Chapter 82 One more chance
The taste of copper was still thick on Elara’s tongue when the world vanished.
One second, she was screaming, her hands pressed desperately against the hole in Ronan’s chest, trying to catch the blood that refused to stay inside him. The heat of the blue flames and the screeching of the Nosferu were deafening. Then, the ground simply gave way.
The forest, the fire, and the dying King in her arms were gone.
Elara hit a surface that felt like frozen glass. She scrambled to her knees, her fingers clawing at the floor, expecting to feel Ronan’s cooling skin. Instead, her palms slapped against absolute, polished blackness.
"Ronan?"
Her voice didn't echo. It didn't even seem to leave her lips. She spun around, her breath coming in ragged, shallow hitches. Above her, the sky was a swirling vortex of silver and violet clouds, spinning with a violent, silent energy that made her skin crawl.
She looked down at her hands. They were clean. No mud, no blood—just a faint, oily purple light pulsing through her veins, twitching in rhythm with a dark, heavy heartbeat that wasn't hers.
"Ronan!" she shrieked, lurching to her feet. Her bare soles slid on the slick floor. "Where are you? Ronan?"
The image of that black arm elongating into a spike, piercing straight through Ronan’s chest, flashed behind her eyes. She could still hear the sickening sound of his ribs snapping.
"Please! Not like this!"
A shadow rippled into existence twenty feet ahead.
It wasn't a slow appearance. One second the space was empty; the next, a man stood there. He was tall, his broad shoulders casting a long, jagged silhouette across the glass. The way he carried himself, the slight, predatory tilt of his head, it was a blueprint she knew by heart.
"Ronan?" A sob broke in her throat as she sprinted toward him, her heart leaping with a desperate, impossible hope. "You’re alive? How... I saw it go through you! I saw the blood!"
She skidded to a stop five feet away, her hands reaching out to grab him.
But the man didn't move. He didn't reach out to catch her. As she looked up, the hope died.
The eyes weren't the molten gold that had looked at her with love. They were pits of roiling smoke, swirling with the same black-violet energy that was currently biting at her marrow. This wasn't her King.
"Wh-Who are you?" she whispered, her voice trembling.
The figure didn't answer immediately. He looked at his own hands, flexed them, and then looked at her with a heavy, terrifying stillness.
“I am the part of the King that you devoured,” the voice said. It was Ronan’s baritone but hollow, stripped of any humanity. “I am the Shadow King. Or what is left of him after you tore me from his veins.”
Elara froze. Her blood felt like ice. The figure before her wore Ronan’s face but it was wrong. Every line, every glance, carried something she had never seen in him. She had heard whispers of the Shadow King from Ronan and Arwen, but she had never imagined meeting him like this.
A sudden taste of copper filled her mouth and her mind caught on the memory. The Red Moon. The hunger. The animalistic thirst that had drowned her conscience. Ronan had been the only one close enough to feed from. Her hands shook as she pressed them against her chest. “I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know what I was doing. I lost my mind,” she whispered.
"Intent matters little to the blood, little vessel," the entity said. He was disturbingly clinical. "You drank, and in doing so, you bound yourself to us both. You took our soul-third. And in doing so, you’ve painted a target on your back that can be seen from every realm."
"I don't care about targets!" Elara’s voice rose, shrill and panicked. "I want to go back! Take your anchor out of me and let me go back to him!"
"Go back to what?"
The Shadow King swept his arm across the air. The black glass beneath their feet suddenly turned transparent. Elara gasped, falling to her knees. Below her, she saw Ronan.
He was lying in a pool of his own blood, the dark stain spreading across the dirt. His golden eyes were glazed, staring at a sky he could no longer see. Arwen was screaming, her hands pressed into Ronan's chest, but the blood kept bubbling through her fingers.
"No," Elara choked out, clawing at the glass. "No, Ronan! Wake up! Please, wake up!"
"He is fading, Elara," the Shadow King whispered. "The lunar rot is filling the hole you left in him. Within minutes, his heart will stop. And since you are bound to him, when he goes, you will be trapped here in the void with me—forever."
"Save him!" she screamed, looking up at the entity with Ronan's face. "You have the power! Save him!"
The Shadow King stepped closer, his shadow swallowing her. "I have no body, little vessel. I have no blood to give. But you do. I can act as a bridge. I can feed off your energy and funnel it into the tether you created when you bit him. I can stitch his heart back together using your magic as the thread."
Elara didn't hesitate. "Do it. Take whatever you need."
"To heal a wound that deep, I must drain you until you are on the brink of the void yourself. You will feel his pain. You will feel the rot."
"I said do it!" she shrieked.
The Shadow King slammed his hand into her chest.
Elara’s world went red. A silent scream tore from her throat as her energy was ripped out of her marrow. It felt like her veins were being filled with molten lead. Through the glass floor, she saw Ronan’s body jerk. A faint, golden light flickered in his chest.
She felt his agony. She felt the cold of the blade in his lungs. “One more time, Ronan,” she pleaded silently. “Just one more heartbeat.”
The Shadow King’s grip tightened, his form blurring as he drained her. Elara’s lungs burned. Her heart slowed to a stutter. The black glass began to spin.
“One more…”