Act of a Demon: The Dark Bloods - Book II ✓

Chapter 26 - Shadows and Memories

Flecks of blood flew from Blethinette’s plump lips as Auronmar backhanded her face. She faced him with a snarl, hand on her cheek. He met her fiery eyes with a cool demeanor.

“What did this Shadow of yours do?” he asked her.

Blethinette lowered the hand from her face with an exaggerated motion. “I do not know what you—”

“Do not lie, Blethinette!” Auronmar growled. Crimson ripples inked his eyes red. “It was you entire foolishness that caused so much pain and an unbelievable amount of death. The caliber of these things are beyond a single person’s accomplishments, even for one such as yourself. I ask you again. What did this Shadow of yours do?”

She lost her composure only to recover it. “I do not know,” she spoke with ice in her voice.

“You do not know of your own Spirit?”

“It is not my Spirit in the way Spirits traditionally choose a master,” she spat. “This creature…I believe it brought us here. I am unsure what it did to the rest. To my Mundus.”

His face was rigid, hands into fists. “Mundus? The rest?”

“Yes,” Blethinette hissed. “It claimed about a balance I broke, and I found myself here with you.”

“Balance?”

“I do not know of what it speaks. It was constantly harping about a balance, yet I never listened. It is broken now, yet we still live. Our planet still exists. I do not know what its intentions are.”

“Blethinette,” Auronmar said, grabbing her shoulders and looking at her. Her mismatched eyes were hard; they were not the soft, exotic green they once were eons ago.

She grinned at him, clearly entertained by his stern action. “Why do you gaze at my eyes so? Inquire the question that is on your tongue, dear.”

He pursed his lips, jawed locked for a moment, before he asked, “Was it that which tainted your eye red?”

She laughed, breaking away from his grip. “I Saw it long ago upon the death of Levin.”

Hearing his old Guard’s name, Gahn’s predecessor, made his fists twitch. Auronmar relaxed them and brought a finger to his lips, other hand cradling his elbow, as he watched Blethinette.

“Yes, Levin’s death was my first encounter with this Shadow Spirit. It was simply a glimpse though. A flicker of darkness. It appeared as a dark hand, pulling out a white orb from Levin’s body. Such was all I Saw.” She brought her finger to her red eye and trailed her claw down her cheek, mimicking a falling tear.

“It was afterwards I continued to see it,” Blethinette continued. “However, it only appeared when my See Mahou was activated, and it would only grace over the bodies of the dead, plucking white orbs from their corpses. The glimpses were always fleeting, but each encounter revealed more of the Spirit’s strange, black body. 

“The Spirit was always a curiosity but never a threat. It was not until Mundus was sealed by that mortal warrior of a whore that I at last sought it out. It only appeared with death, so death I granted it. I slayed a Lower and awaited its appearance.”

She paused and came up to Auronmar, lowering his hand from his pensive face. She leaned into him as if to kiss him. He looked at her with stone eyes, body still but ready to react should she try to attack him.

“It did appear, my dear,” she said in a whisper. “It appeared and I Saw it in its entirety and it saw me as well, for that was when it first spoke to me. I was never supposed to have Seen it; no living being should have. It had now owed a debt to me, but there was a price for its power.”