Something With a Prince

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Secular Shadows

Lansing

Fighting was pointless, but I did it anyway, breaking my back to avoid being pinned down and chained to the floor. Panic surged up, smothering me with white heat when I heard that rattling in my ears again. This time it took four of them to get me still, and with every attempt to chain me, I was returning with ten-fold hostility. They weren't even able to remove my shirt. Turns out, biting something's hand, creature or human, makes them less inclined to touch you. A sharp blow to the cheek, however, was enough to disorient me and those iron cuffs were clamped back on. Like it was being pulled out of my throat with a hot poker, my heart thrashed against my ribs. The skin by my eye ached, throbbing in my cheek and blurring my vision in and out of focus. Wrenching my arms up, I grabbed one of them by the back of the neck and smashed its head into the floor by my side. It cried out as I winced, realizing the cuff had sliced open the side of my wrist.

The bashed creature reared up, claws jutting out like black talons ready to slice me to bits. I bared my teeth, profanities at the ready, just in time for Saorla to walk in and catch its hand on the descent. "That's quite enough, boys. You may go." The façade was back, commanding the room with brilliance.

It looked at me, black eyes growing larger as it bared its teeth. They were packed into a nonexistent jaw, sharp white, and lethally pointed. Screaming in my face some awful, piercing noise, the four creatures crawled under the floorboards and disappeared without a trace. My eyes found the witch.

She was walking soundlessly over to what looked like a vanity and sat down, messing with trinkets outside of my line of vision. That was when I realized where I was. A giant hole, a perfect circle, was cut out of the ceiling where a dome or glass used to be. Ivy and other brambles crushed the foundation, weaving through the cracks and falling through the center in twisted green ropes. The sun was high overhead, boiling my already overheated skin. There were no birds in the sky, or bugs floating around. Just a spectatorship of owls, perched around the mouth of the ceiling. Their giant eyes examined me in silence. A chill ran through me, the kind that starts from the marrow and goes out. One tilted its head to the side and gave a hoot, drawn out and low, before returning to its original position.

"They're advisors to me," She spoke, coming over to squat by my side. I saw a giant bed behind her and was surprised something like her slept. Saorla narrowed her eyes, having clearly listened to that thought and added, "They're also guardians."

"From what, could you possibly need protection?"

"We all need protection from something at some point." Saorla cleared her throat, as if that previous life rose to choke her.

To the impervious eye, there was no trace of humanity, but I could see it enough. I wondered how old she was, how young she was when she died. If she even wanted this life for herself.

"Not at first." She responded, as if I had said my wonderings aloud. Her tone echoed indifference, but the way her throat wavered told me she felt everything but. "I used to have friends, family... people I loved." Saorla let her eyes drift to the owls above, speaking almost at them instead of me. "But they betrayed me. Stole my life from me... and when that happened, when I laid dying on the forest floor, it was then that I was chosen by the forest to continue her work. She let me keep my soul and gave me power over life--" She looked at me again, her eyes digging into mine. "---And with that power came an infinite amount of death."

Saorla swallowed hard, watching me with a squinty expression. "I wasn't born evil, Lansing... despite what you may think. No one is. But I did have a little kernel of it. My human soul. Like a seed, humanity got stuck in my teeth, it rotted me from the inside out."

Clearing her throat, obviously surprised at herself for sharing all of this with me. Saorla lowered her voice from that harsh grating of sound into a noise almost human. My stomach turned, not trusting the feeling of vulnerability swarming around us.