His canines extended.
He did not decide to bite. The decision had already happened somewhere earlier in the evening and his body was only now catching up.
He bit into her neck.
She screamed.
He drank.
He did not stop.
The sounds she made changed. Pain first. Then something else. Then nothing. He registered none of it. Not the silence, not the limpness of her body. There was only the thrum and his need for her.
Asharin. Asharin. The blood soaking the sheets as the healer had examined her had made him furious yet full of need. Not just to protect her. To consume her.
How much longer could he do this? How much longer could he watch and not take? He was filled with fury and anger and want.
His thoughts were interrupted by a screech.
He opened his eyes.
The creature beneath him was unrecognizable. What had been a woman moments ago was something else entirely. Fangs. Red eyes and black, scaled skin that was thick and overlapping where flesh had been.
Wings folded and trembling where arms had been. He grabbed its wings roughly and released with a roar before pushing it aside. He did it rougher than he intended, but it landed on its feet and was now crouched on the floor of the cell, his seed still dripping down its scaled legs. It looked up at him with the particular patience of something waiting to be told what it is.
He stepped back, staring at it. He stepped back, staring at it. There was a brief pull in his chest, something suspended between regret and recognition. A twinge. Brief. He examined it the way he examined most things that made him uncomfortable, directly and without flinching, and then he set it aside.
It did not matter.
He had known it theoretically. His father had documented it, in the records Sevrin had spent years refusing to read. A feeder's hunger taken too far, desire too consuming, the feeder's nature overwhelming what it fed from and remaking it entirely. Not Morrath's creature. Not Yorali's creation. His. Born from nothing but want and darkness and a woman he could not stop thinking about long enough to prevent it.
The creature watched him. Waiting.
He found, to his own mild interest, that he was not disturbed. He was fascinated. There was something that fit about it, something that sat correctly in the architecture of a night that had already broken several things he had previously considered fixed. He looked at it the way you look at something that has just proven a theory you were not certain you believed.
He would become a monster if it meant he could have her. He had known this for some time. He was simply done performing uncertainty about it. He fastened his belt. The creature watched him, still patient, still waiting. Still his.
His mother wanted the Blind Gate open more than anyone. She had wanted it for years, longer than she had ever admitted, for reasons she had never fully explained and that he had never fully trusted. But she was useful. She would be useful. That would be done in time.
In the interim, he would prepare.
"Be patient, little one," he said. "There will be more."
He left the cell and locked it behind him.
He stood in the corridor for a moment, the thrum quieter now but not gone. It would never be entirely gone. He understood that now. It had been dormant because nothing had been worth waking it. She had woken it the moment she walked into his palace and refused to be afraid of him and it was not going back to sleep.
He would make more. He would train them. When there were too many for these dungeons he would go back to Morrath. And if this world became too broken, too consumed by war and Threns and brothers who took what they had not earned, the two of them could disappear into its darkness entirely. He walkedback up through the deep levels toward the light. Something in him had ended tonight, and something else had begun.
He did not try to separate the two. He let it run.
CHAPTER 33
Plans
The morning does not hold. It fractures quietly as the warmth fades from the chamber. The world outside does not wait for tenderness to finish unfolding. It presses forward, indifferent to what has been reclaimed in the quiet of a single room.
Colsar still sleeps when I rise. One arm remains where it had rested over me, his hand now slack against the sheets as his breath moves slow and deep beneath the bandages that wrap his ribs. I pause beside the bed, watching him for a moment longer than I should allow myself. There had been too many mornings where I did not know if I would ever see him again.
