7. Malachar

7

MALACHAR

I plunge into the gloom of the enchanted wood, the ancient trees closing ranks behind me like silent sentinels. The air is thick with the scent of loam and leaf-mold, shot through with the acrid tang of magic. The forest is old, steeped in power and memory, and it does not take kindly to intruders.

But I am no mere trespasser. I am Malachar, Lord of Blanchmire, master of the dark arts. The very shadows part before me like curtains of ragged silk, the twisted roots writhe away from my path. The wood may not welcome me, but it knows better than to bar my way.

I reach out with my arcane senses, seeking the brilliant flare of Kira's aura. It pulses at the edge of my awareness, a guttering candle flame against the vast dark. I feel her fear, her desperation, a jagged lance of empathic pain that spurs me to swifter motion.

I have to find her. Have to reach her, before the denizens of this place snuff out her fragile mortal light. The thought of losing her, of that vivid spirit winking out of existence, fills me with a cold, clawing dread utterly foreign to my experience. When did this mortal, this mayfly creature, come to mean so much?

I shake off the errant thought, fixing my will on the task at hand. The terrain grows more treacherous as I forge deeper into the wildwood, the trees gnarled and hunched like arthritic giants, the undergrowth a knotted tangle of briars and bracken. Nameless things skitter and slither in the peripheral gloom, malevolent eyes glinting from thickets and hollows. But they do not dare approach, sensing the power that ripples from me in black waves. I am anathema to them, a thing of dread and shadow too dark even for this tenebrous realm.

All at once, Kira's aura flares like a beacon, laced through with shards of sheerest agony. A growl tears from my throat, raw and ragged. They have her. They are hurting her. The knowledge ignites a conflagration of rage in my shriveled heart, searing away the shroud of cold control.

I explode into a clearing ringed by towering oaks, their boles pitted and blackened. At its center squats a mound of earth and stone, thrumming with a miasma of dark magic. A hedge beast's stronghold, its glamor-woven walls pulsing like diseased flesh.

I don't hesitate. I reach out with my power, seizing the fabric of the glamor, and rend. The stronghold's wards buckle and shatter, the illusion sloughing away like rotted skin. Beneath is a squat keep of basalt and bone, pulsing with pustulant light.

Baleful red eyes kindle in the arrow-slits as I stride towards the grotesquely carved door, a hulking slab of worm-eaten wood. Clawed hands grasp at me from murder-holes, grasping vines lash from the chinks in the stone. Gritting my teeth, I let the power build, the pressure of it swelling in my chest until I feel like I might burst from my own skin.

With a roar, I unleash it, a tidal wave of raw sorcery that atomizes wood and stone alike. The keep's front explodes inward, spraying a hail of jagged shrapnel. Screams echo from the bowels of the structure, high and shrill and bubbling with agony.

Good.

I stride through the blasted ruin of the entrance, tendrils of smoke curling around my feet. The keep's interior is a labyrinth of narrow corridors and cramped chambers, the walls slick with nameless fluids. The stench of rot and ancient primordial horrors hangs heavy in the stagnant air.

But beneath it all, tantalizingly close, I sense Kira. The pearlescent shimmer of her aura, shot through with black veins of pain and terror, is like a hook behind my breastbone, reeling me inexorably in.

I follow that ineffable tug, winding deeper into the fetid heart of the stronghold. Twisted creatures lurch from the shadows, all gnarled limbs and fanged maws and eyes like pustules. They die in sprays of ichor and hoarse screams as I paint the walls with their viscera, my power lashing out in ebony arcs.

At last, I come to a door at the end of a hall, the worm-eaten planks pulsing with a nacreous sheen. Kira's aura seeps from the cracks like luminous blood. I feel her fading, her life force guttering like a candle at the end of its wick.

I don't bother with the handle. I blast the door to kindling with a flex of my will, striding through the splintered wreckage.

And then I see her, and the world tilts on its axis.

She lies on a slab of pitted stone, her limbs spread eagle, her wrists and ankles bound with barbed thorns that drip slow runnels of blood. Her skin is wax-pale, her lips blue, her eyes wide and glassy with a terror beyond sanity. And crouched over her, a needle and thread clutched in bony fingers, is a figure out of a nightmare.

It is vaguely man-shaped, but only in the way a stick figure scrawled by a mad child resembles a human. Stick-thin limbs clad in motley rags of lichen and fungi, a gash of a mouth bristling with needle teeth, eyes like pits of nighted madness.

As I watch in horrified revulsion, it lowers the needle to Kira's face, its intent hideously clear. To sew those fathomless buttons into her eye sockets, to make her a gruesome doll for its collection.

I snap. Rage, cold and crystalline, detonates in my chest like a black sun. I scream, a wordless howl of fury and anguish, and the sound is like the ending of worlds.

The hedge beast's head snaps up, its eyes widening as it beholds its death hurtling towards it. It leaps back, hissing like a scalded cat, but far too late. A lash of sorcery, honed to an infinitesimal point, punches through its wasted chest like a lance of obsidian with such great force it pins the beast to the wall, it's legs kicking as it dangles from the end of that ebon skewer, twitching and mewling, its needle and thread tumbling from nerveless fingers.

I clench my fist and the lash of power knots, barbs of un-force hooking and tearing. The beast screams, a high, bubbling wail, as the life is ripped from its anathema flesh in gobbets of shimmering essence. It crumples like a marionette with its strings cut, a dried husk, empty and fading.

In a heartbeat, I'm at Kira's side, my hands shaking as I slice through her bonds. She slumps into my arms, a fragile weight, her head lolling back. Her skin is cold, so terribly cold, and for a heart-stopping moment I think I'm too late.

But then she stirs, a thready groan escaping her cracked lips. Her eyes flutter open, hazy and unfocused. "Ma... Malachar?"

"I'm here," I croak, my voice hoarse with an emotion I dare not name. "I've got you. You're safe now."

Her eyelids droop, consciousness slipping away again, but not before I catch a gleam of something in those pain-dulled depths.

Something like... relief.

Gratitude.

Trust.

At the edge of a moonlit glade, I pause, looking down at Kira's pain-pinched face. In the argent light she could be carved from alabaster, a saint martyred on the altar of my arrogance.

"Forgive me," I rasp, my voice cracking on the unfamiliar syllables. When was the last time I asked forgiveness from anyone, let alone a mortal stripling? But holding her now, feeling the slow, steady thrum of her heart against my own silent chest, the words feel strangely right in my mouth.

Forgiveness.

Mercy.

Alien concepts, anathema to everything I am, everything I have ever been.

And yet, looking at her, I feel the stirrings of something long buried, long atrophied. Something suspiciously akin to... humanity.

I shake my head, dismissing the maudlin thoughts. Clearly, this mortal chit is addling my wits, making me prey to sentiment and weakness. I will have to guard against such lapses in the future.

But for now... for now, I will return her to the haven of the Blanchmire, to heal and mend. And maybe, in the watching silence of the morrow's dawn, I will find the words to tell her... tell her...

Ah, but that is a quandary for another time.

Cloaking us both in a veil of shadow, I set out into the whispering wild, my precious burden clutched tight against my unbeating heart. I am Malachar, Lord of Midnight. And I will let no harm befall that which is mine.