Chapter 35 Chapter Sixteen Part Two - Azadou
I transport myself to the nearest and most populated city – Bucharest – and as I glance around at all the humans, I breathe in the putrid smell of malice that clings to each and every one of them. The odious stench fills the air but instead of avoiding it, I breathe it in. I let the malice fill me up and strengthen me. I’ve never done this intentionally, but there’s a first time for everything.
“Is that seriously the ring you’re proposing with? It looks cheap as fuck,” I hear a woman sneer.
I look over and see the shocked and humiliated man kneeling in front of her while presenting her with a ring in a box. She retrieves her phone from her purse and her thumbs proceed to fly across the screen.
“Are you really rejecting my proposal because the ring isn’t…expensive enough?” the man asks in disbelief.
“Duh. What did that cost, like a few hundred? Is that all I’m worth to you? If you really loved me, you would have put at least five figures on a decent ring,” she says snidely, the malice oozing off her like tar.
The man gets to his feet, closes the box and puts it in his pocket, “And if you loved me you wouldn’t care more about how much a ring cost and care more about the fact I wanted to spend my life with you, but I can assure you I don’t want that anymore. We’re done,” he tells her, his voice cracking as he walks away, tears brimming in his eyes.
The woman stands stunned, watching him walk away, but slowly the anger begins to rise and her face starts to turn red.
“I can do so much better than a loser like you anyway! Just watch, you’ll be begging me to take you back!”
I walk up to the woman, smiling sadistically at the malice clinging to her soul. “You humans are going to make this far too easy,” I utter in amusement.
The woman looks up at me, the anger vanishing from her face only to be replaced by fear as she takes in the sight of me. I lay my hand on her shoulder and in an instant, she lets out a terrified scream as dark shadows caress her shoulder and rapidly cover her body, drowning her in darkness. In a matter of seconds, the greedy, selfish, vain excuse for a human is replaced with a humanoid shadow. As their deep purple eyes stare up at me, I gesture out to the humans around us.
“Have fun,” I encourage the newborn eyti.
The wispy figure turns its attention to the humans around us and moves forward, sucking all the light around it into itself as the air is filled with the sounds of screams as the humans begin to scatter in fear. I smile at the chaos unfolding before me as one human after another is infected and consumed by their own malice.
With a dark chuckle, I transport myself from city to city, country to country, infecting more and more humans, watching as my creations spread their malice like wildfire, corrupting and destroying every human around them. I stand by, crossing my arms, watching in satisfaction as the humans scream and run like ants during a storm, but no matter how fast they run, they can’t outrun my eyti. They can’t run from their own malice. Let’s see how much Jartre can enjoy his peace once I’m done turning every mortal on the face of this Earth into nothing but shadows.
I raise my hands to the sky, summoning forth a violent storm. The clouds blacken as bolts of purple lightning illuminate the sky above and strike the Earth with shattering force, the sound of it thundering through the air. I let out a maniacal cackle, my powers feeling invigorated as they are finally unleashed from their confines, free to inflict as much damage as they please, but my cackle quickly falters when the scent of a rainbow as it breaks through a thunderstorm in the middle of a warm, sunny day invades my senses and stops me short.
I slowly turn around only to come face to face with horrified kaleidoscope eyes that take in the scene around me. Slowly Orenda looks up at me, and as she does, I finally understand the feelings moving deep within me; the feelings emanating from within her. I feel her disgust and her hatred, but beyond that are emotions I never understood and now, like a fog lifting from my mind, I know the words for these feelings. She is consumed with shame and heartbreak.
“Azadou…what have you done?”