Beloved Beast

Chapter Twenty

Shrugging on his cloak, its woolen folds flapping like massive featherless wings, Don sought to lose himself in the vast, winding passageways that loomed ahead of him. Replete with darkness, its shadows rallied behind him. It had a calming effect to the perennial chaos in his heart, relaxing his tense muscles and mollifying the visceral unease that strained his bones. But his heart remained evermore leaden and ripe with sorrow, as sure as his stride was heavy-footed and his mind awash with undue emotions; harried predominantly by unremitting grief.

As he rounded a corner, an unwanted memory met with acute pain on his inner musings. A low, guttural groan sprang from his throat as he resisted its worrying ascent, but it surged nonetheless, uninvited, shattering any semblance of calm.

"Kill them, Don." Seraphine commanded in that beguiling, sinister tone that shook with ill-conceived rage, and she wagged a finger to the village that resided just beyond the labyrinth of towering oak, where the blithe sound of children laughing could be heard succeeding an advancing wind. "I want them dead. Will you do that, my love? Will you gather their screams for me?"

Dread was an icy fist in the center of his chest as he gaped wide-eyed to the many cottages that dotted the clearing. The village was but one of many that resided on his lands, mayhap even the largest, teeming with unsuspecting innocents. "I cannot." He muttered almost indistinctly beneath the rising gusts.

As if her power and rage were in direct correlation to the elements, thick turbulent clouds rolled in with the promise of a torrential downpour. "You cannot?" she seethed, her cerulean eyes illuminating a blue, manic fire. "You would deny me this?"

At his silence, she gave a throaty, delirious laugh, the sound empty and uninhabited of the woman who had captured his heart. There were no traces of her now, nothing but this cold and ruthless enchantress glaring at him with ill-intent. "It pleases me to have their screams, lover, and you will seize them for me."

He was physically ill. "Do not ask this of me."

Red, shapely lips, lips he had kissed many times over in the heat of passion, curved into a thin and unsmiling display of a passable grin. Raking a nail unhurriedly down his smooth cheek, Sera stated, "It is them, or the last of your family, the decision is yours."

Don clenched his eyes shut, but there was no escaping his grim and unchanging past. It engendered unbearable pain. The horror and loss of that day is where he stayed, reliving the screams as they resounded in the deepest alcoves of his mind, wishing of different outcomes. Terror-stricken faces danced in the hazy shades of his nightmares. A violent, wild fire loomed in rapid saffron waves, parts of it even flickering an iridescent blue. Its flames flared wide and licked aloft, bereaving the air of its fresh, saline breeze and coating it acrid with death. It roared in its devastation, a living, breathing force all its own, silencing the cries of those caught amidst its searing blaze. Thick, black plumes of smoke curled skyward, smothering any shred of sunlight and casting a film of ash and embers over the ravaged.

With a deep and equally disheartened groan, Don shoved the horrific images away, adopting a cold and indifferent veneer.

You are not your scars any more than I am my blindness.

Oh, but he was. His scars were every bit indicative of the monster within. He had ended a throng of hearts and relinquished his own thereafter.

Don touched his chest, just above that slow but otherwise beating apparatus, and knew, there was no substance there, no stimulus for life, nothing moved it, but ... Elle.