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There’s nothing keeping us confined to the woods any longer.
They’ve lost their grip on our reigns, and that’s something they are going to bitterly regret.
They can do nothing to stop us.
It would make no difference if they tried to start the ritual all over again. Even if they sacrificed entire herds of cattle. Even if they sacrificed some of their people. The magic is gone. There’s nothing they can do to make blood sacrifices mean anything.
Our prison walls have crashed down, and I intend to take full advantage of the chance to slip past the boundary of the forest and begin to exact my revenge on our captors.
My thoughts fill up with savage acts, all of them soaked in blood.
The crimson liquid has held us in chains for long enough.
Now it will quench our thirst and signal our freedom.
“You are going back there tonight?” Scratch asks, his low, rumbling voice making me turn.
The arid, rocky landscape of the inner circle of our prison is enough to make me sneer.
This place is a hell hole incapable of sustaining life.
We have next to nothing here. Everything we do have, we had to find ways to make or build on our own. Stealing from their forest was the only way to get anything useful.
I refuse to let us live like this any longer.
“I have to,” I admit.
“Then, I should come with you,” he tells me.
Scratch is a loyal friend, and I feel some guilt at leaving him here, but I do not wish for him to come with me. Reclaiming Nightshade is something I need to do on my own.
My whole life has been building to the moment I am able to confront my childhood foe, and it is something I must accomplish alone.
That is not something Scratch will understand.
He has never been alone.
I have been with him since the day he was born, and he has had brothers ever since he was old enough to make memories.
I understand why he wants to come with me, but I cannot allow it.
“You need to stay here and take care of our brothers,” I remind him.
He shows his sharp fangs as he growls at me for giving him his most hated job.
It is hard to keep from huffing at how irate he becomes when he is tasked as babysitter.
“They are big enough and ugly enough to take care of themselves,” he grumbles.
“That may be so, but they are also unpredictable,” I remind him. “They need to be taken care of to make sure they don’t get into any trouble.”
“Well, Fox is busy taking care of himself right now,” Scratch utters, voicing his disgust for our cat-like brother’s current pre-occupation with physical pleasures. “I doubt he’ll notice whether I’m here or not.”
That may be true, but our brothers feel it as keenly as we do when the portal is open.
If they’re in the mood to chase wildlife around, they will step into the forest when it calls to them, and I do not know what might happen if they discover our barrier is gone.
I kept the discovery to myself at first, before speaking with Scratch in private once I knew what I had to do. Scratch knows as well as I do that our brothers have feral sides that may cause problems out in the more civilised world.
