Blessed Monsters

by Emily A Duncan

  Malachiasz needed it. It belonged to him. It would be so easy. There were only the roots of the tree and the worm-eaten flowers and the thrum of power. He needed to stop the singing. If he didn’t, the singing was going to kill him. His mouth flooded with saliva, teeth sharpening to iron nails.

  Fingers grasped at his sleeve. He shrugged them off.

  He rested at the edge of a precipice. He could hear his name and tried to reach for it. If he lost his name, there would be no coming back. He squeezed his eyes shut. He had no control; he’d never had control. He wasn’t strong enough to fight back. He didn’t want to.

  He wanted the singing to stop. He wanted to taste the poison of power.

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  At the end of everything, Serefin would remember that he had tried. He had done all he thought possible, but nothing reached his brother’s ears. He was dimly aware of Kacper pulling him back, and he let him, not wanting to be near what was to come.

  Malachiasz had shrugged off the chains binding him and was at the tree. There was nothing human in the way Malachiasz moved. A monster preparing to strike, tension coiled in every line of his body.

  Ivan’s eyes opened. Malachiasz grabbed his head, claws digging into his skin, and kissed him, hard.

  There was blood. So much blood. Serefin couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Kacper made a low moan, turning and pressing his face against Serefin’s neck.

  But Serefin did not look away. When Malachiasz slit the man’s throat with his teeth, Serefin did not blink. When he did exactly what a god of entropy would wish of him, Serefin made himself watch. Someone needed to bear witness to this desecration.

  It’s not Malachiasz, he thought.

  But he wasn’t entirely certain that was true.

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  The number of corpses that crawled out of the swamps overwhelmed them. They didn’t have an army to protect the city, and an army was what emerged from the darkness. Rashid had let out a horrified breath and Nadya had gripped her voryens a little tighter.

  After, it all fell apart so quickly.

  The corpses swarmed the city walls, keeping the soldiers distracted as the swamp witches struck. Nadya had been in battle before. Her hands had been stained with enemy blood. She had fought Vultures and survived. But this was different. Something here was at work against the Kalyazi, against her.

  She and Rashid left the walls on Katya’s order to take care of the witches or get somewhere safe. The latter was hardly an option, so go after the witches who had breached the city walls they would.

  They were in an alleyway, the dirt road muddy and thick beneath their boots as it rained. Vines sprouted, abrupt and sharp with thorns, from the walls, cutting off their path.

  Fire. She needed fire. But Krsnik would never respond to one of her prayers again.

  So she pulled it from herself, and hoped it would not kill her.

  There was a bewildering feeling of being torn apart, of having her insides rearranged. With a spark, her hands went up in flames.

  Rashid, hacking at the vines with his sword, stepped back so Nadya could plunge her hands into the tangle of thorns. They hissed in protest, the rain diminishing her efforts, but she pressed harder, focusing, until the vines became an inferno.

  She glanced at Rashid and backtracked through the alley. The witch at work would make herself known soon.

  As the noises of battle flared through the night, Nadya realized quickly that she was being toyed with. A chasm would open in the streets before her and Rashid, only to close behind them. They would go down an alley to find it swarming with rats. Everywhere they turned was something else, some magic, and no witch behind it.

  The city had become a maze and they were trapped inside.

  The sounds of a skirmish came from a few buildings down, and Nadya, frustrated, chased after it. She plunged face-first into darkness.

  The rain was gone. The lights from the torches, gone. The screams and shouts and clash of iron, gone. An unreality so all-consuming that Nadya faltered.

  A laugh rang, soft and playful, at the shell of her ear. She lashed out, blade catching on nothing.

  Nadya closed her eyes, tried to slow the pounding of her heart in her throat, tried to reach for something within the nothing.

  There was a shift. Nadya wavered on her feet, dizzy from a rush of power that was not hers and that was not the unreality around her. She shook her head. She knew this. She had shoved it away, forgotten, let it rot from disuse. Yet power flooded through the tether, impossible to ignore.

  It couldn’t be.

  He’s alive.

  Someone was calling her name. She turned, trying to find the voice because it sounded like Rashid and where had he gone?

  She could feel Malachiasz, near enough to touch. She didn’t want to press farther—there was no time, something brushed against her arm and pain flared all the way down to her hand. He was so terribly cold, panicked and scared and—and—

  Nadya drew away, her stomach turning. She needed to press through the darkness, pull light from somewhere, and soon, but she didn’t know how to mold the amorphous threads of power into what she needed. Fire was easier, she turned to that instead, her palms sparking.

  Another glancing brush, this time across her stomach. She doubled over in pain, warmth blooming across her middle. A laugh. A whisper of words she couldn’t understand and another flare of pain.

  She was too warm and too cold all at once. A starburst of pain struck her back and she staggered. Something jagged and iron protruded from her chest. Distracting—she needed to focus on—she needed—

  Nadya stumbled. The unreality fell and the sound of violence was deafening around her, until it wasn’t. Everything was tunneling back into darkness. She blinked hard and tried to focus, but it hurt, everything hurt. Someone was screaming her name, but she couldn’t—there wasn’t—

  Her knees hit the ground. She was very cold. It was very dark. And the rain looked like blood.

  MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ

  Copper and iron and ashes. He had tasted power before; had tasted divinity, madness.

  He had come to think that he could play this game the same as the gods. He had taken that kind of power into himself and survived. He had killed one of them. He would be feared.

  He was in over his head and he was going to drown.

  This was older, darker, and much more powerful. This was the roots of the trees buried deep within the earth. This was the depths of the water that had never been touched by mortals. This was the space between the stars that cascaded eternally and wound its way back to itself.

  Malachiasz was only a boy.

  He choked on blood and power. He lost his name and his control and everything that kept him Malachiasz and there was no one to pull him back.

  The man hadn’t fought. He had been too numb with power he wasn’t used to touching. It had been so very easy.

  His entire body shook with magic.

  And if this was what Chyrnog wanted of Malachiasz, he could not parse whether he felt horror or exultation. Whether this was the power he had been searching for his whole life and finally had, or if it was too far, too much, not worth everything he would be destroying in the process.

  (But what did he even want with this power? It wasn’t his to use and he knew that—he did—but it tasted so good and he had wanted it for so long.)

  He didn’t care about the horror. The blood staining his teeth. The flesh underneath his fingernails. He knew that he should. He knew that he needed to.

  He wasn’t strong enough to fight Chyrnog’s will, so why not enjoy it?

  Then something snapped. Malachiasz was jerked back into the semblance of consciousness. Two words, devastating, lonely, repeating again and again and again through his mind:

  She’s gone.

  18

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  A tongue of deceit, a spirit of mischief, a desire to foster chaos, these are the things that make up Velyos.


  —The Books of Innokentiy

  It was a full day before Malachiasz’s seizures stopped. Serefin kept wiping blood from his remaining eye and brushing away moths, keeping his distance from Malachiasz’s chaos and wishing there was something he could do. He understood the helplessness of losing everything when a god decided their will was more important than yours.

  The Kalyazi boy returned, eyeing what remained at the foot of the tree with a slight, feral smile. He pushed a stack of blankets into Serefin’s hands with an unfathomable look toward Malachiasz before leaving, locking the door behind him with a resounding clank.

  When Malachiasz’s seizures quieted to trembling, Serefin carefully draped a blanket over his thin frame before returning to the safety of the other side of the room. Kacper sat there, bleakly staring at the tree with a moth-eaten blanket around his shoulders.

  “We’re going to regret this,” Kacper said.

  “You say that as if I’m not already regretting it,” Serefin replied, sitting next to him and tugging the blanket over his shoulders. He held his arms out, frowning.

  Kacper glanced at him, lifting his eyebrows.

  “Nothing,” Serefin said. “Just noticing what all this trauma has done to me.” He had never been a particularly imposing person, but he had grown rather slight. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten an actual meal.

  Kacper’s expression wrenched. “How long until he turns on us?”

  “Neither of us has anything that god wants.”

  “That implies Malachiasz had nothing to do with what happened.”

  Serefin hesitated. Malachiasz was ruthless enough to comply with what Chyrnog wanted. Malachiasz was enough to take like that. Especially when it came to power.

  He let the silence go on until Kacper sighed.

  “He’s a liability.”

  “Kacper, we can’t handle what we’ll find when we return to Tranavia.”

  Malachiasz could still use magic. Whatever was making blood magic inaccessible didn’t seem to reach him.

  “You’ll have to deal with the Vultures.”

  Malachiasz was standing before them, skin pallid, a hollowness to his expression that Serefin couldn’t quite work out. He faltered, slumping down to the floor, the blanket clutched around his shoulders. It was difficult to watch him for more than a few seconds at a time as his body twisted.

  “How are you?” Serefin asked, feeling strangely charitable. Malachiasz just looked so miserable.

  “Remember when Elżbieta fed us mushrooms that turned out to be poisonous? I feel a little like that.”

  “You remember that?”

  Malachiasz shuddered through a shift. “I … get pieces sometimes.”

  “You were sick for a week. Threw up on everything, including the cat.”

  “I don’t remember a cat.”

  “Piotr. Father hated him. He was a stable cat with an attitude. I kept bringing him into the palace, much to the dismay of everyone around me.”

  Malachiasz smiled wanly.

  “What was that?” Kacper asked, voice hard, clearly unimpressed by their filial bonding.

  “The destruction of an … awakened one,” Malachiasz said, pitching over and landing on his side. “I’ve decided having more power is a bad thing.”

  “Oh, you’ve finally decided this?” Serefin asked.

  He nodded, burying his face in the crook of his elbow.

  “But that will change the second you feel better, huh?”

  “Probably,” he mumbled.

  Kacper rolled his eyes. “We don’t know what these cultists want now that Malachiasz did as they asked. We don’t know that we can get out of here to make it back to Tranavia. We don’t even know where we are!”

  Malachiasz tilted his face toward them and opened one eye. “Is he always like this?” he asked Serefin.

  “Oh, yes,” Serefin replied warmly, ignoring the all-suffering look Kacper was giving him. “I’d be dead many times over if he wasn’t.”

  Malachiasz responded with a sound of disbelief before hiding from the dim light of the torches once more. Dawn was starting to break through the grimy windows, but it was too early to do much good.

  “And what does that mean, the destruction of an awakened one?” Kacper continued.

  Malachiasz sat up with a groan, cradling his head with long, pale fingers before slowly dropping his hands. He stared at the tree, the fingers of his right hand pressing hard against the scar on his left palm. Serefin frowned as he noticed the metallic sheen of Malachiasz’s claws digging into his own skin.

  “I don’t know,” Malachiasz whispered, standing shakily. “He tasted like ashes. Divinity tastes like copper and ashes. He had … power.”

  “Well, you did make it so we couldn’t ask him any helpful questions,” Kacper pointed out.

  Malachiasz was nonplussed. Serefin shouldn’t be surprised that he wasn’t horrified by what he had done. How much worse had he done during his reign as the Black Vulture?

  “It’s a question we’ll need to answer, in any case,” he said absently. “If magic isn’t like what we thought, if it can appear in someone who previously could not use it … that changes things. That changes everything.”

  Malachiasz’s gaze fell to Kacper’s hip. “May I see your spell book?”

  Serefin glared at Kacper. He shouldn’t have been wearing it when they were captured by the Kalyazi. It was too dangerous. Kacper bit his lower lip.

  He unclipped the belt and held it out, hesitating right before Malachiasz took it.

  Malachiasz’s expression softened. “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

  Kacper relinquished the book and Malachiasz, with a gentleness that Serefin had rarely seen in him, cracked it open. He flipped through the spells, a frown creasing the tattoos on his forehead.

  “Can you read them?” Kacper asked, hopefully.

  Malachiasz stopped on a page, inspecting it further. He squeezed his eyes shut, swaying as if overcome with dizziness. “Not entirely. I don’t know what Nadya did. I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “Nadya did this?” Kacper asked, and Malachiasz flinched at the sound of her name.

  “Yes,” Malachiasz said, his voice small. He cleared his throat. “But if blood magic had truly been eradicated, I wouldn’t be here. There’s too much of it in me. The Vultures are made of it, and I can still feel them, faintly. Our link is supposed to sever when a Black Vulture dies, but I don’t think I stayed dead long enough. If they try to appoint a new Black Vulture, they’ll fail. They’re mine.”

  “So, you can have them stand down.”

  Malachiasz nodded slowly.

  They were no longer chained, but still prisoners. Malachiasz handed Kacper his spell book and lowered himself to the floor. He curled up, looking young and frail, before dragging the blanket over his head and appearing to attempt sleep.

  “They’re going to make him do that again,” Serefin said with a frown.

  “To what end?” Kacper asked.

  That was what Serefin didn’t understand. What did Chyrnog want? Destruction? Something more cosmic that they couldn’t fathom? Serefin considered the temple Velyos had taken him to, the arms reaching for him; that feeling of morbid inevitability.

  “This is hopeless.” Serefin sighed. “Chyrnog was always going to latch onto Malachiasz’s soul. There was no stopping any of this.”

  “Don’t have one,” Malachiasz mumbled.

  “I’m sorry?” Kacper asked.

  Serefin tilted his head, alarmed. He straightened his leg and nudged Malachiasz with the toe of his boot. “What did you just say?”

  He groaned softly. “I want to sleep.”

  “Tell me what you said.”

  He opened one eye. “I gave Pelageya the pieces. I don’t know what she did with them.”

  “Why would you do that?” Serefin cried.

  Malachiasz sat up, slowly, a defeated slump to his shoulders. The terrifying, calculating Black
Vulture wasn’t home anymore and he had left the broken boy in his place.

  “It was the only thing I had left to give,” he said, blankly. “The ritual wasn’t enough—I miscalculated, and I needed one more piece, but I didn’t know who else to turn to. I don’t know what she did with it.”

  “If you hadn’t done that, would we be dealing with this old god?” Kacper asked, starting to sound desperate.

  Malachiasz shrugged listlessly.

  “He had me, for a time,” Serefin said.

  “But you got rid of him,” Malachiasz pointed out.

  Serefin touched the skin under his left eye socket. So he had.

  Kacper rested his chin in his hands. “If you could get it back, would you be able to break free from him?”

  “Oh yes, I’ll go find my soul, I’m sure that will be easy,” Malachiasz said spitefully.

  But Kacper had a point.

  “We’ll talk more about this later,” Serefin said slowly, needing to think. The concept of a soul was tricky in Tranavian culture, souls were so tied up with Kalyazi theology that Tranavians didn’t really think about them much. Their concept of the afterlife was different, quieter, a rebirth and a renewal; it didn’t weigh so heavily on the idea of a soul. For Malachiasz to have involved himself with the Kalyazi witch was out of character.

  “Did it work?”

  Malachiasz looked thoughtful, his fingers tugging on a piece of bone threaded through his hair. “I suppose so. The eyes started not long after, though that’s a guess. I was barely lucid after the cathedral. Then I went … somewhere else on that Kalyazi mountain, and I don’t think I would have had I not gone to Pelageya.” He sighed. “I don’t know. I thought I could fight him. I don’t think I can.”

  Couldn’t, or didn’t want to? Malachiasz had always made it perfectly clear that there were no lines he was not willing to cross, nothing too horrific for him to not consider and see into reality. Serefin wouldn’t fool himself about his brother; he was a monster to his core. He wanted to believe that Malachiasz could be something better, could claw his way back to human—at least a little—but he didn’t know if he could believe that.