Author's Note: This isn't the end.
I'm working on the end. You see, there's going to be 127 chapters, along with the Interludes, and an Epilogue, and the Author's Note chapter at the end, where I detail the future of Fever Blood, share some exciting news, and tell you the origin story of my story.
Enjoy!
-Corey
***
They rush towards oblivion unaware of the brilliant light that could be theirs, the salvation extended to them. They claimed immortality, and had achieved perpetual longevity, but they had ceased to live. The Eight had robbed themselves of the ability to strive for good. They had, the same way a monk may meditate on a single piece of scripture, devoted themselves to a different debauchery or sin, and given themselves wholly to it. And that evil, for it is evil's twisted nature to corrupt what it embraces and destroy what it inhabits, will bring them ruin.
With their death comes an end to the misery they can inflict.
***
They flew through the air, and Laidu tasted freedom.
The blood within his veins, within their veins, sang. Energy had come pouring in, had surged within them from a renewed source. They had cloaked themselves with heat, and with the wealth of aether pouring into their body, they had forgone the use of Fever Blood. Instead, they had attuned it's dangerous, but powerful cousin.
Solar Heart.
It was like Fever Blood, with a similar tempo and melody (though one not heard with the ears, but with his blood), but stronger, fuller. However, instead of making his flesh glow like fire, glowing cherry red, this made their flesh white-hot, glowing like the sun.
Be sparing with when you let the blood truly sing, Rhaedra cautioned him. Laidu remembered seeing dragons fly, shining like the heavenly light, before plummeting to the ground, their wings burning, their flesh wreathed in flames. It will consume flesh. Should you lose control, your invulnerability to fire and heat will pervert itself. That immunity would become a vulnerability, and your flesh will be devoured by the fire you brought forth.
Burned by the fire that I lost control of. There's a kind of poetic justice to that, if you think about it, Laidu thought.
Think about slaying Kazalibad, and not losing control of the Solar Heart. You understand? Rhaedra swooped down closer to the ocean. Laidu wisely let him stay in control of their body. Laidu had martial skills, and was deft with a sword. He had absolutely no experience flying.
He felt something sinuous and wet wrap around their leg, and Laidu focused the Solar Heart around that leg. With a hiss and a snap, it burned to a crisp. What was that? Laidu asked.
One of Kazalibad's tongues. He becomes more grotesque the longer he exists. An abomination, and he has stolen our power, Rhaedra cursed. It will be a most noble task to reclaim it.
I don't think we can take it back, Laidu answered.
We don't need to. We just need to end him. Rhaedra ducked, and skimmed near the water. The spray began to evaporate, throwing up mist driven up by the heat of their blood.
"Coward!" They turned to face Kazalibad. "Fight me here! On the ground!" He had waded out into the sea, but was stepping on ice, every step of his twisted foot causing the water to solidify. It spread like a flower blossoming, centered around him, before the ice touched the Coldspire.
Streaks of blue shot through it, veins of coldest cobalt and purest white, weaving a branching pattern into Kazalibad's miniature glacier. "I'll kill you, take your power, and then take the power of the Coldspire too!" He laughed. "You've given me such a great gift, Rhaedra, Throneless King!"
Laidu felt Rhaedra's pride smart. He reaches down low for his insults, the dragon noted. We should end him, his low insults being but one reason.
Agreed, Laidu said. Thoughts began to form in their mind, memories and ideas, plans and stratagems as they conversed faster than speech.
Kazalibad's greed anchored him to this world, and he lusted after things of the flesh so much that it became his being, and he was unable to leave as long as a trace of him remained. And, with his abominable actions giving him the ability to heal from any injury nigh-simultaneously, he remained nearly impossible to slay.
But Rhaedra had an idea.
They landed onto the ice sheet, and attuned a colder blood. Hoarfrost blossomed on the ice around their claws.
"So," Kazalibad snarled, his empty eye socket in the center of his face weeping blood. It froze in crimson droplets the second it touched his artificial glacier. "You come to face me at last."
"You're blinded, and you have nowhere to run." Rhaedra was the one putting words in their mouth this time. "You're done."
"I'm immortal," Kazalibad said. "No matter how many times you tear my flesh, or spill my blood, I'll come back." Rhaedra immediately attuned the fiery blood again, expecting something. "Rejuvenate me. Surr-"
They spat a small jet of flame, and it slammed into Kazalibad's mouth. He howled, a gargled cry as his tongue began to reform after being burned into a flaming grease stain in his jaw. Immediately, Laidu attuned a colder blood. We have to bait him into it, Laidu said to Rhaedra, have to have him use that blood.
"Such impudence!" Kazalibad's tongue must have reformed, because now he snarled in hatred at them. "Fine. I was going to assume you into my godhood, and let your miserable lives fuel my greatness... but if it's fire that you wish to us against me, it will be fire that shall end your life!" His talons burned cherry red. "I shall immolate you and render you ashes!" With that, his claws glowed with the light of Solar Heart. He charged towards them, every step making the glacier that he stood on hiss. They attuned Solar Heart in response.
And then Rhaedra began to sing.
He sang the song of Solar Heart, sang it with the power of the dragon's roar. His mind was totally focused on that, leaving every sensation for Laidu to feel.
He felt Kazalibad's claws dig into their meaty shoulder, yet Laidu did nothing. Hurry up, Rhaedra, he thought as pain surged down the nerves of this body. It hurt, but this was his defiance. He had been whipped. He had been beaten. Laidu could take this.
It was him taking that blow, and not Kyra. It was Laidu who was bleeding, and Laidu who was burning, and not Kyra. Every stab of pain from Kazalibad's claws was a sign of the act that would save her life. Bearing the agony would be his weapon against Kazalibad.
The immortal dug his claws into their flank, and it took all of his effort not to flinch. Should Rhaedra mess up the song, should he falter, it would start them from square one again.
They bled from two wounds, and as Kazalibad raised his arm up for the third time, Laidu felt the faintest hint of satisfaction from Rhaedra. Kazalibad screamed, and slammed his claws into their chest.
And stared in shock as his claws disintegrated into ash.
The immortal recoiled as the stubs of his fingers lit afire, before noticing the burning of his blood. "What are you doing to me?" he demanded, screaming as Rhaedra kept singing. He tried to strike again, but one of his legs, glowing with incandescent inner fire, chose that moment to collapse. Kazalibad sank to his knees, and tried to struggle to his feet.
Laidu wanted to tell him that the price of losing control of Solar Heart was that the blood would consume Kazalibad's flesh. It would surge up, and the heat would incinerate him at the cellular level. That no matter where he reformed his body, anywhere where blood coursed through his veins, Kazalibad would burn, burn in a sanctifying flame that would rid the entire world of every trace of him.
They used the exact technique Kazalibad's sorcerer had used on Laidu to ensnare him. Now, it was turned against the immortal, and it must have been painful. Laidu knew how it had felt, and now Kazalibad did to. Kazalibad didn't command his own blood anymore.
It was the only thing that could kill him. The only surefire way for Kazalibad's death was for his very blood, the anchor that bound him to this earth, to be the kindling of his funeral pyre. His greed for power, for the magic that dwelled within Laidu's veins, within Rhaedra's veins, was what had done him in.
Laidu had hated Kazalibad, but now he pitied him. He saw that the immortal had given up the shackles of mortality for a different kind of shackle, and how avarice was just as cruel a slavemaster as death. It was greed that had compelled the monster to seek Kyra's death, and it was greed that was the source of his demise, as the powerful blood Kazalibad had lusted for burned him away.
He was screaming as he burned up.
***
Kazalibad had been burned to pieces, but that had happened before. After hearing lurid tales of witch-burnings that had occurred, in the age before the light of that abomination called civilization had shone, he had made dozens, if not hundreds, of contingency plans. Every town he visited, he carved open his flesh and poured his blood into a vial, and had hidden it away in some small, forgotten nook.
That was so that now, as he drifted in the dark and senseless void, Kazalibad could find them. They shone like stars, brilliant points of experience and sensation in utter emptiness. He willed his spirit towards one. For a moment, he felt nothing, and everything, before his spirit slammed into the vial of blood.
It snapped, and the blood began to warp, multiply, as it wove itself into Kazalibad's form. It took all of two minutes, and he stood in a dark chamber. A catacomb.
Ha! That beast, and that Ranger, had thought that they had slain him. But it was not so! He lived, and he would find his way back to them, and slay them all! He would turn Rhaedra to dust, and slay the girl that that Ranger had tried so hard to protect. He wished he could force that Ranger to watch, but it was more important that the girl was dead.
Kazalibad was so lost in thought he didn't notice that the catacomb was beginning to brighten.
He heard that song! That same blasted song that sung in his heart whenever he used the stronger, immolating blood. Solar Heart, he had heard Haema Rin call it. But now it thundered through every fiber of his being, infectious with its fast-paced tempo, demanding that he move, he act, he answer its frenzied beat.
And his blood couldn't help it.
He glowed, and the light surged up around him, illuminating everything in stark detail. Those skeletons, of kings laid to rest, grinned at him, mocking him. You tried to escape the fate that befell us, they seemed to say, tried to escape death. You laughed at our mortality, scoffed at the wisdom we offered. How are you standing now?
Kazalibad screamed as his flesh erupted into flame. He had felt the burning before, and now the pain was nothing. He screamed for the awful realization that had befallen him.
Death had come, and Kazalibad couldn't escape it.
***
Rhaedra sang, so it was up to Laidu to rescue them both.
The ice was beginning to crack from the heat of their song. Laidu could see the air ripple and warp with the heat of their presence. It was time to move, and seek solid ground.
He beat their wings, and carried them up into the air.
***
It was hopeless.
Kazalibad had tried to escape several times, but to no avail. He had reappeared in an apothecary, and had barely made it off the shelf before the fire consumed his half-formed body, burning pungent herbs like funerary incense as he screamed, before he was reduced to ash.
He had thought he nearly made it, in the shaman's tent, hidden in a jar the man had. The blood had spilled, and Kazalibad had dragged himself out of it, but alas, his body lit aflame and he became a soot-stain on the ground. An immortal, reduced to this. Over and over and over and over, he was returned to the void, until but one sample of blood remained.
But at last, he found safe haven. His great Vault.
There, he emerged, slowly, from the one vestibule of his blood that wasn't a cheap glass vial. It was a basin, made of black stone, which had once been full to the brim of his blood. He remembered spilling it, willing the wound on his hand to remain open until the basin was full, and the crimson liquid was still, as reflective as a mirror.
Now, he burst from that into stillness. The Vault, a cavern warded a hundred times over, by Haema Rin and the dozens of sorcerers that were his predecessors kept Rhaedra's influence out. He was safe.
He collapsed on the stone floor, gasping. He hurt, ached from the drain of going to that void and back so many times in so short a span.
They had come close to what that sorceress had said. She had promised Kazalibad that he would be ended by one of the few people that his Avaricious Eye could not see, the ones whose souls were already bought, and not able to be taken or bargained or tempted by Kazalibad. Rhaedra was one, and he had helped Malaphaisto drive the king insane. The Ranger was the other who he had not killed, but not for lack of trying. He would slay them both, slay them with the power that he had stolen from them. They would die torturous deaths for the pain that he had been just put through, the agony of death tasted again and again and again and again.
But first, he needed to find a way to leave the Vault. He had to devise a stratagem of some sort to not be instantaneously destroyed by stepping outside, or by someone opening it.
And then he heard voices.
"Alright! Last of the wards will be down soon!" What? Was someone breaking in? Impossible! He had buried the Vault underneath the ruins of a hundred palaces, all lost to time. "We'll unearth the history of this place, for Alberion's new University! With this archaeological find, we'll rival Caeldar!" Archaeologists?
Kazalibad charged towards the door just as it opened, and that song, that SOlar Heart melody, that call of death greeted him.
Bemused scholars stared in awe as he screamed, before crumbling into ash for the final time.
***
It is finished.
Laidu heard Rhaedra say that. You know?
Yes. I had felt his resonance since I was singing. Now we are alone. He is gone. We have done it. Joy flooded their hearts, before a wave of exhaustion overtook them.
They crashed into the shallows, and they both slowly, painfully dragged themselves towards the shore. You must get there. Go, for her. Laidu trudged on. One foot in front of the other. Over and over and over.
At last, he struck dry ground, and collapsed. I am honored to share a form with you, Rhaedra said, just before Laidu collapsed onto the sand.
Blackness overtook him.
***
He was whole again.
Kazalibad stared at his unblemished skin. Gone was the rough hide, the gray and lifeless pallor. Gone were the lamprey mouths that dotted his forearms, or the bloodshot eyes. No, he wore the skin of his birth now, the body he had been born into, with its dark skin, soaked in color and vitality.
He was human again, the shape he had been before he had cast off the shackles of fate.
He stared up at light. There, before him were the gates of a great city, shining, beautiful. Spires of ivory and gold, of silver and malachite, of every precious gem in abundance shone in dazzling splendor behind the smooth walls of the city. And there, before the gate, was a man, clothed in a robe of brilliant white, with hair like burning fire, eyes shining like the sky, only a thousand times brighter. It was all so beautiful, so incandescent.
And Kazalibad hated it.
He hated it and he wanted it. He wanted it, of course, because it was riches and wealth and power at his grasp. It was beautiful in its abundance, and the greed in his heart made him ache for it.
He hated it because that city was so beautiful. He had destroyed Elysion, defaced statues, because they showed the beauty of the human form, and whenever he looked in the mirror at his true self, he saw the abomination. Even when wearing a cloak of another's skin, he still seemed false and lifeless. He had destroyed Elysion because its beauty had shown the ugliness of himself. And this city made Elysion seem like a shanty-town.
"You could have come in," the brilliant man said. He had skin like molten, hot bronze. "You could have changed, could have freed yourself of the chains of guilt. We will all be free of death eventually, but you feared the first death so much more than the second."
"Second?" Kazalibad asked.
"The second death. You enslaved yourself to your avarice, all to escape the first death. But that avarice was your undoing, and that was the choice that you made." The man seemed saddened by it. "You could have joined the everlasting feast. The wine was to die for, if you pardon the pun. But you chased after treasure in the old life instead."
"Who are you?" Kazalibad asked.
"You know who I am. You deny my existence, but you know. You cannot help but know." He paused. "But your treasures, where will they be?" He paused. "Gold will sit, moldering away in your caverns. The silks you arrayed yourself in will be devoured by moths. Your life force, hoarded and stolen from others, is useless to you now, and you could only use it while in the form of a cursed creature." He paused. "You could have so much more, but you chose that, and ran from me."
"No, no, you're making a mistake!" Kazalibad cried out, the totality of the situation crashing down on him.
"No, you made the mistake when you chose to walk away from this path," the man said, his voice full of sorrow. "I wanted you to join me, but I let you choose. Now, I will let you abide by your choice. I am sorry, but you have willed it. Let your will be done."
Kazalibad cried out as gold coins fell from the sky. He stared up, silent as they piled around him, gathering on the white stone. And then he noticed the rot.
It spread through the stone beneath, something gross and cancerous. The gold too, became black and soft, something rotten. He screamed as the ground gave way, and he fell, the riches surrounding him now maggots and flies.
He fell, fell for days, before the glory of the city above vanished, every trace of it.
Kazalibad the Skinstealer, Kazalibad the Avaricious, lived out the rest of eternity surrounded by riches. And those riches brought him no joy or love. He forgot what those things were eternities ago.
Such was his fate.