Page 174 of Turncloak

Panic mounted and bucked in him like an axelmare. He tried to summon the sense of calm he got when practicing sparring with Miret. After dragging a few ragged breaths deeper, slower, a coolness settled into his muscles, and he drew from a place of trust in his own body, his own ability.

He stopped abruptly, changed direction, dropped to the ground, and aimed his wand cleanly at the now feral-gazed Alucia.

“Sen debilitan,” he incanted, imbuing the curse with all the self-preservatory intent possible.

His wand obliged and fired his spell, but it missed Alucia, who dodged with a catlike agility he’d never seen her deploy. Behind her, the six compelled mages started toward him. His retroactive end condition hadn’t worked.

“Sen debilitan,” he muttered again, but again Alucia dodged. The curse found one of her fast-approaching henchmages, but that was of little use to Levan. He needed to sever the serpent’s head, not freeze a small portion of its middle.

Frustration built as Alucia dodged three, four, seven curses, and his calm splintered. She’d clearly been training, during all these years she’d spent in hiding. While he’d been plunging himself into the darkest depths of loxlure addiction, she had been drilling and practicing—little wonder she looked so lean, so strong, so dangerous.

The other henchmages were almost upon him, raining down curses—not to kill but to impede, so that their leader might finish him off.

A debilitan struck him in the bicep, and for a few terrifying seconds, it pinned him to the spot. He wrested free, the way Miret had taught him, but it was costly, both in terms of energy and time. He staggered, as though lurching free of time itself—

—straight into the last pillar as it crumbled.

A large hunk of stone slammed into his back, knocking all the air from his body. The pain was delayed, but he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t regain his footing. He fell to the ground, dropping his wand, and then the agony cracked through him, as though an axe had buried itself beneath his shoulder blades.

He rolled onto his back, searching for his wand, but his vision was speckled with stars.

Alucia stood over him, wand pointed at his heart.

Stop, leave, go, he tried to compel, but he could barely even think the words, let alone imbue them with enough power to make them stick.

As his hand scrambled for his wand, she looked at the veinless golden skin with something adjacent to amusement. “A victim finally had their revenge, I see. I hope you suffered. Sen—”

Behind her came a feral tearing sound, an agonized scream, the wet squelch of flesh torn from bone. She spun on her heel in time to see Rasso ripping the throats out of her backup.

Levan used the hesitation to kick at her ankles, sending her careening to the ground. He scrambled to his knees, found his wand, but his hands were fumbling, as though the falling stone had knocked all his coordination loose.

Alucia let out an enraged scream as Rasso tore through two more Whitewings—then blasted killing curses at Levan’s companion. Though the beast was fast, all it would take was one misstep.

Levan yelled, “Rasso, go! Away!” as fear belted through him.

But the beast wasn’t listening.

Stop firing killing curses, Levan compelled, begged, and the Whitewings obeyed, but it was not a specific enough command, and instead they plunged the torture curse at Rasso instead.

The brutally trained animal of Levan’s body saw red, and almost without thought, he grabbed the dagger from its sheath and hurled it at Alucia. It was about to fly west, but Levan wielded the breeze subtly enough to nudge the blade’s path toward its target.

It plunged straight into her back, right between her ribs.

Howling, screaming, spinning fiercely on her heel, Alucia blasted a killing curse at Levan so suddenly that he had to hurl himself through the air to dodge it—

—colliding with a rogue torture curse.

He fell into doloran’s cruel arms the way he might an old friend.

There was nothing like the feel of it.

Lightning met every nerve ending, every tendon and ligament peeled apart with a white-hot fork, a bleaching of the vision, a whole complex human body reduced to a single scream. A fundamental altering of worldview, because most people had no idea this depth of pain existed, that a body could endure it, survive it, without crumpling beneath the unbelievable force.

All at once, Levan was eight years old.

He was in his childhood bedroom, discarded board game pieces scattered on the floor, his lost brother’s spare nightclothes still peeking out from under a pillow—left there by Levan in case Laris ever found his way home. Somewhere in the distance was the clop of hooves over the Havenwood’s undergrowth. Vogolan stood over him, craggy face twisted in concentration.

Levan was inside the pain, inside the memory.