♔ 𝔑𝔦𝔯𝔞 ♔
Calix grabs my wrist and pulls me running, the moment everyone around us Sceres from view. He Scere's too, carrying me with him, and I become so discombobulated from the rush of movement that when reality engulfs me once more, my knees buckle. Sweat is beading around my hairline, but not from the overexertion of my power. If anything, since the promise I have made to Zaire, it wants more.
"Are you alright?" He asks, though his attention is focused on the space around us. We are in the thick of the trees, the canopy sheltering us from the sun and casting shadows around us. It is still warm, a horrible muggy heat that comes before a heavy rain.
"Fine." I clip, straightening my posture. It is too silent. "We have to reach the end."
"Too simple of a proposition for it to be the only thing we need to do." He counters, and I find myself inclined to agree, pulling two daggers from the fitting along my spine. "Think before you throw. Urani and Ovander are our allies."
"And we have twelve enemies. Better they learn to dodge before I risk either of our lives." He says nothing, but begins to walk, and I follow a few paces behind. "The borders are returned. There will be none of the Unseelie we faced before."
"Just whatever was left." That does not comfort me as I suspect it was supposed to. We can only walk onwards, remaining on our guard from all our foes. The foliage does not sparsen, and the silence does not lift, and I even try to Scere, but some restraint prevents me from going further. Wherever we are, so it everybody else. Our enemies are among us, and I have the nagging urge to find them.
The noise is so slight, for a minute, a think I might have misheard. Yet, my gut turns, and the hair on the back of my neck bristles to attention. I turn and poise my daggers to throw, my mind urging the thick leaves of the bush to part. Calix stalls, bringing his shadows forward, prepared to attack. From the divide in the bushes, something drags along the ground. I frown, leaning closer to see it.
The head of a snake looks back at me, coiled to strike, and I almost laugh. "Come on." I mutter and I lower my daggers, but Calix's shadows wrap around my waist to stop me. He watches with narrowed eyes, and just as I am about to argue about his overly fond interest in the reptile, it starts to move closer.
I have seen snakes in the woodlands of Cracuria several times. Small things, barely worth noticing. This one though, it is bigger that I have ever seen. As huge as the trunk of a tree, with fangs that leak with venom, at least as long as my fingers. Its eyes glow a horrid yellow, and when it hisses, there is something so...
Calix's shadows move before I can finish that thought, driving straight for the snake, and then he yells at me to run. I do not let myself consider why, for the last he sounded this panicked, it was when chased by the Magfuror, and for good reason. He knows the horrors of the Unseelie that lurk among these lands far better than I, and for that, I trust his judgement. So I run, Calix beside me, his shadows whipping the air behind us.
The Stygian erupts from me, defending our backs, my mind forcing the trees to knit together as we pass through them, in any attempt to stall the snake that pursues us. "What is that?" I shout at him, dodging the tree that unearths itself a moment too soon, collapsing to the ground as we barely pass it.
"Serpen Witch." I have heard that name before from Ezekiel, but I did not venture questions then, nor do I have the time to now. We sprint, shielding ourselves with protective magic to avoid the snag of branches and twigs. Trampling through the overgrowth, our laboured breaths are all that meet my ears. I dare to look behind us, the huge snake not far from us. Except, it is not much of a snake anymore. It's risen, it's skin shedding and mouth widening, face morphed to something more human – or Fae – like. Whatever a Serpen Witch is, it is a thing trapped between two forms, and as horrid as anything I have ever seen.
I stumble, held upright by Calix, who still allows his shadows to tackle the Unseelie. It gets close – too close – striking at my midriff, held away only by my shield. "Move, Nira." Calix shouts. I do not want to know what will happen if that thing catches me, or either of us. I pull fire to my fingertips, casting a barricade between us and the witch, sending the dry vegetation up in flames. The snake screams as it slices through the fire, the taut scaled skin blistering and sizzling. It falls back, and for a moment, I allow myself to believe that we have made our escape.
It does not last long. A barrage of magic blows into me from the side, a force harsh enough that it crumbles the shield around me and knocks me from my feet. I yell out as I fall through the air, snagging on brambles as I land in a heap and roll down a decline. The lack of focus forces my power fizzle out, and all that can protect me from the assault of nature is my arms wrapped around my head. The ground gives way, and I free fall, a coldness engulfing me as I splash into liquid, deep enough that I sink. Icy water fills my lungs when I scream out in panic. Pain burns in my throat, my neck. My arms flail, dragging slowly through the water. I fall and fall, and I know that I'm drowning.
My lungs burn, and I'm forced to take a breath again. More water, filling my lungs. I will die here. But each breath, it steals away the burning of my lungs. I'm breathing. Breathing in the water. I slow my movements, enough to notice my hands – my fingers. Webbed skin has stretched between each of them, thin enough that is almost transparent. I move them to my throat, my neck, and feel for where the pain has now subsided. Slits, like open wounds, lay beneath my ears. Like the gills of a fish. Like the gills of a Mer.
It does not matter though, because with the Mer's power in my or not, I am not meant to stay beneath the water for this long. I still need air, and I cannot swim. Drowning will just take longer, it will be slower, I will die no better than the human that died in her first Equinox. Naïve and over trusting. Calix should have been here to save me. I have been betrayed again.
I sink, swallowing back desperate gulps of water to steal as much air as the lake can offer me. My eyes start to flutter. The bank is so close – I just need to...
Up on the bank, submerged in shallows, sits a bow and quiver of arrows. The light glints from them, a taunt if there ever was one. Bubbles leave my parted lips in the space that there should be a laugh. Somebody must have told the makers of this tournament that I could not swim – to hide my weapon in the water would almost ensure I was to never find them. To ensure that the huntress was never to be armed. Do they think they can best me so easily?
The bite on my shoulder begins to throb as my head goes light and empty. It is a pain grounding enough that it reminds me I am still alive. That I have to stay alive. That I have to find Calix. I kick a leg, the movement propelling me forward an insignificant amount. My arms drag through the water, palms open to act as spades, and I move.
Despite the fatigue settling in my muscles, I keep going. I kick my legs, wading through the water, and then I am inching closer and closer to the bank. To my weapon, and to my life. I refuse to swallow more water, for I know it will suffocate me as soon as I reach the surface. I trust in the gills at the side of my throat that pulse as they filter air from the lake. I keep moving, but so does something else.
Over my shoulder, a juvenile hope fills me. That Calix has found me, and is coming to save me once more. The hope extinguishes as quickly as it arrived. A Selkie. It chases me, driving through the water with seamless precision, heading straight towards me with a mouth full of sharp teeth bared, inky black hair trailing behind it. I kick my legs harder, propelling myself forward as the Selkie makes for me, moves to kill its prey.
A spindly hand curls around my ankle and I part my lips on a yell, flailing as I fight away the Unseelie that holds me under. Its claws drag through my clothes, bringing blood into the water as it breaks past skin. I kick, but the water captures the force of each attack, hardly hindering it. Using my body as leverage, it comes closer, snarling as it pushes me down toward to bed of the lake. I wrestle for the daggers at my back, wrinkled fingers fumbling with the hilt. It is slow as it drives through the water, but it pierces the hip of the Selkie, nonetheless. I stab it twice, dark crimson escaping in a cloud around us, her scream breaking through the water.
She releases me to staunch her wound, and I take the movement to swim, or flounder, towards my bow and arrow. My lungs are burning, the water held within them slowly choking me, and I know I need to get out of this lake. I need air. The Selkie screams again, pursuing me once more, but I have made it before she has. My arm threads through my quiver, the fingers of my free hand fumbling with the bow, and I hoist my head out of the water.
I vomit, water spilling from my lungs and stomach, coughing until my throat burns. There is a moment where I cannot breathe at all, the few seconds before my gills close up completely, and the moment I take a grateful breath of air is one too short, because the Selkie drags me beneath the surface once more. I turn, not quick enough to see as she bites into my thigh, but I feel the blinding hot pain. I scream, blood drifting towards me so thick, I wonder if she has torn my leg off completely.
It seems impossible to reach for another dagger, and I can do nothing but succumb to fate as the Selkie moves to take a chunk of flesh from my hip. She reaches no success, for a harsh hand wraps into my hair and hoists me from the lake completely, discarding me on the wet ground with carelessness. I scramble to sit, bow armed before I have finished coughing up the water, arrow flying to the Selkie that leaps from the water.
It knocks her head back, buried deep in her eyes, an instant kill that leaves her motionless on the bank of the lake, her lower half still submerged beneath the water. I prepare another arrow, turning to aim it at my rescuer.
It is not Calix who looks back at me, nor Ezekiel, the male who has saved me from this Unseelie kind before.
It is a competitor – Eesah, the eldest prince of Posieren. He is wet from his knees down, the rest of him just damp with sweat. His hair slicked back, and a smear of blood across his cheek, fresh enough that a rivulet still runs down his face. I pant as I tauten my bow, ready to kill him, but he lifts his hands in surrender. "I would prefer if you did not."
"I do not have the best history for doing what others prefer." I say, my chest still heaving.
"It would only prove my siblings right. That there is no ally in you." He makes the ridiculous decision to drop his spear, letting it clatter on the moist ground. "Would you not believe that I saved you because I need you as an ally?"
"No," I answer resolutely, but something stops me from shooting. Something about the nostalgia of it all. I should have learned my lesson from Ezekiel – he saved me once too, but he still betrayed me at the end of it all. Eesah will do the same. I should shoot him. Yet, I do not.
"I do not wish for my siblings to win a throne either. I know you agree." I blink past my stupor.
Enough. He is my enemy. "I need no help to stop that from happening." I free my arrow and he spins from its line of fire, barely missing the iron arrow before it buries into a tree behind him. I try to load another, but Eesah does not allow me the opportunity, tackling me on to my back. I scream, bow and arrow forgotten as I claw at him, raking my nails down his face and neck as we struggle on the floor. He wraps his hands around my wrists, stilling to stare into my eyes, and I am assaulted with the sense of invasion. He is trying to get into my mind – whatever power he has allowing him to do so, and the voice within my head knows it too.
I feel his presence tapping at the barriers of my mind, attempting to break through the walls, and the voice within my screams out in anger, so loud that my ears ring. It fights, a darkness blurring my consciousness, battering his offence with all the energy I have. My body slumps, exhausted by the battle occurring in my mind, but he grants me reprieve, pulling his presence away. My blurred vision manages to decipher the concern etched on his features, but I am hardly conscious enough to understand it.
"Who else do you home in your mind?" His words are an echo, and I try to ask what he means, but my mouth cannot form the words.
The last of my energy is funnelled into the Stygian that erupts from me, not from an order of my own. It barrels into his frame, knocking him from me and lifting me from the ground. It start to constrict him, prepared to deliver a kill that is not one I have allowed. It acts entirely alone as it begins to tighten at his throat, and push into his mouth, and strangle his limbs.
"Stop." I wheeze, the word strained. The voice in my head fights my authority, and I crawl towards him until I am straddling his waist. Blood trickles from my noise, my head fuzzy with dizziness and skin sheened in a cold sweat as I scream, "Stop!" The Stygian ceases movement, and only slinks away when I free a dagger and press it to his throat.
It only stops, because it thinks Eesah is to die at my hands. The sentient darkness that I home within me listens only when it suits it. I try not to dwell on that fact that it means, all this time, it has never been mine to control at all. I lean closer, water from my hair dripping on his face. He looks bewildered, but there is a strength to his composure that I admire. His hands come to my hips, sitting against them as he prepares to throw me off. His smile is slight before he tips his chin away from the dagger to expose his throat to me. Cocky. He thinks I will not do it. Just to show how merciless I am, I press the blade into his skin until it starts to whiten beneath the pressure.
"Tell me what you mean."
His dark eyes find mine, and the moment he opens his mouth to speak, there comes a rustle to my left.
My head whips up, Calix pausing when he sees me through the brambles he battles. His shadows knock them aside in an arrogant single sweep, and then he looks between Eesah and I. He raises a brow. "I had thought you were dying, not making friends."
My tongue runs over my teeth in annoyance. I pull away the dagger, and while Calix looks prepared to kill Eesah right now, I do not let him. "You wanted allies, here is our first." I climb from Eesah and squeeze the water out from my ruined braid. "If he betrays us, kill him."
———
The real question is do we trust Eesah? I'm not even sure if I trust Nira at this point