“We need more power.”
Disembodied voices broke through Caius’s half-conscious haze. For hours, he had drifted in and out of wakefulness, only vaguely aware of the hands that propped him up and moved him from place to place as if he were nothing more than an inconvenient sack of potatoes. He was not blindfolded, but he might as well have been. His eyes stubbornly refused to open to let him survey his surroundings; they were still bruised and swollen from the two punches that had knocked him out. The force of a gauntleted fist crashing into his head had been more than enough to put him to sleep for an indeterminate amount of time. Hours, maybe. Gods, perhaps even days.
A different voice responded to the first. This one he recognized, and the familiarity of it made Caius’s stomach turn.
“Bring him to me.”
Hands seized him once more and hefted him upright so that he was almost standing, even though his legs did not seem inclined to support him. He sagged between his captors, and a small part of him wished that they would let him fall, that they would allow him to slip into the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness. An armored fist to the face seemed preferable to facing the person who had just spoken.
He did not want to look upon his sister and see what she had become. Tanith, it would seem, had other plans.
Although he could not see his surroundings, Caius could tell the space was damp – there was a faint scent of decay permeating the air, reminding him of long-dead plants and the whiff of rot he associated with the catacombs deep beneath Wyvern’s Keep. They were underground. Probably very far underground.
He tried to take stock of what his other senses told him about the space in which he was being held and the number of people holding him. His sister was one. The soldiers on either side of him were two more. Firedrakes, he assumed. There was a faint scuffle of boots about two or three yards to his left, if he correctly judged the distance the sound traveled. Armor creaking off to his right. Pages of a book flipped behind him accompanied by the tinkling chime of glass settling against glass. Too small and delicate to belong to something large, Caius noted. Perhaps the small vials carried by healers or mages.
Seven people, then. Maybe eight. Healers often performed their duties solo, but Drakharin mages operated in pairs. In front of him, where Caius assumed his sister was, another voice whispered something in unintelligible Drakhar. Eight people, then. A paltry number to hold a Dragon Prince captive, even a dethroned one. If he was in fighting form, eight opponents would not present much of a challenge, even if he were unarmed. The body was a weapon; Caius’s trainers had drilled that into him from an early age. He had molded his to be as strong and as deadly as steel. Few could meet him in combat and live to tell the tale. His sister would have tried, but he had bested her in the sparring ring more times than he could count. On a good day, they were very nearly evenly matched, though Caius’s height and reach gave him a marginal advantage.
But today was not a good day.
The two soldiers holding him up dragged him forward a few feet, only to dump him unceremoniously on the ground. Caius was so exhausted, so thoroughly drained from his ordeal thus far, that he barely registered the pain of his knees smacking into hard stone.
Fingers brushed against the bruising on his face and he fought not to flinch. It was an instinctive response. A Dragon Prince does not cower. A Dragon Prince does not show fear. But then, he was no longer a Dragon Prince.
“Always so brave,” said his sister. She pressed at the center of the worst bruising on his cheekbone, and the pain was so severe, he thought he might vomit. Maybe that would serve her right, to have the brother she tormented spew his sick all over her shiny golden boots.
Her hand retreated, and it was only then that Caius realized what had felt so wrong about it. Aside from the obvious.
Her skin was cold.
Drakharin tended to run hot; their core temperature exceeded that of both humans and Avicen. But Tanith possessed a unique ability, once common among their kind, now extremely rare. Fire danced in her veins, the same way the power of the in-between lived in Caius’s. Fire was her element to call, and it had always felt as though it were simmering below the surface of her skin, as if her skeleton were made not of bone, but of blazing embers.
But now her skin was cold. Unnaturally so.
“You know I take no pleasure in this,” said Tanith.
Caius could not resist the urge to spit at her feet. Without sight, he couldn’t aim, and wasn’t sure if he’d hit her, but the disgusted noise she made at the display proved that he had made his point. He decided to drive it home with a single word: “Liar.”
A fist seized his hair, yanking his head upward. When Tanith spoke next, it was not to him, but to one of the healers or mages who’d been fiddling with the books and glass vials behind him.
“Heal him.” The words did not match his sister’s tone. This would be no benevolent act of healing. An undercurrent of violence lived in that command, promising more pain to follow. Caius gritted his teeth. He would not cower. Not now. Not ever. Tanith continued speaking, each word more poisonous than the last. “I want him to see me when I reduce him to nothing. I want to watch the light go out of his eyes.”
The warm glow of healing magic washed over Caius as the healer obeyed Tanith’s order. It wasn’t a complete healing; the throbbing of the bruises on his face eased and the headache that had lingered since he regained consciousness faded, but the limited relief only made him more aware of the cuts and bruises on the rest of his body.
“Open your eyes, Brother.” Tanith relinquished her grip on his hair. “Look. See what I have wrought.”
Caius did as she commanded, quelling the urge to rebel out of spite. Light seared his vision as his eyes adjusted to being used for the first time in days. Even as the initial burn faded, he couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing.
They were not in the catacombs beneath the keep; they were in a tomb. Alcoves set deep into the walls housed skeletons gone yellow with age. Caius caught sight of random weapons and pieces of armor: the broken blade of a bronze sword here, the pale green of a rusted helm there. The walls themselves were made of bones packed so tightly together that they appeared at first glance to be stone. Every few inches a row of teeth or an empty eye socket protruded from the wall, a grotesque reminder of the materials that comprised it. By the time Wyvern’s Keep had been built, the fashion of burying the honored dead in palaces of bone had long since passed, but Caius recognized the style of architecture. This was a warriors’ tomb, where victors were laid to rest among the remains of the vanquished.
The walls, however, were not the room’s most arresting sight. Set into the middle of the floor was what appeared to be a large, round metal seal. A crest had been etched into its surface; Caius did not immediately recognize the language of the text encircling it, but the symbols were familiar. He had come across similar pictographs in his research when he was hunting for the firebird. It was an ancient writing system, the secrets of which he had assumed were long lost.
A crack ran through the center of the seal, and from it arose the telltale black tendrils of the in-between. Caius could feel the magic pulsing through the rift. It was like the song of a siren beckoning sailors closer, aching for the satisfying destruction of ships crashing against rocks. It called to him, stronger than any normal gateway. There was something distressingly not right about the scene.
As he watched, the crack grew wider, and the power emanating from it became suffocating.
“You heard what the mage said,” came Tanith’s voice. Caius tore his eyes from the seal to look at her and immediately wished he hadn’t.
The crimson had bled out of her eyes and been replaced by an inky black, which made it seem as if another mind was looking out from behind his sister’s eyes. Dark veins ran up her bare arms, twisting and twining like the branches of a tree in winter. The color had been drained from her lips, giving her the sickly, pale appearance of a corpse dredged up from a river. Caius wanted to close his eyes again. The thing standing in front of him was not his sister. He could not think of her as such. His sister had been a being of fire and gold, blood and steel. This … this was something else entirely.
Cold fingers clamped around his chin. The second Tanith’s skin touched his, he felt the energy seep out of him. He had so little left to give that it reduced him to a slow trickle, a painful sludge. Tanith pulled his power from him as if she were gutting a beast she had felled in a hunt.
“I need more power,” said Tanith. “And you, Caius, are the perfect conduit. You are my blood, my flesh. We once shared a womb, and now we share magic.” Caius’s vision blurred at the edges as his sister continued to talk. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
It was not.
Finally, his well of power ran dry and she released him. It took everything he had not to slump to the floor, half dead. He felt as bad as Tanith looked.
As he watched through slitted eyes, Tanith turned to the seal and projected her stolen power toward it. With the screech of metal snapping, another crack split the surface. Then another. And another. Magic churned the air, wild and uncontrolled, threatening to devour them all. The mages Caius had heard before threw up a barrier around the seal, a flimsy circle of magic that wouldn’t hold all that erratic power for long. The wrongness of it all compounded. He didn’t understand what he was seeing, but he knew it wasn’t right.
“What are you doing?” Caius asked, looking at the broken seal. His voice echoed inside his head, rattling around his skull painfully. The minor healing had already been undone by Tanith’s leaching of his power. “What is this?”
The thing that was not his sister turned from the seal and fixed its unsettling black gaze on him.
“For a new world to be born, the old one must first make way.” Tanith’s lips split into a ghastly smile as she gazed at the cracked seal. “This, my dearest brother, is the end. And the beginning.”