Chapter 112: Devil?
“Move,” Garran grunted, dragging his legs toward the swarm of shadows, skin painfully sensitive around his back. Prickling there as if thousands of needles were stabbing at him. Crawling fear in the pit of his stomach as Lenora’s figure rose with her wings stretching out to the sides.
“All hail, the Daughter of the Hatred,” the strange woman muttered as she faced the crowd, half-closed eyes slowly opening while the fog churned around her. Garran could’ve taken her as a daughter of some middle-class family. Looked barely twenty years old. Delicate skin and delicate features. Short, too, now he thought about it.
And yet the shadows hissed and screeched around her. Tides of them inched forward as if in a rush to be embraced by her fog.
Garran, instead, was staring at Lenora. Or the creature she had become.
No, she’s still the same. Still the same…
Hexmenders died young. Garran knew the fact before he became a Proved in the Brotherhood. Knew that the more you give them time, the more the shadows take control of their mind. Insidious pressure, the Captain had once told him. It was like living with maggots wriggling inside your head.
But Lenora was no simple Hexmender. A Warden of the Veil, who had a real chance at completing her Third Trial. For too long she braved the murmurs of the fallen. For too long she managed to hold her chin high against their insistent probings. She even fashioned a locket for the purpose. Told them it reminded her of the deeds she had done keeping the shadows close to her chest.
Now that locket was alive, tendrils oozing from inside of it, covering her scaled skin and higher up into her head. Horns jutted out from the sides of her face, dark horns gleaming with darkish lights. As if welcoming a newly crowned queen, hundreds of Shriekers prostrated themselves in front of her, their forms wavering in twisted pleasure.
Then, as Garran prepared himself to rip into their tides, the man on the stage stepped forward and held Lenora’s hand. He bent the knee and planted a kiss on her pulsing skin.
He felt sick just looking at this sight. Sick that he couldn’t move, or do anything to stop it. There were just too many of them. They were lucky all of them were too focused on this dark ritual to pay them much heed.
We have to do something—
Blazing lights. That was the first thing. Then the warmth around his back, sending heat down across his arms and underneath the armor. Blazing lights of fury and dancing flames, lunging at the back lines of the shadows that stood in a dreamy haze. Waves of it ripped into them like Justice himself had descended upon the world, scorching their ethereal forms with brutal ease.