose of this?” I demanded.
Immortal voices once again spoke from the dark hollows between the petrified trees.
Thy resolve failed thee this last winter, Headsman.
Thou hast allowed this evil to return to this world.
Some sentiment keeps thee from banishing this one spirit from thy soul.
The Heart of the Briar shows the truth of thy own.
Almost as though in demonstration, I could hear that massive heart thump-thumping through the trees, the impacts like deep tremors in the bones of this eldritch place.
Show it to us!
Destroy this shadow of obsession.
It is naught to thee but a parasite.
We are the gardeners of parasites.
Let us free thee.
A test? Or a trick? Some trap, most assuredly, or at best a game.
Look at how he stalls! Finds excuses!
He cannot bring himself to do it.
“You did this twice before,” the false Fidei said to me once the briarfae were done cackling. She still held her arms out wide as though welcoming me for an embrace. “Once twelve years ago, once last winter when you destroyed my shadow. Perhaps a third time will finish it?”
“This won’t be finished until I meet the real you again,” I told the apparition.
“And you wish for that?” She asked. “To see me again?”
When still I hesitated, her eyes narrowed and her voice became harsh. “Perhaps if I wear a less fair face?”
And the clerical vestments burned away as though in a flashfire, smooth skin peeling back to reveal the corpse-complexioned thing beneath. Clawed wings, ill-formed and jointed by monstrous hands, stretched out wide to mirror her open arms, and her wise gray eyes became pools of unearthly silver-green light in pits of black. This form had a pair of curling horns, its naked skin stretched over sharp bones that weren’t quite human. A demoness in truth.
“I know why you wrap yourself in darkness!” The succubus bared its pointed teeth. “Why you compromise your soul and stain yourself at every turn, why you wallow in the ire of this land and let it paint you as the villain!”
She took another step forward, and again I stepped back. If she came close, if she got within my reach, I’d have to…
“Do you think I wanted that?!” Shyora seethed. “Do you believe I wanted to make a monster of you, Alken?”
“Nothing else makes any damn sense!”
The words burst out. The demon went still, stopping both her advance and her tirade. I’d meant to keep my silence, to not give these bastards anything of my truth, but something about this place, about her face, about the cold pit in my chest and that ever-beating heart…
I could barely hear anything else. The voices in the darkness had gone silent. And once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.
“It’s not possible,” I said in a breathless rush. “It’s just not fucking possible that you could… I was no one! An idiot, a bloody-handed brute who did whatever he was told on the off chance it would earn him a scrap of affection! What more could that brainless fool have been to you than a dupe, another tool to use and discard, a soul to eat?”
I couldn’t tell if the heartbeat thrumming in my chest was my own or that other one. Inexplicably, Delphine’s words came back to me then.
Do you regret it? What you did?
And my own words. We were meals to that thing, meals and toys, nothing more.
If you believe that, then why were you crying?
I’d deflected the question then, but a different answer came to me in that moment. I’d grieved because I’d wanted something real. A childish fixation, naive and pointless, and the revelation of Fidei’s true nature broke my heart. But it wasn’t just her. It was Rosanna too, and Lias, my father, my dream of knighthood. The idea that the Alder Table itself was just as corrupt and broken as everything else, that I’d been given to it for the influence and vanity of a proud girl with dreams of empire.
I hadn’t just been betrayed by a demon. That was too easy, too simple an answer, and if it had been just that I think I would have recovered from it and not let it haunt me all this time. No, I’d been betrayed by everything and everyone… And I’d given up. If the world would be so ugly, then I would become something to match it.
Or so I’d thought, but I couldn’t even do that right.
Why was I saying any of this? Here, now, in front of these monsters? These words weren’t for them.
It was this place. That damn heart. I found myself turning towards it, taking a single step and hearing the clatter of my armor and the creak of burnt wood as I tightened my grip on Faen Orgis. It was close… Very close.
And through the shock and the frustration, a new feeling began to rise up. Rage, cold and hot at once, so intense and sudden I nearly choked on it. That anger had been there for a long time, and the wicked spirits I’d allowed into my soul gleefully stoked it.
How dare they? I had things to say and questions to ask when I finally met her again, and having any of that tugged out here against my will in front of this apparition, when it served no purpose and wasted time, enraged me. And that violent hate broke the pall of confusion hanging over me, gave me the strength to fight back against the drowning sensation of this heavy air and that beating heart.
“What are you doing?” The false Shyora asked me. “Look at me, Alken!”
I just wanted it to stop, before I said it out loud, before I—
I took another step, lifted the axe, and threw. It tumbled end over end into the gloom, its shape illuminated by fire and quickly shrinking as it flew. It struck something, though I didn’t see it as darkness crashed in and I lost sight. Another great drumbeat rippled through the forest, the heart beating even faster.
No. It was even closer than that. I brought my now empty hand back and found it, right there beneath my ribs. Pain throbbed through my shoulder, and my hand went back, found the foreign object lodged there. I grasped it, and felt my own pulse quicken.
A flash of blinding pain. Blood bubbled over my hand, drenching it to the elbow. It hurt, and resisted my strength, but I kept pulling.
The thing that’d struck me before. It was a thorn, lodged into my back just to the left of the spine, its tip dangerously close to my heart. They’d poisoned me.
No, I realized. That wasn’t all of it. This thorn was mine, and it had been there for a long time. I needed to pull it out.
I tugged again. It felt like my heart would erupt inside my chest, blow open my ribs and expose me to the world. But I kept pulling, and with a groan and a wrench and a spray of blood I pulled the thorn free. It was large as a dagger, barbed like a snake’s fang and soaked red.
And the sound of the great heart beating through the forest stopped. The pulsing veins began to dim and go still, then blacken and crumble. There was no explosion, no roar of wind or thunder, nothing dramatic. Blood continued to pump out of the open wounded in my chest, but the pain felt oddly distant. I concentrated will into my eyes and was able to see again, just in time to perceive a long trickle of bright, shining fluid, like liquid gold, beginning to stream out of the darkness. It came from the same direction I’d thrown my axe, running like a miniature river between my feet.
The false demon was gone. Everything was silent. I had no thorn in hand, no wound in my chest, and my own heartbeat pounded steady in my ears. Vicar was on my shoulders again, an uncomfortably warm weight reeking of fur and sulfur, and Emma stood a few paces away, looking confused.
“Alken?” She asked me. “Where… I lost you, and then…”
“We were trapped inside a phantasm,” I told her. “Probably since shortly after we entered this forest.”
Vicar’s eyelights flickered into existence lethargically, and I felt him writhe on my shoulders. He’d been caught in it too, experiencing his own hallucinations. The briarfae had waited until we let our guard down, let us acclimate to the space before drowning us in its illusions. The real forest was rotted and full of buzzing flies, those vibrant vines turned sickly and withered now. It stank of slow decay and blood.
“My mother was there,” Emma said in a dazed voice. “And grandmother, and...”
“None of it was real,” I assured her. “Just faerie tricks.”
Wrong.
All three of us turned our attention to that new voice, which hummed out of the darkness in the same direction I’d hurled my axe. There was movement from all around, the depthless shadows between the stone trees suddenly alive with motion. The monsters that’d taunted me had not been illusions at all. They were really there, and one I hadn’t heard yet spoke in a voice dry as desert winds and full of ageless venom. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂
The Briar’s Heart shows you truth.
Truth that you keep locked inside, that which you deny and abhor.
Bitter, festering truth, but it is all yours.
The rustling of feathered wings drifted through the dying forest. I lifted a hand and summoned light, casting away the shadows before us. Twisted, fanged things cringed away as they were revealed, quickly retreating back into darkness. But one form did not retreat. It lurked inside the hollow cavity of a single huge tree. I couldn’t see all of it, just the impression of a shape outlined by the edges of my magic. There, the tips of feathered wings, and there the glimpse of an enormous blinking eye with a narrow pupil and veined sclera.
And more eyes, and more feathers… Those wings, more than I could make out, were folded in protectively as though to hide the form within. And from the gaps between dark feathers, where I might have been able to glimpse a central body in better light, many eyes peered back with an unblinking anger, lidless and mad. Its mass stretched and moved in a disquieting way, as though there were no real connections between any limb, and the eyes were all so large I could have walked on them.
I could not make sense of the shape. It made little sense, just a mound of eyes and black-and-red feathers and thorns that hid inside the hollow of the tree, cringing from us and staring back with that malicious manifold gaze. Liquid that resembled gold melted in a forge trickled out in a ceaseless stream from within the hollow. It formed a pool around the being.
It’s blood, I realized. Golden blood.
My axe lay embedded in the ground before the thing, smoking. It had deflected the weapon, I realized. I wasn’t responsible for its wounds.
“What is that?” Emma asked as she stepped closer to me. “A demon?”
“Nay,” Vicar told her in a darkly serious voice. “That is no abgrüdai. Behold, mortals, the true form of a seraphim of Onsolem.”
And I knew who it was, who she was. I recognized the voice, the particular taste of the creature’s barbed aura.
“It’s Nath.”
