Bereft: Foretold

48 | A King of Mystery

The blade was falling, the muscles in my arm tight, my soul an inferno of untapped potential blazing bright and luminous in the dark of night. I felt like a dragon, like I'd swallowed a star and could taste the flames of a thousand distant worlds upon my tongue. It was so potent I could hear the heartbeat of every mage, witch, and human for miles around. I could hear Sara's soft, reedy breaths. 

I was euphoric on the Absolian's power. As I'd breathed in what I'd thought to be my final breath, I'd held the spent remnants of the creature's aura—the essence of his spell—between my teeth, and I'd swallowed it on reflex.

It was akin to consuming a soul's mana. I shouldn't have been able to do it, as a Sin's broken soul required live mana to survive, not the spent mana infused inside a spell, but I ate the spell whole. Drank it like a drunkard guzzling fine wine. I was basking in the heady potential of an Absolian's deadly magic.

As I'd stood with electricity in my skin and fire in my bones, I'd realized my soul wasn't broken, which was why it'd been able to consume spent mana instead of live mana. My soul was...whole. Fully formed, and producing its own mana. My own mana. My own energy.

Sara had once tried to explain the difference between being remade and reborn. At the time, I hadn't given her words much credence, as I'd been preoccupied with my hunt of Balthazar and had passed her findings off as theoretically interesting, but worthless to my goal.

Now, her words made a certain sense, resonating in a way they hadn't before. One cannot become the same as they were before. You cannot remake what was broken. You must begin anew. When the Baal had first brought me back years ago, he'd done so in hopes of reviving an Absolian. He'd failed, and I'd been incomplete. Broken. 

My shade, that sliver of my soul, had become human, and that human soul was made to be a Sin. It was made for this purpose, not for a higher one, or a lower one, and so I wasn't broken. I had not been hammered into a purpose I was not meant for. This was my rightful form now. I was whole. 

I was the Sin of Pride.

Now, I was about to kill the last of my brothers. 

The sword's poised edge grazed his neck—and a sudden, sweltering wave of darkness overcame the foyer, blinding me and the dazed Absolian. A large hand planted itself on my chest and shoved.

A cold not found in natural Terrestria ravaged the mages' lair, stealing through the wreckage and ruin as the shadows defied physical convention to slither across the floor and drape themselves from the splintered rafters. The darkness rolled like the waves in an untouchable abyss, and he appeared within the nothingness.

The Baal stood with a white scythe balanced against Aurelius' bare neck, holding the Absolian in place. It was not a vision, nor a trick of my mind. The bastard was here, in the flesh.

"What do you think you are doing?" I demanded of the King Below, fingers tightening about the sword's uneven handle. "How dare you—?!"

"Careful," the Baal whispered, pointing two straight fingers in my direction. A feeling like a large spike of ice piercing my side hit me, and a trickle of my overwhelming power was stolen away.

It was a warning. He could have me incapacitated in seconds.

The Baal was dressed in his usual military attire, the tails of his long coat caught in an unseen breeze of his own creation. Against the far wall, Cage was slumped and resting, his hands solidly crimson from the extensive runes he'd painted upon the floor.

My eyes narrowed. "He summoned you."

"In a way." The Baal leaned on his scythe, a permissive smile on his face as he bent nearer Aurelius' and his black talons clicked on the weapon's reflective grip. "I've come to collect a package."