KATARA

  The night fell over King’s Veil in silence, plunging the sky into outright darkness only six hours after noon. The netherborne cried out as the last light from the sun diminished, their prayers soon turned into dusk.

  One elf pushed against the tide until he reached a cauldron of fire. He stuck his hand inside the flames and set the capital ablaze. His screams shook the palace walls in fear as he uttered the sacred words of their immortality. He said the same ballistic words they said in the war against humans.

  Back then, Victoria stood against the human race as the embers slowly consumed her left hand. She took a deep breath and spoke a riddle amidst the darkness.

  “May the light of twelve lead us into the world beyond the stars,” Katara said with a shaky voice.

  Izogie shifted closer to her, and looked her square in the eyes. “We ain’t breathed our last, and we ain’t fifty feet under, so save those damned words for the dead.”

  A piercing screech echoed inside the prison cell as the sound of bones cracking filled their hearts with despair. Katara’s hands coiled tightly around the sword that once electrified the blade. In Nikolai’s cold grasp, the steel became a rod of lightning that dwindled with each passing second until the light diminished.

  Nikolai’s body convulsed, his chest rattling in the distance. They pressed their backs against the cobblestone wall, watching him writhe in pain. She could feel Izogie tapping on her shoulder, and when the seconds turned into minutes, she banged her fists against her arm. Tears began to fall from her eyes. Still, the sword trembled in Katara’s hands.

  “I know! Okay!” she yelled. “I never had a mother to sing me no nurseries. These words are all I got.”

  Katara knew death. All her life, she felt the cold steel slicing into her skin the moment someone she loved succumbed to the Arctic plunge of mortality. A fire burned inside of her because she knew as much as those pointy ears tried to deny it. Elves and humans both had the same capacity to love and rage.

  She had watched them love and laugh all her life. Hell, they even bled the same red blood that humans bleed. Sure, the highborns were monsters that repaid weakness with cruelty, but if she picked up a weapon to kill Nikolai at that moment. Then, she would never be any better than them. She couldn’t bring herself to thrust the end of the blade into his flesh. Not when she had to watch the life drain from his grey eyes until they turned as pale as an Echo Fox.

  “If the light of twelve Eldryn is all we got now. Then we’re already dead.” Izogie whispered.

  Nikolai jolted forward. “Nooooooo.” He roared a thundering scream that lasted several seconds.

  Katara covered her ears as she dropped the sword on the prison floor. The cold cobblestone slammed into her ribcage. She shrieked in agony, mirroring the young lord’s piercing howl. An intense pain crept up the side of her abdomen, pressing against her ribcage.

  “Katara!” She screeched into a cacophony of ear-splitting voices.

  Izogie lifted her gaze to meet her companion, but horror soon fell upon her countenance. She tried to reach for her, desperately clawing at the space between them. A thin stream of blood ran clear down her jaw, tracing a dark crimson path across her warm caramel skin. Her gaze became cold when Nikolai stood before them as nothing more than a walking corpse.

  Two golden beams of light shined through his irises as he stood motionless, void of a soul. His skin had sunken further into his bones, but the closer she looked, the more she saw it. Thousands of small limbless creatures slithered beneath his skin.

  Some gnawed away at his flesh until it chewed through his infected tissue and plunged its slimy, elongated body throughout his skin. When his screams continued, a strained, grave voice spoke through his rage. His words were distorted like a sliver of light puncturing a great mist. Katara understood every word that left his pale, shriveled lips, but she couldn’t grasp how someone was able to defy the cold hands of death.

  “Noooo!” The beast roared, shaking the walls of the prison. “You cannot die! I command you to live!”

  “You’ve seen this before?” Izogie whispered, glaring at the horrid creature standing before them.

  “I knew the plague did strange things to a man, but this is abominable.” She gazed at the atrocity wearing Nikolai’s body like a mask. In the far corner of the dark cell, two golden masks glistened on an old rusty nail hanging from the stone wall. Could the face of the Ghoul Helm have paralleled his conversion? Was a demon wearing a boy’s skin, or was Nikolai the beast?

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  Izogie stared at the sword, her attention wavering from the weapon to the future of Penance. Katara held her breath as she reached for the accursed blade. Truth was what kind of beast would command someone to live. Monsters never mourned the dead.

  Before she deciphered his final command, her cellmate grabbed his sword and tightened her hold on the helm. His screams withered to naught, but her stare was unrelenting like a serpent lying in the grass waiting to strike. She was itching to cut off his head, and she wouldn’t be satisfied until it fell on the ground and rolled to the other end of the cell.

  Katara panted as she spoke. “You can’t. . . kill him. He’s still a child.”

  “The same child with no pulse.” She remained still until Katara steadied herself against the wall.

  “Well, then. . .he’s a KING.”

  “He ain’t my Kang,” Izogie said, staring at her reflection in the steel.

  Across the room, his soft rattles echoed in the dead of night. A gentle breeze pushed through the cell, spreading the rotten stench of death. An old man’s skeleton stood with an unforgiving gaze and pieces of flesh still clinging from his bones. And the longer he watched them the more the atmosphere darkened. The underworld expelled behind layers of dead skin and emulated within the same glowing eyes.

  “Where is he, Golem?” His deep voice rumbled inside her head, resonating inside her chest. “Speak now.”

  “Can you run?” Izogie whispered.

  “You have to listen.” Katara leaned closer, trying to catch her breath as she looked at her in desperation. “The ghoul helm; underneath it’s still a bo. .”

  Her eyes drooped shut until they finally closed. Her voice grew silent until her breath barely brushed past the hairs on her skin. Her grip loosened around her abdomen until she collapsed against the wall. Izogie pressed two fingers against her neck. Her pulse was barely there, but she was still alive. Katara watched her in a thick haze, gasping for air, unable to speak.

  “Katara!” She shouted.

  “It was you, demon,” Nikolai spoke in a hushed tone, but Izogie only sneered at the beast.

  She felt the weight of the sword in her hand, hypnotized by the gleam of the silver blade. It was like she was lost in the steel, listening to the whispers of the cursed weapon. Maybe it was a hallucination, but Katara swore the fires of hell blazed around her like an inferno.

  Izogie stood upright and walked in front of her with a solemn gaze. The sword stood by her side as she dragged the edge of the blade into the ground. She turned to Nikolai, who watched her with ballistic eyes. The blade summoned a fiery orange hue, but the second she rushed forward, it vanished altogether.

  The closer she came to crossing blades with death, the more the darkness reached beyond his decrepit body, coming for her. She leaped a short distance in the air, firmly gripping the hilt and raising the sword over her head. Katara imagined a strong gust of wind that sliced through a thick branch at the moment a sliver of light peaked behind a grove of trees. That’s what it reminded her of when Izogie slashed into Nikolai’s body.

  He fell to his knees, his gaze lingering on the cold ground. Even though he screamed his name at the top of his lungs, it wasn’t enough to calm his soul. “Soren!”

  “Don’t mourn him,” Izogie said, still facing the wall. “He died the same way he lived, as a damn monster.”

  “No, he was a child,” Katara said with bitterness spilling from her raw throat. Some parts of his body hadn’t fallen to death’s grip. A handful of worms slinked together in a small mound of blood and rotten flesh. Nikolai reached for the ground beneath him, but it transformed when his hands touched the cobblestone.

  The same stone that took her thirty sleepless nights drilling away at the wall with one shard of metal just crumbled in his hands. A hole five diameters wide was all she had to show for it. Her fingers were raw from the jagged edges of the shard digging into her skin.

  After a few days, she felt the sharp metal pricking the inside of her hand. With a single touch, Nikolai accomplished something that took her weeks of suffering and praying only for a glimpse outside her shackles. Even if it was only a moment.

  Izogie held the blade at his neck, ready to deliver the final blow. She was ready to send a message to the capital with one swift stroke. Killing Nikolai the same way they beheaded humans was justified to her. She could tell her cellmate just wanted the elves to lose. He wasn’t just a child, he was something more.

  He was a symbol.

  As she drew breath, her hand became unstable as her apathetic gaze dared to twist the steel further into his throat. “Draw another breath, and I’ll kill ya.”

  Faint tendrils of decay crept into each stone, marred with fine cracks that connected like a spiderweb. Loose fragments sprayed frantically through the air as Nikolai stood firmly in the center. He raised a hand, and Izogie ascended in midair.

  Nikolai took another step forward, and like a puppet, her body followed his command. She held on to the sword as she went flying through the air. In the blink of an eye, the blade came to life and was engulfed in flames as she crashed into the eastern wall.

  “Izogie!” Katara called out in a faint whisper.

  She coughed up blood. “Puh. Please.”

  Nikolai knelt over her with a piercing yellow light peering deep into her soul. “There will be no mercy, golem. Not after you killed him.”

  “I-I didn’t killl. . .” She gasped for air as he wrapped his skeletal hand around her throat. A loud cackling sound erupted in her eardrums. She felt the cold, unrelenting weight of death pressing against her neck. His grasp reached her face until it clawed at her eyeballs, reaching for them. Her skin quickly retracted, and parts of her body dissolved into nothing but bare bones.

  Her screams became quieter until she could no longer feel her throat throbbing in agony. She had lost her voice, and with death quickly approaching, she took a final look at the outside of the prison. The restless crowd gazed up at the sky in amazement. Then she heard an explosion spread across the horizon. At that moment, Katara wondered if golems would ever be allowed a glimpse of freedom. A world devoid of their hatred for elves and their bitterness towards humans.

  No more suffering.

  No more agony.

  No eye for an eye.

  When she reached the pearly gates of the other world she wanted to be the reason a lasting peace reigned down on Penance. Maybe even whispered to the world beyond the stars of their journey to peace.

  She knew it was only an old wives tale, but part of her hoped the old world was still out there somewhere. Full of life and thriving in a place where elves and humans reigned side by side.

  Katara looked at Nikolai and wished she somehow saved him from his hatred. She didn’t know much about black bleeders, but she thought their prejudice came back to haunt them. Either way, she smiled at him apologetically and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Before she closed her eyes, a shadow slipped in from the rift in the wall. He pounced on Nikolai in an instant, and black blood rained all over her face.

  The man stood still in his fighting stance, his back facing them. She looked again, and Nikolai’s head had been split clean in half. The top of his skull hit the ground with a thud. Then the man relaxed his shoulders, lowering the same cursed weapon Izogie used moments ago. As he approached her, black spots appeared in her vision. He came into view with half his wavy white hair pulled back into a ponytail. His tall stature and broad shoulders were daunting, but more than his appearance caught her attention.

  The sword roared to life with smoke and darkness in his calloused hands. Katara fought against the sharp pain that pressed against her ribcage. She longed to rest her eyes for a moment but now wasn’t the time to sleep. Not when Izogie was barely clinging to life on the other side of the wall. Not when she had risked her life to save her.

  Amidst her struggle, the man knelt beside her with barren eyes. “Another golem.” He muttered to someone staring from behind the other cell.

  Her feet shuffled closer as she held a small slab of cobblestone. “Is she one of those damn freaks?”

  “A few moments more and she would’ve been nothing but bones.” He lifted her chin. “Another deathspawn.”

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