Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
The idea I’ve bested him on some level, any level, ushers in a bracing flush of courage and energy.
“Pick that up”—he jabs his finger—“and put it back in the bag.”
“No.”
“Pick that infernal rock up and put it—”
“No,” I yell back at him.
On a sudden conviction, I thrust my palms forward, and that’s when the black fire comes out of me, so forceful that the great Dark King stumbles back. He even puts his bulging, veined arms over his head and seems to beat the air as if he’s trying to stop a storm of hornets.
And I know, without consciously knowing, where he must go.
Back into the fissure that was created for him and sealed with the Fulcrum. By my mother. Eons ago. When she collected all of the good, remaining magic from the very soil of Anathos and brought it here to keep us safe by locking him up.
She should have imprisoned me here, too, for I am as dangerous as he. But instead, maybe because she loved me even though I’m a monster, she hid me among the humans, just in case, some time in a future she couldn’t imagine, but knew would come to pass, he rose up once again.
And I was the only one who had a chance of defeating him because I am him, and he is me.
As all of this occurs to my mind, I see the fissure he emerged out of reopen in the contaminated red crust. With even greater strength, I scream again, and the dark energy coming out of me redoubles, battering at him like blows, until he is down on his knees and I’m standing over him.
“Sorrel,” he says in that seductive voice that promises darkest desires granted. “Do not do this. Together … we can have dominion over all of Anathos. Together we can make manifest the destiny I was intended for. Regard now at once my army, ready to do our bidding.”
A wave of distortion undulates through the red landscape, the black fires flaring up in a coordinated explosion that brings heat and cold at the same time—and then, as the optical show recedes, I see the horror I suspected, but never wanted to witness.
Legions of demons stand at the ready in formation, thousands of them. Millions. They stretch out as the horizon does, into a forever because there is no end. These are all the souls my father has taken, has bartered for with lies, has overpowered with unholy strength.
And Merc is among them.
Then again … so am I.
Dearest fate, no human army can defeat this.
The war is lost before it began.
Unless …
Unless, I can do more than just survive this greeting, this handshake of which the Sooth warned me so strongly. If I can finish off my father, with a wrath of my own unleashed, I can save all of Anathos.
Surely that triumph will heal me. And if I die in the process? At least I tried.
I think of the Fulcrum, and the black bands, the black flurries, the black flames that surround me.
Gathering all my strength, I pour the very essence of me into my father, not as a gift, or as something he can take, but as a terrible contamination that will corrode him from the inside out, spoil him to his evil core, rot him until he is no more capable of animation and will than the cold dead carcass of a cow taken down by one of his demons—
Against all comprehension, the Dark King begins to move backward toward the fissure. Even as he fights the momentum, he cannot seem to break out of it, his head making rounds of me, the worthless pebble, and the black hole that I am sending him into.
“Wait! Wait—daughter mine!”
I can barely hear him over the grunting that rumbles out of me. I feel as though I’m lifting a house from its very foundation, and the strength required is more than I have—yet I am in the throes of the effort, shaking and sweating, straining and groaning, and it’s working. The evil is being sucked into the ground now.
“Daughter mine!” The Dark King marshals his voice. “I have something of yours you need to see. Look … behind you. Look … at what you are doing to him. Look at the one you love—”
“You lie—”
And that is when I hear the one voice I cannot ignore, even though I should.
Merc’s:
“Help … me…”
Ninety-Four
The End.
I close my eyes. And I remember once again what Merc himself told me, even as I never want to think of him again.
Not all is what it seems.
“You’re a liar,” I yell at my father. “He’s not here, that is not him, he’s not here, that is not—”
The hoarse moan that rises up behind me goes in my ears and through my body. I tell myself this is an illusion created for my benefit only, nothing but a manipulation, a chimera created by dark magic and chosen with deliberation as the only way to get me to stop. And because my father thinks he can dupe me, my vengeance strengthens even more, and for this, I’m glad the Dark King has tried to play to a weakness I no longer have—