Chapter 138 The curse beneath the skin

Chapter 138 The curse beneath the skin
I didn’t get the chance to answer him.

The ground beneath the broken well shaft buckled outward all at once, earth and old stone exploding upward in a column of red-tinged dust, and the figures that had been climbing out one careful step at a time suddenly surged forward like a held breath finally released.

The crowd behind the guards’ line broke into full panic, screaming, scattering toward the lower city’s narrow streets, and Aurelian’s archers loosed without waiting for his mark, a useless volley of arrows passing clean through bodies that had stopped needing flesh to matter a long time ago.

“Fall back to the second gate,” Aurelian shouted, and then, lower, only for me, his hand closing hard around my wrist, “Elara, move….”

I didn’t move, I couldn’t. The Crown’s voice was a roar in my skull now, no longer patient, urging me toward the broken well shaft with a hunger that felt disturbingly close to my own some deep, old, royal instinct in Caelum’s borrowed memory recognizing the door he’d died failing to lock and refusing, even now, even in someone else’s body, to simply run from it.

Bryn screamed my name from somewhere behind us.

I turned in time to see one of the waxen figures... Lord Edrin’s dead grandfather, wearing his ruined face like an accusation reach for her with both hands.
I didn’t think.

I didn’t have time to think. I threw out my own hand, and the Crown answered before I’d even fully formed the wish, a wave of red light tearing across the space between us that struck the figure mid-reach and unmade it the same way it had unmade the Council lock not killed it, because you cannot kill a thing that’s already been dead for sixty years, but unwrote it, dissolving the waxen shape back down into the dust and broken stone it had climbed out of.

The other figures paused. All of them, all at once, turning their ruined faces toward me with something that might have been the first flicker of fear I’d seen from anything that had crawled out of that hole.

“She remembers how to close doors,” one of them said, in a voice layered with at least three others speaking through it at once. “She remembers more than the Crown wanted her to, this early.”

“Good,” I said, and my voice came out steady, cold, edged with something that wasn’t entirely Elara anymore. “Then you already know what’s about to happen to the rest of you.”

I don’t know what I would have done next. I never got the chance to find out, because that was the exact moment Aurelian, three feet to my left, made a sound I had not heard a king make yet not a battle cry, not a command, but something low and involuntary, half pain and half something far darker, as the dark stone wall of his own sworn restraint finally, audibly cracked.

I turned to find him on one knee, one hand braced against the broken ground, his other hand clawed against his own chest as though something underneath his ribs had just woken up violently and uninvited.

Black veins were spreading up the side of his throat, his jaw, climbing toward his temple like ink soaking through wet paper, and his winter-grey eyes had gone, in the space of a single breath, the deep, wrong red of the moon hanging fat and watchful overhead.

“Aurelian….” I dropped to my knees beside him, forgetting the waxen figures, forgetting the Crown’s roaring voice, forgetting everything except the sight of him shaking apart in front of me.

“Don’t,” he managed, through teeth gone tight with effort. “Don’t touch me right now, Elara, I mean it, the curse, it feeds on power, and there is more loose power in this courtyard right now than there has been in a hundred years, it’s going to….”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t get the chance to. The black veins reached his eyes, and whatever had lived quietly leashed inside King Aurelian his entire life, fed for a hundred years on careful restraint and a crown he’d never asked to inherit, finally, violently, broke free.

He threw his head back and screamed, and the sound that came out of him wasn’t entirely human anymore, and the shadow that tore itself loose from his skin in answer rose up over both of us like a wing unfolding, black as the well shaft’s broken mouth, hungrier than anything that had crawled out of the dark that night.

Behind me, Selyne’s voice rose in genuine, unguarded horror. “Oh, gods, no...not now, not here, the curse only ever breaks loose like that when…”
She didn’t finish either. She didn’t need to.

I already knew, with a cold, sinking certainty that settled into the Crown’s mark over my heart like ice, exactly what kind of curse waited for more loose power in the courtyard as an excuse to stop being patient because it was the same hunger I’d just felt roaring up out of the broken well shaft, the same hunger that had been sleeping under this palace for three hundred years, and somehow, impossibly, it had been living quietly inside the king the entire time, waiting for exactly this night to finally, fully wake up.…..