Glass of Revenge

~16~

Lyria was beyond furious. She was absolutely enraged. How could any of this be happening? This was not going according to plan. None of her plans included this! What on earth was she meant to do with this new information? It wasn't like she could just give up now, she had come too far, come so close that she could almost taste victory.

But now? Now she didn't have a clue what was going on. It felt as though her carefully laid plans were slowly sliding through her fingers, disappearing into the mist and she didn't have a single idea on how to fix it.

And she had to find a way to fix her plans somehow, adjust them, make them better, for she was not about to give up on her revenge now – not when she could sense all of the effort she had put into her plans for revenge had started to come to fruition. She was so close to succeeding that she could almost feel it.

At least some of her plans had been put into place before this latest hiccup had occurred. So far the only plans that had some chance of succeeding involved Sam Cortland and Dorian Haviliard. Lyria had not been terribly impressed that day that Athril had barged in on her having sex with Sam, but she also knew that she would be able to use his misconceptions and assumptions against him. It had been the matter of moments for her to realise that Athril thought that she was abusing Sam, but when it came down to it, that wasn't the full truth. It wasn't even half the truth, as far as she was concerned.

Yes, at first, she had merely been using Sam for her own gain, her own profit. She had been using her compellability magic on him to make him agree to her plans, to make agree to becoming her sexual plaything. But what very few people knew, what Athril didn't know, was that if she used her compellability on a human for long enough, they would become totally immersed in it and she was able to keep the cloak of magic on a human almost permanently, no matter the distance between them. And if the cloak of magic was to be ever removed from the human, their mind would be forever damaged, and they would not be able to survive without her. Not that they would want to live anymore anyway.

And that had become the case for her and Sam Cortland. He was a weak human, weakened by the years of his imprisonment in the Assassins Guild. Weakened by the torture he had endured at Hamel's hands. And all of that opened him up to her as easily as slicing into butter. Sam Cortland had been totally under her control when Athril took him away from her, thinking that he was 'saving' Sam from her. But Sam hadn't been saved, Athril had been doomed.

It was because of her bond with Sam that she knew Athril knew about the wedding between her and Dorian Haviliard, and that Athril and the Thirteen had decided to flee north to Terrasen and had taken Sam with them. Which was exactly where she had wanted Sam to be, for obvious reasons. The one way connection she had with Sam made it easier for him to gather information about the royal court of Terrasen for her.

Now, Lyria thought, her plans for King Dorian Haviliard were really quite devious in fact. So simple minded in its brilliance. Over years of research, Lyria had discovered that placed her magic on a human male at the very moment of the binding effect in the inherent magic of a wedding ceremony took place, then the human man would be forever bound to her, his mind almost entirely enslaved by her. Whereas her normal brand of compellability magic usually left the human with some small level of free will that they were barely able to act upon, the marriage version of it left him with none. As of the moment Dorian slid the wedding ring onto her finger, Lyria controlled every single one of his thoughts, every single one of his actions. Unlike Sam, Dorian no longer had any private thoughts that Lyria couldn't touch, no more free will. His mind and will had been completely subsumed by Lyra's mere presence.

Yes, Dorian's resentment toward his friends had been growing for months, but in a way that only made it easier for her to slide in and turn those resentful thoughts into thoughts of anger. Where Dorian had once been a reasonably decent and considerate young king, now stood an angry young man who hated everything his kingdom, his people, his friends and their kingdoms stood for. In other words, here stood a young man with nothing but bloody vengeance on his mind.