Chapter 84: What Is A Monster?
The world shudders. The colors bleed away, draining into a flat, icy black and white. Every detail narrows into focus, every sound distorts or fades. I can feel the other students stumbling back, gathering together in a huddle of terrified, clinging life, but they are meaningless. They are so far away now, as distant as the stars. I do not care. We do not care. All that matters is the monster and the storm inside me, inside us.
The world is like before we think. There’s no line anymore between my mind and the voices that have haunted me since my marks first burned themselves into our soul. All the suffering, all the terror, all the disgust and rage and agony of watching this abomination kill so casually, so gleefully it has snapped the leash I kept wound around my emotions. That leash was always thin, stretched ragged ever since the King forced me to kill in that chamber weeks ago. When he promised me my fate as his weapon before keeping me like his pet in Lusa.
Cain was my only real friend in the outskirts, friends weren’t a luxury anyone could afford I didn’t realize how much that meant to me. But even that was stolen from me as I was not allowed to see him after being forced to endure the kings crash course training. Now here in the woods, surrounded by corpses, choking on the stench of blood I realize that my life will be nothing of death and destruction no matter how much I may have wished otherwise.
She smiles at me, all teeth, her fangs painted red with the blood of my house mates. Then she bows, a mockery of courtly grace, hair swirling behind her like smoke. "Nos?" she taunts, her voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere. "Unus tantum es. Nisi alios canes significas?"
[We? There is just one of you, unless you mean the other dogs?]
I meet her gaze, the blackness of her eyes. There is nothing human in her, nothing but unholy evil radiating form her. I feel the storm that is me, that is us, boiling just beneath the surface. My lips peel back into something that might be a smile, but it is cold, cold as a blade. "No," we say, our voice cold.
I am not alone. I am not fractured. I am whole in a way I have never been before. The voices are not whispers anymore they are my thoughts, my instincts, my hunger. When they think, I think. When I hate, they hate. Our rage is one.
"wow talis occidere intent?!" she purrs, eyes gleaming. "Sic, ostende mihi quid potes, puer."
[Wow such killing intent! Yes, show me what you can do, boy.]