KINGSLAYER

♕ 2 | 6 ♕

Act 2 Chapter 26
JAYLAH

The heat was unbearable.

I was sure I was sweating out my weight in water. Perhaps I would just melt altogether. I would not have been been aware of my foggy existence at all, if not for the pain racking my form. There was no source. It was everywhere and unyielding.

Was I asleep? Or sick? I wished to see. With monumental strength, I forced my lids to raise. And immediately regretted it when the screams began as soon as my eyes were open.

My ears were being torn to shreds. The shrill, pitiful wailing of grief was my pain in physical form. But my own lips were pressed together, never to open. There was nothing I could do to stop the suffering, not even to kill it out of mercy. Even if I could see the owners of the screams, there were too many to put out of their misery. A world of agony worse than the one overtaking my body. Except the agony was not only mine.

I was alone. Completely alone. Normally, I would not mind solitude, but this was different. This was knowing I was in a cage with no perceivable walls or chains. But they were there. They always were when no one else was.

Alexander, Klymene, Antinoch, my advisors. Gone. Not quite dead. Just erased from existence, as if they were only ever figments of my imagination.

Terror, deep and frenzied, set in. I felt as though I must run, but there was nowhere for me to go. This was the best I could do.

But when I turned, there was a door behind me that I had not taken notice of before. Had it been here this whole time? In a sea of relief, I walked to it, feeling as though my heavy feet were one with the shadowed ground.

At odds with the dreamy feel of the world, the doorknob was hot. Molten-hot. My hand pulled back of its own accord. But I—as an animal in a trap—was desperate. Taking the pain, I gripped the knob hard enough to turn it and passed through the gilded doorway.

This world was just as endless, but instead of the gloomy, low night sky of the first room, there were flames as far as the eye could see. A city was burning. The world was burning. A gasp strangled in my throat. The screams were still present, but muffled. No longer in fighting their fates, but in dying breaths. The air reeked of burning hair, like a sacrifice to a dark God.

I dared a step closer. No sooner had I done so when I became aware of a figure in the midst of the flames, impossibly large for the distance at which it calmly sat. Not quite human, it seemed. The only distinguishing feature I could make out was the spiked crown on its head. It was the cause of this utter ruination.

Daggen? was my first thought. Was I not enough to stop him?

The figure gave a nondescript gesture, like the lazy raising of a hand at the elbow. Fire spread outward across black grass. The screams reached a crescendo, piercing my chest straight through to the heart. Not me too.

I stumbled back several steps before my feet hit something solid. I was afraid to look down, but I found myself doing it anyway. A body. At first glance, it was difficult to see in the darkness, but I soon noticed it was face-down.

Feeling as though something deeper than curiosity was compelling me to, I rolled the body over with my bare foot. At first, there was nothing. But then the flames flickered closer, lighting the face.

It was Daggen's body, his shaggy hair and hulking frame. But he bore my father's impeccably-shaven face, his cold, empty black eyes. I could not scream, for my lips were seen shut.

As I stumbled back in utter disgust, the face morphed into another. My mother. I recognized her angular face in my own. The terror would not stop coming. Her killer wore her face. He stole that too.

This was infinitely worse than the first place. I ran to the door as fast as I could. I had to go back. But the knob would not budge. Was it locked? Or sealed from the inside? I had to go back. With both fists, I pounded on the door, praying someone would let me out.

No one did. I was just as alone as before.

Then, like being underwater and finally resurfacing for air, I broke through to consciousness. Before my eyes were even open, I was aware of the pain, just as in my dream. But...as I blinked against the brightness of day, it felt less like a faraway dream and far closer to a vision.

I sat up on the bedroll, already clutching the semi-bandaged wound on my arm. As real as the events in my mind had appeared, the effects the adder's poison had on me seemed realer in that moment. My hands still had the shaky weightlessness of someone experiencing great shock. I somehow suffered from being too hot and too cold at the same time. The book did say the poison could induce a fatal fever...

All other thoughts vanished from my mind when I realized what my unconscious state around Alexander meant. With some difficulty, I moved both arms to check the sheaths at my back, but they were both still occupied. For some reason, he did not take the opportunity to overpower me. The thought was more chilling than it probably should have been.

I noticed him then, sitting with his back against a thick tree trunk, watching me boredly. There was no hint of sadistic bloodlust on his face, but I knew it was there somewhere beneath the surface.

"You did not steal Sargon's blades," I spoke aloud, figuring feigning openness was my best bet at outwitting him at whatever he was planning.

"You didn't die from fever," he said smoothly. His ignorance of my statement was glaring.

"Why would you not take the blades for yourself when you had the chance?"

Instead of answering, he simply smiled. A second red flag within three minutes. Was he simply trying to scare me again? His words returned to haunt me: the first cut is not in the flesh but in the mind.

I would return to that problem later. I blinked back bleariness. Glancing up through the lush canopy, I saw the sun was already beginning its lazy fall into afternoon. How much time was lost—a day? Or more? I nearly shuddered at the thought.

Working myself up to a more stable seated position, I rested for a few seconds, then used my good arm to push myself off the ground. Black spots peppered my vision. As soon as my feet held the full weight of my aching body, the ground seemed to be made of writhing snakes and I nearly lost my balance. The movement made something turn uneasily in my stomach. It could have just been hunger. Or I was going to be sick.

"Too much time has been lost," I announced, my breathing changing when the familiar pang in my arm settled in. I hid it. "It is time to move until the day is gone."

Still sitting, Alexander looked leisurely up at me through squinted eyes. "You sure you're not going to kill yourself with the strain?" I was in shock by his concern for a split second, until he followed it up with a shrug and stood. "Fine by me."

Once again, his intentions were murky. "Now you do want me dead?"

I was unable to read the look on his face, but I was well aware it was no good harbinger. Very deliberately, he said, "We should check the trap before we leave."

My lips pressed in displeasure. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Nevertheless, he was right to check the trap. I knew better than to dwell on it, but we wasted a day's worth of food on him while I was unconscious.

But upon pulling it from the water, it was empty.