THE SUNDERING

BAZ

He didn't know how long he lay there, but the bird flying around his head was getting on his fucking nerves. It wasn't a vulture. He could have handled those, but not this strangely colored pest, a bird of purest white, with stripes of yellow and black upon its wings, a bird of beauty. Such a bird wasn't found in Velle, nor in any of the mining colonies. He swatted at it with the scant amount of energy he had left. It wouldn't go away, and neither curses nor aggression stopped it.

"Leave me the hell alone. If you're so damned smart, you find the opening."
He was crazy-talking, and he knew it. Maybe that meant there was hope for him. After all, if he could talk, he could live.

Baz still hadn't found the portal, and if the forgotten, cruel lands of the hellish desert didn't kill him, his queen would.
He refused to die this way, a coward. A failure. He found a reserve of energy, but when failing to move more than a few inches, venom spouted out from his lips. Venom and filth and every disgusting thing he'd ever heard, all shouted at the top of his lungs.

He swatted at the bird, who flew lower and lower each time his arm swooped the air. Maybe it ate carrion. Baz fumed, as he wasn't dead...yet. Its presence stirred him, rousing him to wrath and recovery.

"My god, Mato," he said, his most frequent prayer, the superstitious incantation of his bride's name, bursting out from his lips. Anger met the agony, all because the fucking bird wouldn't stop flapping around him. He rolled to his side and gained purchase to his feet. "Mato. Do you see me now? You'd never marry a man who can't even get a damned bird to go away."

She wasn't there, not in person anyway, but her spirit fueled him. His bride hardly left her bed anymore, sickness taking over her body, but even in her fragility she gave him strength. She always had.

The necklace around his neck swung against his chest as he rose. Bitterly, he tucked it back under his shirt, reminding him of why he was here, in the middle of the desert. Alone.

The necklace, always hidden, was an omen, a dark and depraved reminder of his servitude. Pain of Life. Humiliation of Hope. Shadow's Blood.
He touched the reddish-black stone, the ring of deliverance on its leather cord. The ring shackled him, warning with a lewd promise. To fuck up his vow would destroy him and Mato both.

The ring meant power. After all, the secret of carrying it weighed across his chest for years. Even now it crossed upon his neck, a talisman of all he'd be denied. Family, a future, a woman to stand by his side-for however long Mato had left to live.

Jin's benediction, the cruel pressing of the ring into his palm those years ago, his fervent promise to the man he wished had been his father, worried and set Sebastian's brow. Meaning came to him, sharp and deliciously sweet. If the ring were meant to open the portal as Jin claimed, Baz still hadn't found the opening.

At the moment, all of Baz was agreed. Jin was wrong. There was no mirror-realm. If so, he'd never find it.

Baz sunk back down to his knees. Death better come quick, for he was an impatient, but decisive man. If the desert didn't kill him, his blade would. Weeks he'd wandered the desert, roaming the land that few visited and fewer returned from. Time tugged at him, pulling him farther from his mission and further from returning.
Maybe it was time to give up.

He brought out his knife. He stared at it. If he had tears, they would be falling. Mato...

The bird circled his head. Baz swung, ready to murder it for bothering him in his last hours. Tauntingly, it chirped a song, one of goodbye and of good riddance. Then the damned thing crashed into a wall of nothing.

The bird fell. Stunned. Paralyzed.

Dead.

He didn't care about the bird's demise. It irritated the hell out of him, anyway. What interested him was the way it died-hitting air. Hitting a nonexistent wall, one that shouldn't be there.