West of Words (Alec Lightwood)

🗝 Chapter Fifty-Six 🗝

"You have a power that I gave you."

Varian's hands were forced flat on the ground out in front of him, held down by the same empty feeling that decorated the air around the Maledti. His eyes couldn't focus, his every sense dulled as she pulled something from the air around her.

A stick, as dark as the world that she concurred, a metal spike sticking from the end. She smiled with a wicked twisting smile, her teeth gnarled and yellowed and crooked in her mouth. Her mouth started to move, forming words that only the unseen could hear, Varian strained against the force holding him down, wincing as the restraints tightened.

"I gave you this power." Valentine rephrased his last declaration as he kneeled in front of the Warlock. "If only I had known you'd be twins, I'd have tried something new."

The rake was positioned above the back of Varian's left hand, the first strike barely breaking through the dull crevice that his mind had become.

"I fed her Angel blood, decorated her body with feathers as she slept." Valentine was happy as he spoke, reminiscing on a time when he was in complete control of every person in his life. Every syllable of every word that he spoke was punctuated by another spike of the rake on the back of Varian's hand, the feeling barely a shock to him. "Your sister, Clarissa, she was born beautifully powerful. But I wasn't suspecting another subject."

The rake continued, and though Varian's head barely lolled with every strike, the difference in the world was ever the more obvious with every tap.

"I wonder what you would have become." Valentine's hand was strangely delicate as it brushed against the wisps of white hair on Varian's head, accidentally brushing against the spiking horns, the newest addition to the boys appearance. "That half-breed changed you."

Varian wanted to speak against Valentine, to speak up for his baba, the man who had raised him. The words wouldn't form in his mouth, falling against a limp tongue and clenched teeth. The tapping continued, sharp and piercing in his ear, the constant sound become painful in his mind.

"Turned you into some disgusting destroyed Shadowhunter." Valentine laughed a dry laugh, the sound harsh in his mind. He stood, the anger rolling off of him in droves, the red air around him flickering the longer that the tapping happened on his hands. "You're a disgrace to the Morgenstern name-"

"I'm not a Morgenstern!" It took so much to just utter those four words, his head clunking against the deck as he attempted to pull his hands from the black emptiness holding his wrists to the deck.

The Maledti started a second line, an inch below the first, a half inch wide. A perfect replica of the first line, Varian started to feel the pain of it all, an ache forming in the back of his left hand the more the tapping continued.

Valentine's voice was deathly calm as he spoke again, his hand moving to his belt, pulling a knife and baring it to him. "You will always be a Morgenstern." He stepped forward, feel threateningly close to the wrist that he had broken weeks before. The Maledti did not flinch, but Varian sure did, his hands dug against the restraints, but his fingers wouldn't bend.

The man bent once again, with an easy swipe of the knife against Varian's cheek blood pooled on the blade. A hiss passed through the Warlock's lips, the pain cutting through the dull ache that the Maledti had put over him.

The smile on the Shadowhunters face was wicked as he held the blood up to the light, perfectly red and staining the painted sky as it dropped from the blade to the deck. "The same blood that runs through my veins, made you, runs through you. You are just as wicked as me."

The Maledti passed over him, starting on the right hand, the left laying limp and unrestrained against the deck. Varian couldn't see the world in the way it was. The constant brightness that filled the world dulled in such a way that terrified the Warlock.

"You are just as wicked as me." Valentine spoke the words once again, lifting the knife to his mouth and licking the drops of blood off of the blade with a gruesome smile. "Say goodbye to the world you knew."

It was ominous, and if Varian had even the slightest bit of energy he would question why.

The first bar was completed on his right hand, the second beginning almost immediately. The Maledti entirely unphased by the spoken taunts of Valentine, her mouth still forming words just on the cusp of Varian's hearing.

"What-" The word was interrupted by a sharp stab of pain in the Warlocks hands, the dullness beginning to fade as the second bar was nearly complete.

"'And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.'" Valentine's words echoed, the tapping growing all the louder as his mind started to realize what exactly was happening to his body, to his mind, to his hands. "'And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the Earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the Earth.'"

And suddenly the world fell silent, the second bar was complete, and everything that the Warlock was before was suddenly obsolete. The world noticed the absence of Varian, the absence of the power that the Warlock had wielded.

The Maledti stood, backing up a few feet, and despite the hope that Varian felt that her presence would help the dullness to disappear it did not. Valentine looked at her in a proud way, smiling brightly as he thanked her in a vocal way.

His sword pulled from his sheath in a moment, arching peacefully through the air before sinking hilt deep into her stomach. She opened her mouth in a voiceless scream, before crashing in on her own form and disappearing with a loud cymbal crash.

It echoed across the water, the last of a species so effortlessly destroyed at the hands of a vile man for his own enjoyment.

Valentine turned on Varian, grabbing at his hands in an indelicate way, not minding the shout of pain that passed through the Warlocks lips. "Such lovely work." He grinned, lips spreading across his face in a way that made him seem so villainous. "You were her last victim, and what a last hurrah she got."

Varian screamed as Valentine lifted him up by his hair, tears pouring down his cheeks as he tried to struggle free. Every jolt to his hands was like fire in his veins, the world wouldn't react the way he needed. Valentine pinned him against the rail of the ship.

"Just one more thing." Valentine muttered it, gripping Varian by the back of his head to hold him steady, his knife lifting to press into his hair.

The shouts that ripped through Varian echoed through the bay, every corner of New York feeling the agony of someone powerful being stripped of all of his power, everything that made him him. The sawing motion shoved at Varian's neck with every back and forth, a sickening crack sounding before the sawing continued.

"Tada." The words fell on hollow ears, his head was pushed back and Valentine held pieces of him in the air as a trophy. His little horns, the newest addition to the Warlocks appearance, the part that Ragnor Fell gave to him, dripping with blood as Valentine smiled proudly. "And they shall be made to crawl on their bellies to enter the kingdom of darkness."

And with one final motion Valentine pushed the young Warlock over the railing, and Varian sunk into the cool blew water of the Hudson below.

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The first quote is Revelations 6:8.

The second is from Dante's 'Inferno'.