The two approaching slavers fell as if they were made of sand. And just like that night, it was quieter than I
expected it to be. Their words strangling into silence, their bodies falling with dull thumps onto the ground.
For a few seconds, everything was suspended. My and my blade, Max and his, the Syrizen and their unsheathed spears. Sammerin, Nura, Zeryth poising for action — all of us ready.
And then, all at once, something snapped, and we plunged into dirt and blood. I buried myself into it with unexpected glee. I had not killed since Esmaris. Even at Tairn, I had managed to avoid it. But as my eyes snapped to that one man and stayed tethered to him, I wanted nothing more than blood.
I screamed out a rough, frantic command to protect the slaves, praying that it didn’t get lost in the snap of chaos. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eslyn grab Sammerin and disappear with him, reappearing fractions of a moment later near the glut of terrified slaves. Good. Because I couldn’t think about them.
There was only one place I wanted to go.
I relinquished just a few threads of my mind to Reshaye. Just enough that I felt its power cackle through me, rising
the hairs of my arms, twining with the intoxicating, overwhelming emotion that I sucked through every breath.
I grabbed minds like handfuls of skinned grapes. And I relished the way that the slavers’ terror ran down my arms just like their blood did when I rammed Il’Sahaj through their chests. Every strike of the blade left rotten smears of decay, even shallow near-misses blooming with putrid black flesh. Reshaye threw itself into every shred of control I gave it — first with glee, then with impatience.
{More,} it demanded.
Not yet.
This was mine. Mine alone. And I needed the power over my muscles that I maintained with such desperate mental energy — with so many innocents here, I could not risk that.
Still, maintaining that control grew more and more difficult as I drowned in the agonizing, bloodthirsty euphoria that was solely mine, and the confused terror that wasn’t. Max was beside me, filling my nostrils with the scent of burning flesh, and he sank into this brutality with a precise grace that was darkly beautiful.
There was nothing graceful about what I was doing. If he was a dancer, driven by years of training and lethal precision, I was an animal drunk on hunger and instinct. But he protected me, covering up the sloppy mistakes of my rage, responding to every silent request of my movements.
I looked at no one but that one tall, thin slaver. He grabbed for his scimitar, but scampered along the walls of the building, ducking through the door like a terrified rabbit seeking its den.
I fought my way to him. I hardly felt the blood spatter across my face as I struck down the guard in the doorway, or the wound that he slashed across my arm when I failed to hit my target. For one split second, the slaver’s fat fingers curled at my arms. I ceded more control to Reshaye
and let it wither his hands until he screamed — until Max tore him off of me and threw him against the wall, opening him from his navel to his throat in one slash and letting his mushy, smoldering gore spill over the floor.
My body shivered with Reshaye’s laughter, with its pleasure, with its unsatiated desire.
{More, more, more,} with every beat of my rapid heart and every inhale of rage, hands yanking at my mind with increasing desperation.
I hardly paused at the dead guard, flying into the house with a lurch only to stop short. It was so dark inside that my eyes struggled to adjust. And the fear hit me all at once, as thick in the air as the sweaty scent of bodies and urine. Through every open door, I saw the glimmering whites of eyes and fingers that trembled around ropes and rusty shackles.
A ragged breath tore through me. Gods, it was just — it was too much. My memories of my time in places just like this burned my throat like acidic bile. I stumbled. Nura and Zeryth flew past, sealing those rooms, clearing the hall. They killed so easily.
Max’s hand brushed the small of my back. A wordless note of concern when he couldn’t stop moving or fighting long enough to speak.
{Do not stop!}
I wasn’t.
Couldn’t, even if I wanted to.
I stood in a large lobby, a sweeping staircase opening before me. The steps were already filling with the frantic bodies of the remaining slavers pouring downstairs, blades drawn. One lunged for me. One touch — one brush of my sword — and his flesh turned to ribbons of pus and rot.
His body had not hit the ground when my eyes once again found who I was looking for. The tall, thin man had retreated to a corner beneath the stairs, his black hat discarded to reveal pitifully thin hair on the head that he
bowed, as if keeping his eyes to the floor would keep him from being seen.
Him. Him.
All of my exhaustion faded away into the background of a single memory: that night, again and again.
Too young to whore. By some standards.
One surge through the mass of bodies, and I was upon him. I grabbed him. Threw him to the stone ground. Felt my throat release a wordless, groaning cry.
I wanted to watch him suffer the way I had suffered.
{More, more!}
Reshaye gulped my anger, still begging for more control.
Holding it off grew further and further from my thoughts.
The slaver’s arms shielded his face — already marred with rotted handprint wounds from my touch — mouth flapping in gummy pleas. “Please, please, don’t— Please—“
My people had begged too.
I stood over him, feet on either side of his hips, Il’Sahaj in my hands. “Do you remember me?”
“Please, please…” His face lolled, pressing against the floor, eyes squeezing shut.
“Look at me!” I thrust Il’Sahaj’s blade in his face and used it to turn his cheek. The flesh of his face withered into decay where the metal touched it. I relished his squeal of pain. His fear pulsed through me like a hideous, intoxicating drug.
“Don’t kill me,” he wept.
Bastard. Bastard. There was no recognition in his eyes
— nothing but that cowardly panic.
He took everything from me. Killed my family members in their beds. Sold a child to a terrible fate. Me, and so many others.
And he didn’t remember.
{It is not enough,} Reshaye hissed.
“Remember me,” I snarled. A command, not a question, as I opened my palms to release streams and streams of
butterflies — crimson, putrid wings spewing into the air as violently as the spurt of blood and the smoke of funeral pyres. They kept coming, surrounding me even as I closed my hand around my sword’s hilt again, as if they were peeling from my skin.
I heard my name, faintly, far away. I ignored it.
“Please,” the man moaned.
He did not remember. He did not care to remember.
I was nothing to him. Invisible and unseen, just another body to use and sell and ruin, the same as so many who came before and after me.
And maybe it was the same for me. I looked down at the old man cowering on the floor and noticed the pudge to his cheeks, the sharpness of his nose. Was this really the same man that I had met all of those years ago?
Did it matter?
The bloody red butterflies clouded the air, sticking to the floor, the ceiling, the walls and to my soul.
Not enough. Never enough.
{More!}
I let my rage consume me.
{NOW!}
An animal cry escaped my throat as I raised Il’Sahaj over my head.
And when the blade came down — when it spread lightning-fingers of decay over the slaver’s body — my hands were no longer my own.
Tears streaked my cheeks as Reshaye lifted my chin and let out a manic, howling laugh.
