IN FULL COLOUR - Dark Fantasy

Axel

“You have been held captive all this time?” King Gaute asked with a pained expression on his face. He clearly felt sorry for the son of his long-lost friend.

“Yes. I fought beast after beast in that room, next to the body of my mother’s dead handmaiden. She had given her life to protect me, and yet I couldn’t fight my way to freedom. The beasts were relentless, so many, their bodies were starting to pile up in front of the door. I grew tired. So very tired that I could hardly lift my sword. I had fought for hours with only half of my strength and half of my body mass.”

The young king looked down, stretched out his fingers in front of him and pulled one of his sleeves up to expose his forearm.

“I didn’t always look like this,” he said slowly turning his palm and inspecting the semi-translucent skin with the blackness swirling underneath like tendrils of dark smoke wafting inside of him.

His warm hazelnut eyes looked up and met with mine. I blinked. I didn’t know where to look, so I kept his gaze.

“The curse stole not only half of my power, but half of everything I was. Everything which made me, ME. My skin, my soul and my restraint.”

There was something that flickered in his eyes when he said the word restraint. Sorrow. Guilt.

He finally looked away and I willed myself to start breathing again. This man, this king, was a mighty being. A creature of raw potential. A bottomless pit of power. Power so rich, it rolled off of him in waves. It was unnerving, sometimes suffocating, especially when he got emotional.

I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to share a room with him when all of his power has returned.

“The Serpent Queen drained me of all my strength by sending beast after beast to wear me down and when I had nothing left and it was quite clear I couldn’t die, she captured me, bound my wrists and ankles with iron and dumped me battered and barely alive in the dark dungeons of her kingdom. I had become her new favourite toy.”

Iron. The only material capable of withstanding magic. A fairy’s kryptonite. Their only weakness.

“She tortured me for years. Asking me for the location of Lighthaven.”

King Gaute visibly cringed, “you didn’t know, no one did,” his voice was barely more than a whisper.

Coyne nodded.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t have said a thing.” This time, Coyne locked eyes with Lighthaven’s king. His statement was sincere. Honest. I believed every word the young broken king uttered.

“The Serpent Queen wants power. She wants to be the sole ruler on earth, and she would stop at nothing to get it. After seeing that I wasn’t going to prove myself useful any time soon, she turned me into her own personal entertainment. I was chained and dragged around the castle wherever she went. Some days I wished she had left me in the dark pits of the dungeons, but she delighted in tormenting me. She slaughtered innocent beasts and high fae alike in front of me out of pure spite.”

Coyne clamped his eyes shut and struggled to breathe. The darkness wafted out of him, flowing around his chair like it was caressing him, rubbing against him like a cat.

“Sometimes she would capture prisoners, chain them to me for months and once I befriend them, she would pounce. Hurt them. Gut them. Kill them slowly to get to me. After a while, I shut myself off completely. Even to the servants, my overseers, everyone. I didn’t want anyone else to die, so I withdrew and became a mere shell of a man.” He clenched hard. “I lost all hope.”

The room remained silent. The Regmus beasts grew restless, sensing their master’s unease. Coyne slipped a hand down to the nearest one and slid his fingers into the blackness of the beast’s head, between its two massive horns. He was stroking the wicked monster with such tenderness; I felt a lump forming in my throat.

“Over the years I had witnessed first-hand how she betrays and schemes to get what she wants. She has her eyes set on Lighthaven and she will not back down until she has her filthy claws wrapped around its throat.”

People were shifting uncomfortably in their chairs and looking around the room.

“So, what brings you here, king? Why NOW?” Locke’s older brother Gerek asked with a sneer. He had addressed Coyne as a king, but somehow, the way he said it, made it sound more like an insult.

I haven’t really had the opportunity of dealing with the second-born son of King Gaute, but what I had gathered from Gabrielle, he was the most ruthless of the four sons. Hard, merciless when it came to nether fae in their realm and unkind.

“I came to warn you,” Coyne said, finally looking up and locking eyes with Gerek. The young king’s expression had changed from haunted and hollow to determined as he stared the ruthless prince down. “A few weeks ago, one of my nether fae under influence of the Serpent Queen obtained valuable information. Information that will lead her here.”

“If your nether fae yields to her command, then I would say they are HER nether fae.” Gerek snarled.

One of the Regmus beasts let out an unearthly rumble and the hackles in the back of its neck stood up.

Coyne lifted a hand and the beast lay back down.

“My fae only answers to my bloodline,” he said with such wickedness, I felt the air in the room shift. Once again, it became difficult to breathe, like the oxygen had somehow dispersed.

“However, the Serpent Queen is cunning and very clever. When she learned that she could not kill me, she searched for other ways to weaken me. To steal my power for herself.” Coyne’s eyes grew dark as shadows danced within them.

“She drugged me. Used the poison from her very own fangs to intoxicate me.”

Fuck. I felt bile pushing up in the back of my throat and my stomach tightened. No. No. I didn’t want to hear this.

“The poison in her fangs reduces even the strongest of men into nothing but carnal, instinct-driven animals.”

Everyone was staring. Unblinking. Their eyes so wide, the white showed all around their irises.

Coyne focused on the wood grain in the table in front of him. He couldn’t look at our faces as he said, “she knew that the only way for her to hack off pieces of my magic, was if I sired offspring. So that is what she did. She injected me with her poison, waited until I was nothing more than a beast myself and send female after female into my cell.”

Coyne clenched his fists so tightly, the black swirls faded into dull white.

“Some of the women I killed and fed on, some I…”

He couldn’t say it. Hell, it was hard enough for me to even think it. The three primal needs of an animal; feed, sleep and reproduce.

The young king was shaking, and I pitied him deeply. Now, I understood why he had asked that only the most important people attended this meeting.

“It went on for years. I couldn’t stop myself. I was a slave at the hands of her poison, and she delighted in it. Taunted me with it and watched me do the horrible deeds many times.”

He took a few deep breaths, but his eyes remained black in shadow.

“As far as I know, I sired two offspring over the years. I have no idea where they are, what they look like or even what beings they are mixed with, but I did feel magic leaving my body two times and the magic never came back, which means they are still alive.”

Locke swore under his breath, and I dragged a heavy hand through my hair.

“She uses them as pawns in her ruthless game of power. They are of my bloodline, so they can order nether fae belonging to the Kingdom of Shadows and Whispers to do their dirty work.”

My mind flashed with images of my sister. Her disappearance, what Raiden has told me about the winds and the voices. Shit. I was going to be sick. But as my stomach contracted, Coyne spoke again, and I swallowed. I swallowed my horror mixed with the contents of my belly back down.

“One of the scouts they had sent out to search for Lighthaven came back speaking of a young fae prince he had spotted in the northeast near the great mountains.”

The bewitched man we found at the border. Locke. He saw Locke. I couldn’t help turning to face him. Locke’s face had gone pale. Ashen. “There you are, we have been searching all over for you.” The words of the man rang in my head, the voices sounding neither old, nor young, neither feminine, nor masculine, neither human, nor animal, but yet also all of them combined.