Chapter 83: Strange
"What was that?" Taria’s voice came out dry, her eyes still watering from the suffocating pressure that aura had brought down on them.
Kaedros almost smiled.
That question ’What was that?’ had become the most asked phrase since they stepped into the Throne of Ruinlight. It seemed like everything they encountered prompted the same reaction, the same stunned disbelief.
But this one... this one had been different. More than just terrifying. The air itself had become fear. Breathing had felt dangerous. It wasn’t just pressure, it was the sensation of a sword poised at the back of your neck.
"It was like facing a horde of monsters with nothing but a knife," Rauk muttered, shivering. The hair on his arms still stood upright.
Kaedros recognized the aura. Or something very close to it.
He had felt it before, surrounding only the highest of the high, the Demon Queen heeself and he only felt it from a distance.
It was the aura of death. Of thousands of deaths layered upon one another. It was something no spell could replicate. It only came from experience... and the number of lives taken.
Thalso must have killed thousands to emit an aura like that. The weapons lining the training hall’s walls? Not decorations. Trophies of death.
He’d said it himself. Taken from the hands of the dead.
Kaedros’s eyes drifted back to him, tracing the chains wrapped around Thalso’s torso and upper arm. When they’d first met him, Kaedros assumed those chains were just part of the armor, adornments or perhaps symbolic bindings. Even when he’d seen them move, he dismissed it.
Now? He wasn’t so sure.