Chapter 190: Bigger Enemies
>>Draegon
Each time I struck, I could feel the resistance in Reagen’s mutated flesh, thick, tar-like, nearly unbreakable. But not invincible. My claws raked through his side again, and he howled. Where steel failed, my fire did not.
With a roar, I summoned the blaze from deep in my chest, that ancient flame laced with draconic magic, and unleashed it in a torrent across his front.
The fire tore into his corrupted skin. It burned. It hurt him.
He reeled backward, arms raised to shield himself, his abyssal skin blistering and charring. His scream echoed like a thunderclap, but it wasn’t pain alone, it was fury.
Desperation.
Good.
He slammed a fist into the ground, cracking the forest floor beneath us, and then lifted his head with a snarl that didn’t belong to any man anymore.
"You think that little flame will stop me?" he growled. His voice was darker now, doubled. Twisted, "I am stronger than all those abyss monsters," He declared, "Even the giants!!"
And then...
He changed again.
Dark tendrils poured from his spine and shoulders like wings of smoke. His form, already monstrous, began to expand, bones shifting, his face contorting, flesh bubbling into scales of abyssal black. Each footstep shook the world. Trees bent under his weight, some splitting apart in bursts of splinters.
I stepped back slowly.
He was massive now. A crawling mountain of darkness.
"You don’t stand a chance!" he bellowed, teeth like spears in a mouth too wide for a man. "Your little fire won’t even scratch me now!"
I didn’t respond.
I simply looked up at him, and then I leapt into the sky.
My wings unfurled as I soared high above the trees, the wind screaming past me, the scent of scorched bark and blood trailing in my wake. I felt the weight of my body change as I reached higher, my spine lengthening, bones twisting, fire curling through my veins.
The shift came fast. Natural
And then I was no longer a man.
Scales glimmered with obsidian sheen. Wings wide enough to eclipse the sun spread open as I roared loud enough to split the clouds.
Below, Reagen looked up, rage flaring behind his abyssal eyes.
"You think size makes you stronger?" I called, my voice reverberating through the wind like a storm rolling over the earth, "Keep thinking then,"
***
>>Aelin
The breeze played with the ends of my hair as I tried to slow my breathing, but my mind kept tumbling forward.
Too much had happened. Too fast. And yet, I needed to know.
I looked at him, steadying my voice. "How come there were never any signs of the Abyss before? No warnings. No cracks. The gates just... started opening out of nowhere." I paused, "I mean, it’s not like the knowledge came out of nowhere, did it?"
"No," He shook his head, "The knowledge is always there. People are always desperate and try dark things. But the seal on the abyss never allowed it to open before." He sighed, "Until now."
"The seal?" I asked, "There was a seal on the abyss?"
"Yes?"
"Then how come it’s opening now all of the sudden?"
Tala’s smile faded, just slightly. A shadow passed through his expression, as if I’d brushed against something old and painful.
"That’s because," he said softly, "the original seal we placed on the Abyss... is now gone."
I blinked. "Wait. You were the ones who sealed it?"
He nodded once.
I leaned forward. "Then, how did it break?"
Tala looked out over the city for a moment, as if gathering memories from the mist itself.
"The seal we placed back then, it was temporary," he said. "We bound the Abyss shut to buy time. Time to prepare a true seal. One that would last forever. One that could never break."
"So, you initially just placed a temporary one?"
"Yes?"
I frowned. "Why not just do the final seal right away?"
He glanced back at me, eyes calm but heavy. "Because to forge that kind of seal... we needed something rare. Something sacred. Pure power, in its rawest form."
I didn’t speak. Just listened.
"We had started to prepare it," Tala continued. "The process was long. It needed a few months, at the very least about a year and we needed all the people we had to work on it, and when it was done... the Abyss would’ve been locked away for good."
I could hear the shift in his voice then, the bitterness that crept around the edges of sorrow.
"The people loved us for it," he said quietly. "They saw what we were doing. They saw we were protecting them. That we were willing to give everything for peace. And they trusted us. More than they trusted anyone else."
He paused.
And then his words dropped like a stone.
"The royal family was not happy about that."
My breath caught.
"They grew fearful," Tala said, his gaze fixed on something distant. "Afraid that we would take their place. That the Solwyn tribe would rise as more than just guardians. That the people would stop looking to the throne... and start looking to us. We were already worshipped as saints after all."
I felt the cold edge of understanding slip into my chest. People were bound to look up to people who were literally saving their lives.
"And so, one night," Tala said, voice quiet now, almost hollow, "the army was ordered to kill us all."
!!!
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t.
He looked down, brushing his thumb across the stone railing beside him.
"We were easy to trace," he murmured. "All of us liked to live together. We lived in a valley, a beautiful valley-" He was about to say it’s name but I beat him to it
"Emberlight" I said, recalling the information from the book
He looked at me in shock first, then smiled, "Yes,"
"And," He added in, "Even when we tried to run we could be easily caught," He softly touched his forehead, where I could lightly see it, "Because of the symbol of the sun on our foreheads."
I reached up slowly, almost unconsciously, my fingers brushing the place between my brows where I had always felt a strange warmth, a faint shimmer under my skin.
The place where my mark had begun to glow.
