He doesn’t. His eyes are locked on his dead family like he’s trying to sear the image into his mind.
“I did this,” he grits out, devastation and rage and grief colliding in his chest. His whole body shakes.
Elyssara grips him, presses her hands across his chest, desperately trying to reach him inside his rage. His disbelief. His grief.
“No, Kael. No. This is Maireth. Maireth is the monster, Kael. You loved them. They helped you willingly,” she pleads, the words coming out strained and desperate. “This is not on you.”
Her hands frame his face, palms scratching against the stubble of his chin.
But he does not react.
She reaches for his hand, clawing at it desperately. She presses it to the bare skin of her chest, the rapid rhythm of her heartbeat thundering into his palm.
You will come back to me.
That’s what she said. That’s what she promised.
“I love you from now until the Stars claim me, Kael Thorne.” Her words come out as a desperate plea. “Look at me, my love. Come back to me.”
His gaze moves to hers slowly. Too slowly. It is not Kael who stares back at her. It is wrath incarnate.
Obsidian spills across his irises like ink in water.
He huffs a humorless laugh. “A monster?”
Obsidian spreads, bleeding into the oceans of his eyes.
“Maireth doesn’t know the meaning of the word,” he growls, voice dropping into a low register. “But she’s about to.”
The vault seems to recoil from the promise.
His breath steadies. Just slightly. Not from peace. But from the calm that always descends upon him before violence. Before he becomes a beast on the hunt.
The tether goes cold. Not broken.Worse. Deliberately severed. Walls slam up, blocking their connection. Cutting her off. Casting her out.
Serpents of onyx crawl through his veins in response to his rage, climbing up his arms, stretching through his honed form like soldiers being commanded by a general.
Stormlight eyes cling to the last fragments of color.
“Stay with me, Kael,” Elyssara pleads, eyes desperate, voice raw.
Kael stands, presses a kiss to her forehead. “I need you to leave, El.”
Leave?
“What? No. Kael, where you go, I go. We’re Starbound. I won’t leave,” Elyssara says, but she knows she’s begging.
“You must,” he grits out.
The rhythmic pounding of bootfalls beat down the corridors.They’re coming.
“I won’t,” she snaps, defiant. But tears spill from her eyes anyway.
The last sliver of ocean-blue is swallowed whole by the Decay, and depthless pools of obsidian stare back at her. It is not the loss of him that terrifies her. It is how little of him she has left to reach.
Kael grits his teeth, as if he’s fighting to stay with her. Fighting to claw his way to the forefront of the Decay that possesses him.
His veins are entirely black, eyes endless chasms.
