The Cursed Blood, стр. 84

He caught and steadied me with a gentle but incredibly strong grip about the arm before anyone else could even move, patting my shoulder sympathetically. “Though not yet as good as you could be,” he finished my corny statement with a sad chuckle.

“You will get better, you will heal, but not here I’m afraid.” He silenced me with a kind smile and gestured for me to let him finish. “The girl, this Warlock—her connection to you is dangerous. You may never heal should you stay in this realm.”

At the time I hadn’t any idea what he was talking about. There wasn’t a place in Feydom Morgan couldn’t find me, and there was nothing about that I found bad. Still though our connection had been suspiciously silent of late, each night I longed to find her waiting in my dreams for me as I drifted into sleep.

I had the sinking suspicion the Elf Lord had something to do with her not being there. He smiled at me and nodded, as not surprisingly the Wizard knew exactly what I was thinking.

“The girl. She is dangerous. I cannot allow this unsavory connection of yours to unsettle the potential for peace. You, my fine young Darkling, may yet bring an end to this madness—” he frowned and looked about pausing mid thought. His guard behind me shifted uneasily as an unnaturally oppressive silence settled over Gramps’ lawn.

“No.” The Elf Wizard gasped as he looked about, eyes narrowed to glowing silver slits of arcane fury. “No. No. Not now. I won’t allow it—”

“Brother dearest.” The voice of the Wizard from the dungeons cackled sardonically. The words spat out like a foul taste as from a coalescing dark he fully materialized under a magnificent old birch tree, leaning heavily on his crystal topped staff.

“You rather vaingloriously assume you have any choice in the matter.” The assertion ending in an insane cackle that built into a cold high laugh and ended in a fit of hacking wet coughs.

“You’ve fallen to the Dark, Gideon.” The Elf King scowled and unsheathed a magnificent sword with a large, glowing, egg shaped emerald set into the pommel from out of nowhere, all the while glaring at his fellow Wizard with disgust.

With his free hand he pulled me behind him and took up a martial stance. “Brother, I will not show you the mercy Eric was shown. Leave now, while you can.”

The black robed, pointed hooded old man snickered, unfazed as he glanced about in mild curiosity. “You Elves, the elder races—you’re all the same, aren’t you? So arrogant. So utterly certain of your superiority, knowledge, and seats at the hierarchy of life. So confident in your grasp on power. So blind.”

I felt the cold as he spoke, each word like an artic gust warning of a storm. I gaped about in horror as the Elves, White Owl, Fazool, Gramps, and Aunt Milly stood frozen mid pose, almost as if they were outside of time. Even faithful Manx was stilled like a painting, mid leap from the porch.

A leaf, blown from the birch tree under which the Wizard stood hovered mid flutter from its branch from which a bird hung mid wing beat. All was still and unmoving—all save the Elvish High King and Gideon.

Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world (which is entirely a feasible possibility) the Wizard turned his attentions back to his Elvin counterpart. “You think man beneath you. You think it impossible that one of us could rise higher than you, or ever know things you are ignorant of. Don’t you, brother?”

“No, brother. Please, please, you are not yet past redemption. Do not make me do this,” King Efferieal Rain begged, even as his face hardened and he held his blade still and unwavering. “Do not be a fool!”

Gideon sighed and shook his hooded head at this, the purple stone atop his iron staff pulsing ominously. “Blind, so very, very blind. And who do we have here?” He gazed at me coldly from the shadows of his hood and beckoned with one nearly skeletal, long sharply yellow nailed finger.

With a groaning creak, roots snaked up from the earth, sprouting vicious red thorns and thick with clumps of dirt, leaves, and grass they waved about like the tentacles of some eldritch leviathan of the depths and snaked forward.

Some went for King Rain and the Elves. Others came for me. Binding hands, feet, and arms to my body in a constricting, tearing wrap of horrifically thorny birchwood life root that drew me from the ground and toward the Wizard, who scratched at his jaw and studied me curiously as I was brought before him.

“I smell her in you. You must be the Darkling boy my dear adopted daughter has been protecting, I presume, Ben is it?” he asked softly as the Elvish High King battled roots of his own with frantic abandon that Gideon simply ignored as he gazed at me where I dangled.

He reached forth with a claw like nailed finger and dabbed at one of the cuts his roots had sliced into my chest, his touch sickeningly stirring at my gift as he brought the fingertip to his lips then licked the blood from it. His eyes closed as he nodded, a cruel smile spreading on his crimson stained mouth.

His eyes, eerily matching the color of the crystal atop his staff, snapped open and narrowed to glowing slits as he regarded me with interest from within the shadowy folds of his pointed hood. “Yes, yes, yes. You are powerful. Perhaps she was right to protect you and I have been overly harsh on her. Perchance there is yet a use for you?”

After a moment he shrugged almost dismissively as with a wave of his hand the enchanted roots flung me like a rag doll head over heal with jarring force into the tree trunk he stood under.

Light exploded in my vision as I slumped down the papery bark as more