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This book is dedicated to the Booktok community who are a classy barrel of loons that would love nothing more than to have a winged Fae to show up on their doorstep and whisk them away to a forced marriage in the Fae realm (“Oh no! How terrible! please don’t tie me up, marry me and spank me pleaaaaaase, Mr Hot Wings!”)
For the thousandth time in my cursed life, I wondered what I’d done to earn such disdain from the celestial beings who toyed so flippantly with my soul.
“I thought I made myself clear, silka la vin,” he said in his deep baritone, his voice empty of the raw anger I’d witnessed from him down in that chamber. “You are the Void. And I will deliver you to Mirelle the moment we are free to leave Never Keep. This soul-tie forged between us will ensure you remain compliant in the meantime.”
“Fight all you like. Thrash and struggle and plead with the stars for your deliverance, it will do you little good, and you will burn in the process. Once you are done with your rebellion, you will come crawling back to my door begging to fulfil the demands of the soul-tie. There is no escaping that fate. But if you wish to do this the hard way, silka la vin, so be it.”
The words Kaiser had spoken about this soul-tie rattled through my skull. “You will suffer so that I might thrive.”
“Now go to your room like a good girl. The soul-tie will demand that you return to me soon.” “I will never return,” I vowed in a hiss. “You have no idea how deep this magic runs, silka la vin,” he said, a warning veiled between those words. “You are my Fearsire and the meaning of that name will soon spark a terror in you that you will never forget.”
“Stay close to me, sisters,” I breathed to the wind which stirred at my words as if they truly were drawing nearer. “It’s only your strength which keeps me moving at all.”
😭
I would break this soul-tie. Just fucking watch me.
SLAY
Only a fool cages a wild creature and expects it to remain trapped forever, Kaiser Brimtheon.
“One foot in the traitor’s nest, another sunk in snow,”
“The point is the leash. The whip. The collar. The muzzle. The cage. The ways of old are stunted and I cannot tell what binds them. But the dark whispers your name, Vesper Crossborn. And it wants you to come for it.”
“Run fast, fly swift and remember what I told you. When the darkness calls your name again, I would suggest you listen.”
Then again, the stars always had found amusement in my suffering. So I likely owed them my wrath instead.
“I could outride you on a donkey or a dolphin,” I muttered to myself, echoing my former declaration to Ransom and seething at how I seemed to have manifested that test for myself. “Very funny, Cancer.” I shot a glance at the heavens, almost hearing her clacking her claws in amusement at my predicament. She would be behind this for sure, her games of trickery written in songs and stories for all Raincarvers to recite.
“She cheated!” he bellowed, beckoning the Reapers over and pointing at me. “She cast magic to increase the speed of her ass.” “My girlfriend did that last night. Bouncy Brenda I called her,” a boy in a blue coat yelled and a few laughs rippled through the crowd.
“These are not marks of training. Who placed these on you?” he asked, so low I nearly didn’t catch it.
“I had forgotten how it felt…” he rasped, a crease forming on his brow. “How is it possible to forget such fear? Such pain? Such loss?”
“Do not leave,” he growled, the command weakened by the quiet desperation lacing those words. “Without you, I will return to that vacant place, that hellish nothing.”
“Hello, little witch,” he growled, his voice a low timbre which crawled across my skin and sank into my veins, leaving every inch of me exposed to his scrutiny. “Hello, monster of mine,” I replied in kind, my voice a purr dressed in silk, the darkness in me rising to the surface and offering up its own greeting.
Whewwwwww my fave couple !!!!!
Yeah she was rude and kind of a bitch but she was honest and fierce and real in a way that so few Fae were too.
Ugh love her
It was no easy task to deny a star gifted bond.
I’m looking at you Tor 👀
North released a low chuckle. “Kaiser and his pet Sayer Dragon have imprinted. Their bond gives him an advantage over turtle-brained cunts like you, Raincarver, or is your mind too full of seaweed to notice how powerful he is?” “I’m sorry, did you say something?” I asked lightly. “I couldn’t hear you over the sound of you suckering your lips onto Kaiser’s asshole to blow smoke up there. Again.”
I smiled at him. He smiled back, and a tug in my chest made me want to step away. Kaské, I’d done it now. I’d gone and started caring about him. We were bonded outcasts for fuck’s sake.
A dark passage cut into the rocks before me and I crept inside, a mouse slipping into the lions’ den. Squeak, squeak, motherfuckers.
“Fuck you. Fuck your soul-tie. Fuck your Nightfire. Fuck your mother. Oh, and fuck your mother again for good luck,” Everest growled, stalking toward me.
Magic sparked between our palms as our bargain was struck, the stars binding us to our deal as certainly as any curse might. And as I looked into the smiling eyes of the monster who I had just gifted my death, I smiled right back. Because I was done with the pain of this cursed life anyway and I was more than willing to marry myself to nothing but bloodshed, carnage, ruin and rot from this breath until my very last.
The knife slipped from his fingers and he stepped close, too close, his hand coming to my face and his fingers brushing against my jaw. “If I let him live, you will use this power on me whenever I request it. You will do so until I can remain in the carnage of my own mind without you.” I inched nearer to him, closing the space so there was nothing but a breath between us. “I accept, hollow man.”
His fingers tracked up my jaw, almost a caress, the need in those obsidian eyes rooting me in place. “I am not so hollow when I am with you,” he said, his voice gritty, full of truth and tempered with the darkest brand of emotions.
AHHHHHH
I have felt nothing since. Until you.”
“If you don’t feel desire, how can you get hard?” “It happens unexpectedly, I cannot predict who I will get hard for,” he answered plainly. “For example, my cock became hard when you touched me during our last Fearsire meeting.” I stopped walking again. “What the fuck?” He glanced back. “I can’t read your current emotion. Name it.” “Disgust,” I growled.
👀🤣
“Yeah well, potato potarto.” “They are acutely different actually. More like, potato….petunia.” A laugh escaped me as the asshole caught me off-guard and Calcifiend chirruped happily from Kaiser’s shoulder.
“I’ve never been afraid of the dark.” I stepped past him, but he knocked me back and took the lead. “Well if you want to walk first into that gaping asshole of doom, be my guest,” I muttered. “You are an important asset.” “One you’ve led here? To this safe little place. At the top of a terrifying staircase that beckons us toward an unknown, but likely violent, harrowing death?” “Sarcasm?” he guessed. “Well done, clever boy.”
“Oh salacious salamanders, never before have my eyes beheld such wonderous beauty!” the man called, lurching forward and knocking several buns from the edge of his stall.
Miss you ger
“My buns!” the man wailed. “My plump and crusty buns!”
“Such pretty words from such violent lips,” he replied in a rough tone.
“We’re a fucked up pair, you and I, aren’t we?”
😌
Yes he was an asshole, and a Stonebreaker to make it even worse, but he wasn’t utterly lacking in appeal in a purely physical sense. It was just a shame that he had to go and spoil the fantasy by opening his mouth so very often.
“You are my most ruinous fantasy,” he told me. “You’re like the sun drawing me to your orbit at all times, there is no light when you aren’t near, no joy outside of your company, no point to my existence at all. You found me in the dark and set me free so that I could dedicate myself to worshipping you for all of time, and I want to spend every second I have making you feel just a fraction of the bliss you offer me with your mere existence. Tell me you want me the same way, spectre, tell me you-”
We were just two outlaws on the run. And for now, that was enough.
“You’ll have to pry her from my cold dead hands if you want her, Fury.”
MAVUS MY MANNNN
“What? I fucking hate that man. He’s not my anything,” Everest spluttered, and I shrugged innocently. “Must have been someone else’s lust I felt tainting the air when he came charging in here flexing his muscles and barking orders then.”
“I kept going with our investigations at the Keep after you died.” “Not dead.” “I grieved. You died. Now you’re just un-dead again.” “You grieved?” “No.” I smirked at her and she huffed. “Like the tiniest bit and only because I wanted to kill you myself on the battlefield one day,” she said. “Ah, that makes much more sense.” “I know it does.”
It had been easier with my spectre somehow. She’d had a way of creating distance between us and the crowds we moved within. Or maybe she’d just drawn my focus to the point where all others became little more than noise.
But that weaselly asshole had made whatever money he could out of me the second he’d seen the opportunity. And of course he had. It was so blindingly fucking obvious now. I’d let him talk me up, fallen for those lies he weaved about how great I was, how talented. You fool, you fucking idiot, Everest. Mavus played you.
IM SO SADDENED BY THIS there must be a reason
“Maybe my great, great, great grandkid is out there?” Bastian mused and I cut him a glance. “You had kids before you were trapped in that cave?” I asked. “Well, no. But some kind of distant descendant could be there.” “You have no descendants if you didn’t have kids.” “I could have grand-nieces.” “So your siblings had kids?” “I didn’t have any siblings.”
I absolutely chuckled at this
“A Skyforger, a Raincarver and a Stonebreaker cross a battlefield together,” Bastian mused, his voice a low growl and his eyes flashing with amusement which I had trouble feeling. “I believe we’re missing a punchline here.”
I turned for Cascada and she turned for Stormfell. Our choices were made, our destinies set, but I never could have prepared for the pain of that goodbye.
😢
“You’re a Dragon with earth magic, Bastian. Of course they’ll take you back.” “Back?” He shook his head, striding away from me before turning sharply and lurching into my personal space. “There is no back for me! Don’t you fucking get that? I’m alone here. Everyone I ever knew died in the time I spent stuck in an unchanging form. I know one Fae in this entire cursed land and that’s you, Vesper!”
“Silka la vin,” he croaked a laugh, a beautifully tragic freedom in his eyes. “Killer of mine.”
ahhhhhhhhhh
Of course it was her. It had been her ever since she’d first stumbled upon me in that miserable cavern. She stepped closer and I pushed myself back onto my haunches, kneeling before her as if I were her creature alone.
AHHHHHHHHH
