Discordant Note: Crescendo | TBATE

Chapter 310: The Discordant Note [End of Book 5]

Thank you to my beta reader and editor, GlassThreads!

Aurora

Inversion easily slid free from Toren's chest, and the blood that followed pulsed weakly. There was no momentous spurt or eruption of crimson. Just a terrible, sickly trickle of too-bright scarlet.

"No!" I screamed, panic suffusing every inch of my soul. "Toren, return to yourself! You can fight this!"

Agrona's red eyes mocked me like they always had from the depths of Taegrin Caelum, lined with subtle cruelty. As he tore my son's anchor from his chest, all he did was smile.

"It's not a matter of fighting, dear Aurora," Agrona taunted with Toren's voice, blood seeping from his teeth. "This 'child' is already doomed."

I fell to my knees before Toren's body, shaking with fear and frantic terror as I sensed his life's blood leak out into the dirt. I ignored Agrona's words. He was wrong. He was lying, as he always did. I struggled to think through visions of that cage, struggled against the urge to run again. I wanted to disappear into the darkness and fly away. If I didn't, he would take me, clip my wings and stuff me into a cage once more.

But Toren was here. I couldn't leave him. I couldn't leave my son again.

Yet Toren remained silent, our bond empty and blank. My screams echoed into a reflectionless black void as I demanded and pleaded and begged for him to wake up. Because he was dying. The red flowed in meandering rivers down his chest, and I could hear his heartbeat begin to slow.

I didn't understand what was happening, did not comprehend what Agrona was doing or how he'd taken over my son's body. But all the same, I howled with fury. I grabbed Toren's head, glaring into those curdled-blood eyes.

Agrona's arts were of the Mind. I did not understand how he had implanted himself into my son's head, but he had only done so when Toren was weak and unconscious. That meant that I could tear the Sovereign out. If I could only urge Toren's soul back, his mind might be freed.

"Relinquish him! You will relinquish my son, basilisk!" I commanded, sending pulse after pulse of energy over our bond. I would make the High Sovereign retreat. I'd carve him from my son's mind. I'd do whatever it took. "Your mental arts will not hold him. I will burn you from his skull until there is nothing left!"

Wake up, Toren! Please. Please! Wake up!

Toren's limp body laughed, wet and pained, before his hands reached up to my throat.

"I don't think I will relinquish this prize, Lady Dawn," he purred, hands sinking into the sides of my head. "And you're so, so very mistaken. You think that I've taken this poor boy's mind?"

It took me a moment to understand what I had heard, what had traveled across my head along currents of thought and malice. Because... Because Toren's mouth had not uttered the words. His lips had remained in that terrible, bloody smile. The words had been thrust into my head like hot knives. Over our bond.

I did not think the horror suffusing my soul could deepen at all. I had been through too much in my afterlife to easily feel new sorts of fear. But as Agrona's amusement coiled about me, cold and stark and interested, I recalled old, old terrors.

"I've taken his soul, little bird," Agrona's voice seeped into my very being. The tips of his fingers rustled my hair, the pads pressing painfully into my scalp.

Then he wrapped me in chains of my bond and pulled. I was yanked along roads and pathways I had always traveled with care and grace. For a fleeting infinity, I felt as if I had been lashed to one of the titans' great chariots, left to trail through countless miles of broken glass and jagged stone.