01 - Defenders of Ulthuan
Page 33
Nightly his violation continued, pleasured and tormented by the weakness of his flesh and tortures that left his body unmarked, but left nightmarish scars upon his mind. He was plunged deeper into the abyss of madness than any mortal should ever go until his sanity began to crack and buckle at the seams.
He screamed himself hoarse, forgetting his name and past, everything that made him Caelir; brother of Eldain and husband to be of Rhianna. His mind detached from his history and he was reduced to a frame of meat and bone without intellect, reason or memory as magical tendrils wormed their way into his mind to plant a seed.
Only emotion remained: anger, hatred and fear…
And when there was nothing left of him but the last fragment of his self, he was brought back, the building blocks of his psyche rebuilt enough for him to function as a sentient being. He resisted, unwilling to face the horrors he had just lived through, but he felt the touch of magic as those memories of pain, darkness and manipulation were closed off, hidden beneath enchantments of such cunning that they could only be released by secret commands or specific magic.
Dreadful nightmares plagued him as he lay weeping in his cell, but as the magic took hold within his mind, he slept more soundly, lost in the wilderness of his mind as new thoughts and talents—music, art, poetry and song—were seeded within him.
Still he was but a mass of emotion and selective memory, and only as he had been held above a heaving ocean on the deck of a black ship that pitched and rolled in a shimmering fog had the last shreds of intellect and reason been returned to him.
Then he was falling and cold liquid filled his lungs as he hit the water and sank beneath the waves. He struggled to the surface and coughed a heaving breath of saltwater.
A fragment of timber detritus bobbed next to him and he gratefully seized it.
Thunderous booms echoed from the cliffs as surf crashed against rock and exploded upwards in sprays of pure white. The icy, emerald sea surged through channels between rocky archipelagos in great swells, rising and falling in foam-topped waves that finally washed onto the distant shores of a mist-shrouded island…
Caelir let loose a howl of pain and betrayal as the memories buried within him surfaced in a torrential rush at the magic of the Everqueen. Time slowed and his focus narrowed as he gripped the hilt of the dagger and saw the beautiful ruler of Avelorn reach for him with outstretched arms.
He saw the pleading look in her eyes and wept bitter tears to see her so anguished.
Her very presence was anathema to the thing at his side and the heavy scabbard of black metal disintegrated in the face of Isha’s power to unmake the baubles of Chaos…
Where before he had held a sheathed weapon that could not be drawn, he now held a triangular sectioned blade of crimson iron that reeked with the blood of a thousand victims and the evil bound within it.
The ground beneath him blackened and the trees around him died in the blink of an eye as the power of its evil rotted them to the core. Birds dropped dead from the trees and the elves of Avelorn cried out as they felt the diabolical presence within the blade.
Caelir fought to resist the impulse to raise the weapon, but his limb was no longer his own.
The weapon smoked, dark tendrils of magic seeping from the blade as the daemonic power within fought to resist the Everqueen’s purity.
Everything around him was moving as though in a dream, with glacial slowness and terrible inevitability. A trio of riders arrived at the edge of the clearing around the Everqueen’s pavilion and Caelir felt as though a blazing fist had seized his heart.
One rider he did not recognise, an elf maid with a greatsword sheathed across her back.
But the others… oh, the others…
Rhianna.
Eldain.
Hot anger surged in him and the dagger in his hand fed upon it, drawing on the well of hatred that had been stoked within him to sustain its blasted existence in this realm of healing magic.
Caelir heard someone shout his name, the sound drawn out and slow.
He saw Eldain, now knowing him as his brother and not some monstrous doppelganger.
He saw the betrayal his own flesh and blood had visited upon him.
Caelir screamed as the smoking, daemonic weapon thrust itself into the Everqueen’s chest.
To be concluded.
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