Fate and Destiny (The Fated Series, #2)

Chapter 52 - Fauna - Mistaken As Melody

Nothing else matters. Nothing save for those seven words, ending a prophecy of my own. They don't bring up any memories, and I don't know who anyone is except for those who have caused me pain, but those words...they're written deeper than memories.

I don't know who I am, I don't know what my purpose is, but all I know are those words and those which the healer recited to me.

My emptiness weighs heavy and my heart is tired, but I have been fighting since I was a child. I am no survivor, but a warrior. I am a violent storm - an enraged sea - trapped in a raindrop.

I feel nothing but the power thrumming through my veins, the earth surrounding me reforming, the water before me raging its storm in the still solid form. It was easy to let it wind through the halls, through the stairs I've never seen to drown the people with a demon's mark.

It was easy enough to break the chains, to freeze their links and crack their metal until my feet met the earth and it sent a wave of bliss through it, waking it. Standing is a bit harder, but my legs move fluidly, taking me towards the men and women who smiled as I bled and screamed.

Víđarr holds my torturer by his neck, his teeth inches from the artery that pumps his blood. He won't let go. I'm never letting him go again, not this time.

The others try to escape, pulling on the power that's choking them the more they move. Actually, I'm choking them. I can feel the cells beneath their skin bending to my will as they hang several feet off the ground, pinned to the wall by nothing more than the water in their bodies. I know two of them. The girl and the boy who came to me last night to fuck while I had no choice but to listen. They beg the most, wheezing through their closing throats, stretching their arms to grab onto something. They're the easiest to kill. They had little life in them anyway, I did them a favor by pushing water down their throats and then breaking the stone wall behind them so they could have their burials.

Then there's the white-haired female with red eyes. She's no fun dead to me. Nor is she my kill. So I catch the blood still spilling out of the cut on my stomach she made and look at the brightness of it. Her eyes latch onto it too, her tongue licking her lips as if she can taste it.

Blood is a disease. It keeps you standing, keeps your skin full of color and muscles moving, but put yours into another's, and, well...

The blood lifts off my finger, and I watch as it floats above me, shifting like a raindrop in a different gravity force. Meeting her eyes, I reach down and pull out the knife from her thigh, perfectly weighted and freshly sharpened to the very tip. I take a second to look at it, catching a glimpse of the bucking wave of water that rams each side wall with its angry force, cracking the stone in its reflection. There are faces on the other side of its storm, but they are no faces I remember. Hers, however, seems to be in need of an accessory.

I lift the blade to her cheekbone, and with a pull of the water in her head to keep her still, I carve a jagged line over her cheek, down her jaw, and all the way to the base of her neck. I watch her own blood swell for a second and then guide my own spilled blood to coat hers. The two drops of blood meet and soon clot, and then a scar that will never truly heal nor can be removed turns the jagged line from faded red to a deep blue. A tether, and a binding.

The man beside her is getting harder to contain, but he's not my concern. Not yet.

I could kill them both, here and now, but that would do nothing. I can feel how much of this land he's plagued, I can feel how much of it has become a womb of his own, bearing his own sense of children that will rise when his blood spills. I cannot kill him without killing them first, and they are difficult to find.

This place isn't the only one he's planted his seeds, and though this place is soon to be free of them, there are too many more to risk slitting his throat, and her death would only push him to slit his own wrists and awake what he's burying.

"She may be your blood," I say, not recognizing the voice coming out of my mouth. "But she's no longer just yours. She will never again be yours."

Darkness pools at his hands, the tendrils snaking around his legs and slowly moving up. A few try lunging at me, but the wave behind me rushes forward, slamming against their skulls. Víđarr walks through it, pulling along a now unconscious body beside him. Water fills the room, its harsh movements turning to coax as it touches my body. I push its depths further, deepening it into the halls, through the other cells, and into every crack that holds misery and pain, washing it all away.

No more pain. No more suffering.

A single light appears above me, casting rays of sunlight to bounce off the reflection of my water. I open my arms and close my eyes, breathing the light in. The water shifts with the flip of my hands, and then my feet are leaving the ground and I'm rising towards the light that I've been longing to feel.

My power may be my reliever, but the sunlight, the fresh breeze filling my nose, the clouds over my head gathering at my wish...that's my release. I've missed this more than ever, and it's about time I return it to it.