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Some cold and reasoning corner of my mind knew that this king had just saved me. Had torn my tormentor away and unraveled his whole nightmare kingdom around us. And yet it didn’t matter even slightly. My body had decided he was the most terrifying being it had ever beheld, and it would not be argued out of it.

And as for him, well… he looked almost amused by it.

He came toward me without haste, the armor making a deep and heavy sound with every step before he lowered himself down onto one knee before me. But even that wasn’t enough to bring that horned helm and those burning eyes level with my own. He was a fucking giant!

“Here,” he said, almost gently, the way someone might speak to a cornered animal. “Let me help you with those.”

He laid one taloned finger against the chain at my wrist, and that was literally all it took. The iron simply ceased to exist anymore as it crumbled and fell away into a fine dark dust that scattered across the stone. With the tension I had been straining against now gone all at once, I fell backward onto my hands and backside.

After that, I did the only thing my terror would allow. I scrambled away from him, palms scraping stone, until I could get my knees under me, and then my feet, so that I could run.

I made it perhaps five strides. My legs, after so long bent on my knees, wouldn’t hold me. They buckled, and I pitched forward. But before I could hit the ground, an arm came around me from behind and pulled me back against cold, hard plating. I felt the metal of him against my spine and shivered against him. I felt how easily he held me, how little of his strength it took… no effort at all. I bucked and twisted, clawing at metal and stone, which, naturally, awarded me nothing. Nothing but his response to this.

“Easy.” The voice came low and close, almost soothing, against the top of my head. “Easy now, little human. I have no intention of hurting you.”

Without another word, he swept me off my feet entirely, one arm beneath my knees and one at my back, carrying me away from the dying veil as though I weighed no more than a child.

Hell, I probably looked like it against the great expanse of his chest. The second I saw where he was taking me, I kept fighting. Of course, I kept fighting. And he bore it with patience that was almost worse than cruelty would have been. Carrying me through the last of the collapsing dark until he stopped, and his burning eyes flared. Though it wasn’t from anger this time. No, this was something else, and I watched wide-eyed and astonished as the ground itself split open. Something rose from beneath it at his summoning.

A great block of black stone, dragging itself up out of the dark. No, not just stone, but… an altar.

One jagged and savage, bristling with cruel points all along its edges, save for the center of it. A place which had been left smooth and flat, just large enough to lay a person down upon it.

“No!” I gasped, understanding nothing and fearing everything at this point. “No, please, don’t…!”

He laid me down upon the smooth heart of the stone with ease. I surged up to fight him, but he caught both my wrists in one enormous hand and pressed them gently down above my head. He held them there and laid his other palm flat and warm against my stomach to still me.

“Struggling, will only make this harder, little human” And then, almost to himself, with something that might have been approval, he spoke again, “Although I will not pretend I don’t admire the fight in you. So few of them ever fight… it’s refreshing.” I swallowed hard at that, not understanding the true meaning of those words.

His hand left my belly, and horror struck as I feared the worst when he took the edge of the ruined robe I still wore and tore it open down the center, baring my chest. I screamed and fought even harder until he laid his broad palm flat over my heart, over the black veins crawling beneath my skin. The burning blue of his eyes dropped to meet mine.

“Now,” he said. “Take a breath for me… This one’s going to hurt.”

I dragged in air to scream again, and the scream came out of me in a different place entirely.

Not the valley of nightmares I had started off in, but now somewhere else. It didn’t echo across a dying land. It rang off close stone walls, off a high vaulted ceiling, and off the dark hangings of a vast gothic bedchamber that greeted me when I opened my eyes.

I was also met with a cold blue light and a canopy of twisted black wood. That and the figure above me, the same king, only changed.

The armor was gone. The horned helm was replaced by a startlingly handsome face that was almost too painful to look at. His hooded robe was not enough to hide the raw beauty of him, and what he was still doing to me wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t seem to draw breath. This mountain of a man, with a face that regal must have broken some laws or at least disrupted the natural order of things.

His robed figure was now covered in flowing shadow, no longer a towering nightmare but a tall god of a man with ashen skin and eyes that no longer blazed but only gleamed with startling intensity. His large hand was still pressed flat to my bare chest.

I looked down to find him still trying to pull the rest of the darkness out of me.

And boy, did I feel it!

God, but it felt like I was being ripped open and operated on while wide awake and unmedicated. I screamed, my back arching, still fighting against the one large hand that shackled both my wrists with ease.

My tear-filled eyes took in the sight of the darkness that had tried to consume me leaving my body, being pulled from me like a visual sickness taking form. A great black tide of it dragging up out of my heart, through my chest, and then up my throat. I choked and gagged around it, coughing it up as my whole body convulsed on the bed beneath the weight of his hand. I was spluttering up ropes of something sickening, a cold darkness that never should have been inside a living person.

He continued to hold me down through all of it, calm and relentless, drawing it out of me in a long, unbroken stream that rose and gathered as one. A dark form hung in the air above my chest in a writhing, seething cloud of pure shadow.

When the last of it tore free of me, he turned his wrist, like a master snuffing out his own creation. The darkness that had nearly killed me was suddenly gone in an instant.

I lay gasping and shaking, collapsing back against the sheets, the fight exhausted out of me. And for the first time in longer than I could remember… I felt clean.

He leaned down over me and carefully drew the edge of his shadowed sleeve across my chin and mouth, wiping away the worst of what I had coughed up. His touch was so unexpected and impossibly gentle that I went still beneath it. A different creature entirely from the one that had unmade a world.