Chapter 13: The Reckoning
The pale, false dawn filtering through the chamber’s crystals was the color of bruised bone. Elias woke to it, and to the absence of warmth at his back.
Caius stood a few yards away, a statue carved from the gloom, his head tilted as if listening to a frequency Elias couldn’t hear. His posture was all coiled tension, the relaxed man of the previous night gone.
“What is it?” Elias pushed himself up, every muscle protesting but obeying. The deep ache was a manageable throb now, a background hum to the sudden spike of adrenaline.
“Quiet.” Caius’s command was a whisper, but it cut the air. He didn’t turn.
Elias held his breath. He heard the perpetual drip of water, the faint hum of the pyramid’s latent magic. Then, beyond that, a new sound, thin and distant. A metallic ringing, carried on the cold wind that snaked through the upper tunnels. A horn. Clear, deliberate, and chillingly close.
His blood turned to ice slurry.
“That’s a Royal Hunter’s rally signal,” he breathed, already moving, grabbing for his pack, his boots. “They triangulate with them. They’re not lost. They’re here.”
Caius finally looked at him, his red eyes glowing in the low light. “How many?”
“A horn means a full troop. Twelve, minimum. Probably more. They don’t sound it unless the perimeter is secure and the target is sighted.” Elias’s fingers fumbled with a buckle. Adrenaline was making him stupid. “We have minutes. Maybe less.”
“Can you run?”
“I can fight.” Elias’s hand closed around the smooth wood of his staff.
Caius crossed the space in two strides, his hand clamping over Elias’s on the staff. “Not an option. You are depleted. You’d be a liability and a corpse in the first volley.” His gaze was merciless. “There’s a secondary exit. A vertical shaft.Narrow. It climbs.”
“A shaft to where?”
“The summit. It’s defensible. For a time.” Caius was already shrugging into his own gear, movements economical and swift. “It’s also a deathtrap if they flank us. It’s the only play.”
Another horn blast, closer. It was answered by a second, from a different direction. They were tightening the noose.
“Then we move.” Elias slung his pack, the familiar weight of herbs and vials a small comfort.
They ran, not deeper into the pyramid, but up. Caius led, a shadow with preternatural knowledge of the crumbling labyrinth. They took turns so tight Elias scraped his shoulders, scrambled up slopes of loose scree where every sound echoed like a shout. The horn blasts became more frequent, a conversation of death happening around them.
They burst into a long, sloping gallery open to the sky on one side. Jagged pillars of wind-scoured quartz rose around them, forming a broken forest. Beyond the open colonnade, the world fell away into mist-filled chasms. They were high, terrifyingly high. The summit was a crown of shattered crystal spires just above, glowing with an internal, sickly crimson light.
The sight was breathtaking. It was also a perfect shooting gallery.
“There!” A man’s voice, sharp and commanding, rang out from below and to the left.
A crossbow bolt shattered against a quartz pillar an inch from Elias’s head, showering him with crystalline dust. A second whined past his ear.
Caius didn’t break stride. He grabbed the back of Elias’s cloak and yanked him forward, using his own body as a shield between Elias and the source of the arrows. “The shaft is ahead! Go!”
Elias ran, his breath sawing in his lungs. More bolts snapped and hissed around them, striking stone with sounds like cracking bones. One skimmed Caius’s thigh, tearing his trousers and drawing a dark line of blood. He didn’t even flinch.
The shaft was a black maw in a sheer wall, little more than a crack widened by time. It exhaled a breath of cold, stale air.
“Up!” Caius ordered, shoving Elias toward it. “I’ll be right behind you!”
Elias jammed his staff into his pack strap and began to climb, hands and feet finding purchase in the uneven rock. It was a brutal, muscle-burning ascent in near darkness. Below, he heard the shouts of the hunters closing in, the sharp commands of their leader. Then he heard a different sound—a wet, gurgling scream, cut brutally short. A heavy thud.
Caius was buying time.
Elias hauled himself out of the shaft and onto a flat, windswept platform—the very summit of the Crystal Pyramid. The vista was apocalyptic and beautiful. The entire cursed forest stretched below like a rumpled black carpet, swathed in mist. The sky above was a wash of bloody dawn. Around him, the twisted spires pulsed like exposed veins.
A moment later, Caius surged up out of the shaft, landing in a crouch. His hands were slick with dark fluid. His eyes held a feral, hungry light that had nothing to do with the dawn.
“They’re in the gallery,” Caius said, his voice gravelly. “They’ll be up that shaft soon. They’ll use grappling lines on the outer walls. We have perhaps three minutes.”
Elias scanned the platform. It was maybe thirty feet across, littered with fallen crystal shards. Defensible, but just as Caius had said: a deathtrap. No way down but the way they came or a thousand-foot drop.
“What’s the plan?” Elias asked, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands. “You have a secret flying spell you’ve been keeping to yourself?”
Caius looked at him, a strange, almost peaceful expression settling over his predatory features. “The plan is you trust me.”
“I’m not jumping.”
“Something worse.” Caius turned to face the shaft opening. The sounds of climbing, of metal hooks scraping stone, were unmistakable now. He squared his shoulders, a king accepting a challenge. “They’ve come for the monster, Elias. It’s only fair I give them one.”
A cold deeper than the mountain wind settled in Elias’s gut. “Caius…”
“Stay behind that largest spire.Do not intervene. Do not watch if you think you’ll hesitate later.” He glanced back, and his smile was a razor-cut. “Time to see if you really trust me, little witch.”
The first hunter crested the shaft. She was clad in hardened leather and chain, her face a mask of grim determination under a close-cropped helm. She took in the scene, saw Caius, and didn’t hesitate. She leveled a short spear.
Caius moved.
It wasn’t the controlled, powerful movement Elias was used to. It was a blur of inhuman speed, a shudder in the air itself. He didn’t grab the spear; he simply wasn’t where it struck. His hand closed around the woman’s helmeted head. There was a sound like a walnut cracking in a vise. She dropped, boneless.
Two more hunters emerged. Caius was among them. His movements were brutal, efficient, and terrifyingly silent. Bones broke. Arteries opened with wet rips. He wasn’t fighting; he was dismantling. A soul-rending curse, it seemed, came with physical gifts of horrifying magnitude.
But there were too many. More hooks thudded into the crystal edges of the platform. Figures in hunter’s grey boiled up over the sides. A net, woven with silverite threads meant to bind magic, was thrown. It tangled around Caius’s arms for a crucial second.
A tall, broad-shouldered woman with a severe, handsome face and eyes of winter-grey stormed up the central shaft. She carried not a spear, but a broadsword, its blade etched with glowing runes of nullification. Commander Valeria. Her gaze swept past the carnage, past Caius struggling against the net, and landed on Elias, half-hidden behind the spire.
“Thorne,” she called, her voice cutting through the wind and grunts of combat. “The exiled mage. I have a decree for your pardon, signed by the Crown itself. Stand aside. You need not die with this beast.”
The offer hung in the bloody air.Pardon. A return to the world.Clean hands.
Caius roared, a sound of pure fury, and shredded the net, silverite threads snapping like gossamer. He grabbed the two hunters holding it and brought their heads together with a sickening crunch. But his eyes shot to Elias, just for a fraction of a second. The look in them was not a command, not a plea. It was a terrible, open question.
Valeria pressed her advantage. “Look at him, Thorne! Look at what he is! Is this the ally you choose? A soul-eater? A butcher? Your skills are valuable. Your past can be forgotten. Step away from the edge.”
Elias looked at Caius. At the Blood Prince, standing amidst the bodies he had made, his chest heaving, his hands dripping, his magnificent face a mask of primal fury. The monster in full view.
He thought of the man who had held him in the healing pool, whose touch on his scars was one of reverence, not revulsion. The man who whispered of places where old curses were just weather.
He met Caius’s gaze and gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head. No.
Then he looked back at Commander Valeria, her offer of clean salvation.
“Yeah, I’ve seen what he is,” Elias said, his voice carrying clearly. He stepped out from behind the spire, not toward her, but to stand at Caius’s blood-slicked side. “Trouble is, Commander, so has he. And he still tries. Your pardon can go fuck itself.”
Valeria’s face hardened into something pitiless. “So be it.”
She raised her sword, the null-runes blazing. The six remaining hunters fanned out.
Caius’s breath was hot against Elias’s ear, his words a rushed, guttural stream. “On my mark, you break the largest spire at its base. The one behind us. Use everything you have left.”
“What? That’ll bring the whole summit down on us!”
“Yes.” Caius’s red eyes were fixed on Valeria as she advanced. “Now, Elias!”
There was no time to argue. Elias turned, dropped his staff, and placed both hands on the thick, pulsating base of the central crystal spire. He reached down into the hollow, aching well of his magic, past the fatigue, and found the dregs—the sharp, angry, volatile dregs of power that had gotten him exiled in the first place. He didn’t try to shape it. He just poured it in, a surge of raw, destabilizing force into the heart of the cursed crystal.
A sound like a mountain groaning in agony filled the world. A web of cracks exploded up the spire, following the crimson veins. The light within flared, blindingly bright.
Valeria’s eyes widened. “Shields!”
Caius grabbed Elias around the waist, yanking him back toward the sheerest edge of the platform, away from the collapsing spire and the advancing hunters. He didn’t run for the shaft. He ran for the thousand-foot drop.
“Trust me!” he roared over the cacophony of shattering crystal.
The spire exploded. Not outward, but inward, then downwards. A massive chunk of the summit platform sheared away, screaming as it fell into the mist, taking three hunters with it. The remaining hunters, including Valeria, were thrown back, swallowed by a catastrophic avalanche of crystal and stone.
And Elias and Caius, clinging to each other, were falling into the void, the roaring cataclysm of the summit’s destruction chasing them down into the silent, waiting fog.
The world became a grey-white rush, a deafening roar of wind and crumbling stone dissolving into utter silence. Elias’s stomach lurched into his throat. He felt Caius’s arms locked around him, a vise of muscle and will. Then, a jarring impact slammed through them both.
Caius had twisted in the air, taking the brunt of the collision against the cliff face. His back scraped down the rock with a sound that set Elias’s teeth on edge. One of Caius’s hands, bloody and desperate, clawed out and found a fissure. Their fall wrenched to a stop so violent Elias’s vision sparked.
They dangled, a single straining grip holding them over a drop that vanished into mist. Loose scree skittered past them into the abyss.
“Don’t… let go,” Caius grunted, the words shredded by effort.
“Wasn’t… planning… to,” Elias choked out, his own arms wrapped around Caius’s neck, his legs locked around his waist. He could feel the tremors running through the larger man’s body, the raw strain of holding their combined weight with one bleeding hand.
Caius began to move. It wasn’t climbing. It was a brutal, grinding descent by sheer tenacity. He would find another minuscule hold with his free hand, then release the first, letting them drop another heart-stopping few inches before his fingers, raw and slick, would clamp onto another crack or root. Every motion was a gasp of pain, a controlled fall punctuated by gasping stops.
Elias could do nothing but hold on and listen to the labored, wet rasp of Caius’s breathing against his ear. He watched the rock face, slick with mist and blood—Caius’s blood—slide past. A eternity later, his own feet scraped against a slope, then flat, wet stone.
“We’re down,” he whispered, unlocking his limbs and staggering back.
Caius slumped against the cliff base, his head bowed. His back was a map of fresh, deep abrasions, glittering with embedded gravel. The gash on his thigh from the bolt wept steadily. His hands were pulp.
“We need to move,” Caius rasped, pushing himself upright with a grimace. “Valeria will have scouts circling. They’ll find a way down.”
“They’ll also find a blood trail if you keep dripping like a tapped keg,” Elias shot back, his healer’s instinct overriding the panic. He shrugged off his pack, fingers already digging for his kit. “Sit. Now. This isn’t a debate.”
“Elias—”
“You held the damn cliff. I’ll hold your skin together.” Elias’s voice left no room for argument. He uncorked his water skin with his teeth and began cleaning the worst of the debris from Caius’s back. “Try not to flinch. It’ll hurt.”
Caius sucked in a sharp breath but stayed still. Elias worked quickly, the practiced motions a anchor in the chaos. He applied a pungent paste of crushed yarrow and moss to staunch the bleeding, then bound the deeper wounds with strips of clean linen. His hands were steady, even as the distant echo of a horn, faint but unmistakable, ghosted through the mist.
“Your leg,” Elias said, moving down.
Caius watched him, his red eyes hooded with pain and something else. “You should be running.”
“And you should stop talking so I can concentrate.” Elias cleaned the bolt graze, the muscle beneath hard as iron. The paste sizzled faintly, drawing a hiss from Caius. “There. You’ll live. Probably.”
He sat back on his heels, wiping his hands on his trousers. They were both streaked with blood, grime, and crystal dust. Caius looked at his bandaged hands, flexing the fingers slowly.
“Thank you,” he said, the words rough.
“Don’t mention it. Ever.” Elias stood, offering a hand. “Now we move. You said north.”
Caius took his hand, his grip still formidable despite the bandages. He pulled himself up, his gaze scanning the tree line that emerged from the dissipating fog. The world here was softer, older, a dense carpet of pine and ancient, twisted oak.
“North,” Caius confirmed, a new, grim determination settling in his posture. He pointed to a narrow game trail leading away from the cliff base, away from the echoing horns. “Beyond the Glass Scar. Where curses are just weather.”
Elias shouldered his pack, casting one last look back at the towering, broken summit now shrouded in cloud. Then he turned, following Caius into the deep, waiting green of the forest.
Then he turned, following Caius into the deep, waiting green of the forest. The woods swallowed the sky and the sounds of pursuit within twenty paces, replacing them with a damp, spongy silence broken only by the rustle of their passage and the distant drip of water from broad, dark leaves. The air smelled of rot and rich, black earth.
Caius moved like a ghost, each footfall silent, but his breathing was a ragged counterpoint. Elias could hear the slight catch in his breath on inclines, the rustle of his linen bandages scraping against his shirt. The man was running on will alone, the brutal climb and fall having burned through whatever reserves the cursed magic usually provided.
“You’re limping,” Elias said, his voice low. They were picking through a tangle of thorny undergrowth.
“I’m walking,” Caius grunted.
“Your left leg is stiff. The muscle around that graze is seizing. Admit it.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re a terrible liar for an immortal prince.” Elias moved up beside him, scanning the murk ahead. “We need to stop soon. You need actual rest, not just a pause.”
The look Caius gave him was all sharp angles and annoyance. “Stopping is how they find us. Valeria’s hounds will be on the ground by now. They track magic, remember? Yours is currently leaking from your pores from that stunt at the summit.”
“So we tuck in somewhere quiet and I don’t cast a damn thing.” Elias’s tone was flat, final. “You’re no good to either of us if you collapse from blood loss and exhaustion. We find shelter before full dark. That’s not a suggestion.”
Caius held his gaze for a long, tense moment, his jaw working. Finally, he gave a single, sharp nod. “An hour more. There’s a rockfall ahead I remember. Caves, sometimes.”
The hour stretched, each minute pulling tighter on the fraying cord of Caius’s strength. His silence grew heavier, more pronounced. When they finally pushed through a curtain of thick moss and saw the scatter of massive, ancient boulders, half-swallowed by the forest, Caius leaned against one, his eyes closed for just a second too long.
“Here,” he breathed.
The cave was little more than a cleft behind two fallen slabs, a dank, dark space smelling of damp stone and old animal. It was deep enough to hide the glow of a small fire, however. Elias built one with practiced efficiency, using dry wood from the deepest recesses, blowing on the tiny flame until it caught and cast a wavering, copper light on the walls.
In that light, Caius looked worse.
He sat heavily on a relatively flat stone, his posture sagging. The bandages on his back were soaked through in patches of muddy crimson. His skin had taken on a greyish pallor beneath the tan, and a fine tremor ran through his hands when he tried to undo his cloak clasp.
“Alright, off,” Elias said, kneeling in front of him. He didn’t ask. He pushed Caius’s hands aside and undid the clasp, then helped peel the blood-stiffened tunic from his back. The sight of the wounds, angry and weeping, made Elias’s stomach clench. His hasty field dressing had been just enough to keep Caius moving. It wasn’t healing.
Caius sat perfectly still, his head bowed, as Elias carefully removed the old linen. The raw flesh beneath glistened. “It’s fine,” Caius muttered.
“It’s a fucking mess is what it is.” Elias rummaged in his pack for the last of his clean water and his precious store of golden-seal root. “This is going to sting. A lot.”
He cleaned the wounds again, methodically, ignoring Caius’s sharp inhalations. Then he placed his bare hands flat on the worst of the abrasions, just below Caius’s shoulder blade. He closed his eyes, pushing past his own fatigue. His magic responded sluggishly, a tired, thin stream rather than a river.
It was a different kind of work than the violent rupture he’d caused at the summit. This was meticulous, cellular, a gentle persuasion of flesh to knit and inflammation to recede. He poured what little he had into the task, feeling the strain behind his own eyes, a headache blooming at his temples. Swep beaded on his forehead.
Under his hands, he felt the minute shifts, the slow cessation of seepage, the faint buzz of accelerated repair. But it was taking too much from him, and he wasn’t reaching the deep exhaustion, the marrow-deep drain that was visibly sapping Caius’s very presence.
He pulled his hands back, swaying slightly. The wounds were closed, now pink, tender scars instead of open gashes. But Caius’s color hadn’t improved. He just looked emptied, a magnificent vessel cracked and running dry.
“That’s not enough, is it?” Elias asked softly, already knowing the answer.
Caius didn’t open his eyes. “It helped.”
“You’re lying again.” Elias sat back on his heels, studying him. The curse needed sustenance. All the magic in the world couldn’t replace what a soul-eater literally consumed to live. Caius had been fighting, running, burning energy for days without… feeding. The realization was cold and clear. “You need to feed.”
A flicker of something—shame, hunger—crossed Caius’s face. “Not from you.”
“You said we were tactical.” Elias’s voice was quiet, steady. “Right now, you’re a liability. Valeria finds you like this, you can’t fight. You can barely stand. That’s not tactical. That’s a death sentence for both of us.”
Caius’s red eyes opened, blazing in the firelight. “I won’t take a piece of your soul, Elias. Not after… Not after all of it.”
“Who said anything about a piece?” Elias reached for his belt, drawing the small, sharp knife he used for harvesting herbs. He looked Caius dead in the eye, his own gaze unflinching. “You take a drink. Like a blood transfusion. Old school healing. Souls are off the menu.”
“That’s not how it works,” Caius whispered, but his eyes were locked on the blade, a primal hunger rising to the surface, terrifying in its intensity.
“We’re about to find out.” Elias didn’t hesitate. He drew the sharp edge across his own forearm, a clean, deep slice. Blood welled instantly, a dark, vivid line that overflowed and began to run in rivulets down his skin. The scent of it, coppery and alive, filled the small space.
Caius flinched as if struck, a low growl building in his chest. His pupils dilated, swallowing the crimson of his irises. “Stop.”
“No.” Elias held his arm out, moving closer on his knees until he was right before him. The fire cast the offering in stark relief. “You said it yourself. I’m yours. So this is yours, too.Now drink. Before I lose my nerve and before you waste it.”
For a heartbeat, Caius remained frozen, a battle raging in his face—revulsion, need, a terrible, gnawing want. Then, with a sound like something breaking, he grabbed Elias’s arm. His grip was gentler than Elias expected. He bowed his head.
His lips were fever-hot against Elias’s skin. The sensation wasn’t painful. It was intense, intimate in a way that bypassed thought. A deep pull, a drawing not just of blood but of a low, humming current of vital energy, of life itself. Elias felt it leave him, a warm, draining tide that left a light-headed buzzing in its wake. It was profoundly unsettling. It was also a relief, to give this, to see the immediate effect.
As Caius drank, the grey pallor receded from his face. The tremor in his hands stilled. The raw, strained edges of his presence smoothed and solidified back into that formidable, dense reality. His shoulders, which had been slumped, squared. He was pulling himself back together from the essence of Elias’s own body.
After a few long moments, Caius pulled back abruptly, his breathing ragged. A single drop of blood clung to his lower lip. His eyes were wide, horrified, and sated. He looked at Elias’s face, searching for damage, for the flinch he feared most.
Elias, feeling the world tilt just slightly, managed a weak smirk. He reached out with his uninjured hand and wiped the blood from Caius’s mouth with his thumb.“See? Still here. Soul intact. Mostly.”
Caius caught his wrist, turning it to see the now sluggishly bleeding cut on his arm. Without a word, he bent and pressed his tongue to the wound. The heat of it sealed the edges, a strange, tingling caress that stopped the flow entirely, leaving only a thin pink line.
He didn’t let go of Elias’s wrist. He just held it, his forehead resting against Elias’s forearm, his breaths slowing to match Elias’s own. The fire popped, sending a shower of sparks upwards. Outside their stone shelter, the cursed forest groaned and settled into the deepest part of the night. The hunters, for now, felt a world away.