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cawolters · 4 years

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Wah!!! @flashfictionfridayofficial

15min late! I’m sorry guys, but I had so much fun with this piece so it was worth it!!

This is in my Rise of the Blood Dawn series — it’s a magic escape in the moors!

No triggers, enjoy!

• • H a l f b l o o d • •

by C.A.Wolters

It was not usually like this. Caz was usually a much much faster man, more than able to outrun the Watchers of the Gray City and the witch hunters on the other side of the wall, alike. Under normal conditions he could dash half a mile and then climb a steep cliff with his heart in his throat.

He had done that before, that one time where he was hunted by the Elsalvian pure-blood fanatics on Lord Ehka’s orders. Caz felt flattered that the ruler of the Endlands wanted him dead with such vigor that Ehka had sent his necromancers after him.

But that was then and this was now.

Ehka the Thousand Year Lord was dead, killed by the Empress from down south where the jade and ruby cities stood, and the broken arrow currently jammed in Caz’s femur and sticking out of his right thigh, like a twig growing directly out of his body, was slowing him down to an almost human pace.

Even with his muddled half-blood magic pulsing through his veins, working quickly to weave the muscle back together around the wound; the arrow had somehow managed to lodge itself in a crucial spot for sprinting and he was stumbling over the moor in his steps.

“Get him!!” A man, maybe the fat Baron of Dreist himself, bellowed, and then there was a ‘swiSHH’ in the air as another set of arrows flew past Caz’s ear.

Men echoed orders in the fogs.

“Kill the demon! Aim true!! Take it down!”

The demon. Caz would have laughed had it not been for his burning lungs and that slightly worrying taste of iron in his mouth.

The Rat Baron had been the one to hire Caz for his ‘special talents’ in the first place. He had been paid Caz in imperial gold to get rid of an young woman who had carried the wrong child, and who had unfortunately posed the wrong sort of ultimatum to the worst kind of man. The job had been an easy one.

Caz has only needed one night to step into her dreams and convince her that she was a bird, and the girl had jumped out of the tower the next day. Quick and clean, and discrete.

But now the good Baron was trying to kill his hired help because it was the Baron’s right by law, and because he was a cautious man who no doubt wanted to erase his tracks, tie up the last loose end with and arrow in the back of Caz’s skull. Just in case.

Caz had expected as much, his clientele were always rather lethal folk, but still it had taken him by surprise how quickly things had turned from a polite breakfast to a manhunt over the soggy morning moor.

Another load of arrows were released and this time Caz felt one in his long black hair whipping like seaweed in the cold humid wind.

He did not need to look to know just how close the Baron’s men were, their splashing footsteps told him that they were right on his heels. Fuck. If only Caz could manage to put some real distance between him and the Rat Baron’s men, then he could vanish into the dense fog growing denser in the distance.

“Riders! Maaake waaaay!!”

Riders!?! Fucking mother of a cunt!!

The footsteps fell away and the dull thumping of hoves, galloping over grass and mud, replaced them.

Caz cursed his parents. The stab of icy magic in his tissue of his right leg tore at him with every painful leap. If he has been a full blood Demon, he could just sucked the life out of whatever came next, use the vitality to grow strong and fight back.

But he was not.

Cazian M. Wohlchild was a special kind of blend — a forbidden kind.

He could heal rapidly and he could be in dreams he shouldn’t, but the rest of the Red Folk traits had avoided him in birth. He did not even have the hair or teeth of the banished people.

The thumbing came closer. It synced with the beat of his heart in his ear. In a moment he would be ridden down. His body stomped to a broken bag of mush, and nobody would bat an eyelash or bury his corpse. The law stated that he should not have been allowed to live in first place, so what crime was his murder?

Hypocrites!! Asshole hypocrites the whole lot, humans, Elsalvians, Half-breeds. Everyone trying to eradicate everyone to their own gain. But Caz seemed to be the only man that understood: You cannot challenge chaos to a duel to the death because chaos will make you choke on a fish bone before you even meet on the field or reach for your sword.

It was all beyond irony.

“There it is!” New voices, horses whinnying and snorting only a few paces behind him. This was it!!

The magic inside him squirmed in wound, retracting, and then seeking his racing heart.

Caz shot a glance over his shoulder to confirm his sudden death, and indeed. His eyes met the veiny throat of a brown warhorse breathing down his neck.

Caz screamed, tripped, staggered and fell on his front, face in a black puddle.

The monster of a creature, trained to kill, would crush him!! He could already taste his own bowls being squeezed up in his throat and hear his spine snap.

Bits of other people’s dreams swirled in his last moments.

The birds. Black shapes against a blue sky, and then, a blond girl, falling through time. He had seen her smiling face crack upon the courtyard stone. Maybe it was fate. Maybe Caz was the man that deserved to die a hard death.

But no pain came.

No hurt.

No agony?

Caz tore his face free of the icy mud in a gasp. He flopped onto his back and looked at the horse. Its rider was hitting it with the spores, kicking and furiously whipping the tethers, trying to make it go. But the beast had frozen in a docile stance. It gently shook its head.

And then Caz saw the rest of the horses did the same. War machines turned into mild giants. The other riders were equally perplexed, equally furious and violent with their horses.

Caz sat up slowly.

“What…” he lifted his hand, hesitantly reaching out in front of him, reaching inside the minds around him. The riders fell silent too. Slouching in their saddles and faces going blank.

Dream or non-dream, chaos or order, bird or horse, or man.

No… It was not usually like this for Caz.

Ciao

#creative writing #flash fiction friday #author #dark fantasy #caz #riseoftheblooddawn #amwriting #cawolters #escape #fff33 #running wild

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cawolters · 4 years

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✷ Babes in the Well ✷ (Liar Alliance snippet)

Good day to you! It’s been a minute, but here I am with a little thing that I think you guys might think will be a neat read.

It’s a little snippet of a scene I wrote between charming young King Deria and my newly hatched/refined character, gloomy necromantic Hinrich.

(Hinrich is a Mask btw, a sort of ambassador to the Kings of the ten kingdoms in the empire.)

Where: Tall Castle at the beginning of book two

Who: Deria is talking

What: He’s wandering the Chalice Room, looking at paintings and thinking about magic when he’s interrupted by a gloomy apparition.

WC: 1800

Themes: Ghost magic, politcal intrigue, secret coup!!

Is it gay?

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Well. Yes, on multiple levels, but not explicit in this scene.

Unfortunately.

Plot needs pages too.

✴ BLUE FLAG ✴

What a delightful day it was indeed. The sunlight in the mountains cast its gentle overcast glare over the hills as afternoon clouds drifted slowly over the subtly rising and falling hills deep down, down, in the valley, below my childhood home, Tall Castle.

The patterns of shy light and then sporadic sharp beams, raying out of the heavens and touching a little cottage outside the village, was more enchanting than magic.

Or, I would have thought that before I had seen the gold coin eyes of the Blade by the Empress’ side. Ah, and then her flat pieces of dull ebony to contrast his. They had been standing so close and then she had laughed. I saw it, a flower blooming in the deep dark night.

Magic indeed.

I drifted away from the massive window and toward the far end of the grand chambers of the vacant Chalice Room . My father had called it the Chalice Room because of the grand ornamented stone goblets that ran along the walls on either side of a wide aisle, making an elongated space where politics could merge or divide in its rift.

It was here all the meets with the kingdoms were held. In the middle was the round stone table, large enough and fit for Kings and just a moment ago it had been stuffed with every inch of the continent. The Ten Kings, or, rather our four border kingdoms that could come to us within a week, had gathered here in the tallest of castles, but to what end?

I wondered.

My eyes followed the walls. Paintings, taller than two able men on top of each other’s shoulders, were hung between the lit oil-chalices. King after King draped in deep rich velvets, queens and offspring, squeezed into gilded frames. More often than not, there were more than seven people stacked together in dim rooms and posing.

As I walked, their lifelike eyes followed me. Even my own green gaze, almost hidden behind the black sorrow veil that honored my late father, seemed eager to stalk me through the fabric on my stroll. It would stay like that for five years, covered with black silk to grieve The Great Fifth King. The Wall To The North. Praise in his name.

My face twitched, entirely involuntary, and I quickened my pace for the next two paintings until I got where I had wanted to go.

I stopped at the end of the aisle and came closer to the portrait, larger still than the rest and looking almost empty as there were only three people in the dim light of a dark background.

Kōrudo, The Cold. The Emperor.

Ohtani, The Sun Smile.

His lovely tragic wife that looked like she had never smiled in a hundred years, and now she never would. And then, there, holding her mother’s hand; their little daughter.

Empress Shiroin. The Pure One.

I almost laughed out loud at the nickname.

I had seen this portrait many a time of course. I had admired that oddity of the first girl to be born in the imperial line for a thousand years, but now that I had seen her in person, had had her presence just a breath away from mine, I never imagined an artist to be so wrong about a face.

The portrait looked like her, the likeness was there, no doubt, but he had caught her wrong. The artist’s hand must have begged him to dot those two fictive pearls of oil-white in her black gaze, add that tint of pink life on her cheeks and erase some of that hatred that blazed out of her face like the cutting rays of sun in my valley.

She had only been five when the painting had come into creation, so small a human, but in truth not looking like a human at all. Despite the artist’s efforts.

“Have you fallen in love?”

The quiet voice behind me, slightly distorted into more whispery voices speaking simultaneously, sent my heart racing and made me whip my head over my shoulder.

When I immediately spotted the menacing cloaked figure of Hinrich, standing in the middle of the Chalice Room, appeared out of thin air, my stomach did a small flip as unease hit it.

His cloak moved as if under water, wavering around his ankles and framing his pale face irregularly. Hinrich’s mass was see-through. An undead ghost. The Mask of Kaiserhof.

I sighed dramatically in a smile, suppressing the urge to flee, and turned back to the painting. My eyes once more seeking Shiroin’s pits.

“Yes always, and with everyone. It’s not a sporadic occurrence it’s a chronic condition. You should adapt my philosophies, Hinrich, then perhaps you wouldn’t look like a wraith who wants to crawl down a well and haunt it.”

Though I had my back to him, I could sense the Mask had glided closer while I talked. His presence had changed the temperature of the room.

“My philosophies are my own, they don’t need outside pollution. And wells are only haunted by dead whore-babes. Not men. I fish for them when my work demands bones and rotting flesh.” He said, quietly, the wisp of a voice far away and carried to my castle with death magic.

By the Gods he was a creepy sort of errand boy. We had been dealing with each other since the Empress had first vanished and I had almost gotten used to it by now, his unsettling being and ghoul magic, but admittedly not totally.

“Gone to the Gods through a wet hole.” I joked lightly, “what an enchanting way to depart this world. Out the way we came in, and frequently visits, no?”

He wasn’t actually a ghost of course. I would not have had the stomach to engage if he had been dead.

When I turned, his mouth was sour, disgust crinkling one side of his straight nose sitting on his translucent face.

“If you’re talking about sticking your cock in somewhere, it better be the Empress.” The light in the room did not fall on him, and he cast no shadow.

“Now now, Hinrich, manners. I am still a King after all.”

“Not my King.” He was a statue, staring at me and pissing me right in the face without a flinch. Then he added:

“Did she comply to the marriage?”

I threw my head back in a loud laugh. The Chalice Room made it sound like a roar.

“Comply?! Good Sir, Have you met her?”

Hinrich’s expression told me that he hadn’t and that he had no interest of ever doing so. All he wanted was his master’s orders carried out. He was an unsettling figure, but a good lapdog, to the right lap.

“If you cannot deliver, we will recruit one of the others. Errin’s King is unwed too.”

“Are you threatening me with ‘The sickling from the swamps’? I have the wall, the army, the looks and I am what they call a ‘team player’. I’m a quality bargain.” I smiled wider and tilted my head, “Besides. If you just wanted an unwed King to lock down the Empress with a ring, or stick something still up her dress, why not use your own?”

I knew exactly why. I was dealing a friendly blow, aimed right up under Hinrich’s arm at the only spot I knew he was truly sore.

“Hm, why hasn’t Eckhart apparition joined us here at Tall Castle to seduce the Grand Empress?”

In a blink his ghost was nose to nose with me. Hinrich wasn’t actually dead. His young, able, body was alive and well in Kaiserhof, but his spirit, tainted and twisted as it were, was right here with me. And though he was not haunting me, the illusion of terror, in that moment, was rather convincing.

I gulped.

Hinrich could not touch me, I had tested that when I had thrown a book at him the first time he came to me, but he was freezing my blood.

“Never take my King’s name in your dirty mouth.” His warning was slow and hateful.

There was a long pause where I could only see his sunken in eyes and feel the ice.

I slowly wet my lips with the tip of my tongue. My bones were shaking.

“Are we about to share our first kiss?” I whispered.

Another pause slid by, in which Hinrich processed my third joke of the day. Then he drifted backwards. Not amused at all.

“Deria, the quick. You think you are so smart,” his gaze darkened “but you know nothing. Make her say yes. Force her to be your ring.” The word ‘ring’ was a quiet bark his mouth.

“Force her? And how would I do that. Let me tell you, she almost stabbed me twice already, I’m sure she’s eager to actually spear me through my throat the third time I give her an excuse.”

Heinrich didn’t hesitate.

“Use the war.”

My smile fell.

“… Retract my forces? Then the empire loses two thirds of the world army.”

The Mask didn’t blink and he didn’t answer.

“But… Then the war is not ours. The Elsalvians could win, we don’t know their numbers with utmost certainty. Hinrich, people would die -A lot of people, my people your people, everyone! And mine are the first to meet the doomsday fire on our doorstep.” I ran a hand through my curls. “It- it’s the thousand year war, by the Gods! I won’t risk all of humankind for a coup at puts me at the top. I am not starved for a power that comes at that price.”

“Do what you have to.”

“You’re not hearing me, I can’t agree-“ I started but Hinrich interrupted me.

“It’s a threat. The Grand Empress will have to take you as her ring, for the sake of the empire. She will fold. Use the war.” Hinrich drifted backwards, his cloak soaring and floating in water that wasn’t there.

“And if she says no? She’s not striking me as a humanitarian.” I bit. I was getting angry now.

“This will happen whether you want it to or not. You cannot stop it.” His strange hissing voice was fading, the winter cold was becoming more tolerable.

I gaped at him in disbelief before I found my reply.

“Maybe I can stop you. I could expose your little illegal spells to the worlds, the other kingdoms, and then you’d be burned before the rooster is crowing on the last day of this week.”

His face scrunched up as he snarled.

“Try, and you will know what true horror looks like.”

I opened my mouth but closed it again.

“That’s right. Do what you have to do. Or we will, King Deria.”

My name hung in the air for a moment and then the Mask was gone. Disappeared and dissolved like a drop of ink in the running river.

I stared at the spot Hinrich had just been. Contemplating how I was a mouse between two mountain lion. He had had a point. If I declined, they would stage their coup around me, shut me out and keep me in the dark while they worked their sorcery to manipulate the fate of the world.

My hands became fists of their own as I strode out of the Chalice Room.

“Fucking magic.”

-Ciao-

#writeblr #dark fantasy #wip #original writing #cawolters #riseoftheblooddawn #theliaralliance #ayearofauthor

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cawolters · 4 years

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K x S ~ Brothel Haze

Hello, good evening writers and readers! It was flash fiction Friday yesterday and the seriously awesome prompt was: weeds and ruins!!

I didn’t make the deadline, but I had a great time with this one so I thought I would share!

What: Kiel and Shiroin, the beginning of a sex scene somewhere in book III, they’re slightly intoxicated and very eeeh ... hmm.. hungry.

Who: Shiroin is talking.

Where: The Ruin City in the Endlands (basically a very dangerous and godforsaken place), and more specifically, we’re in Kiel’s childhood home. A brothel full of weed smoking whores. Ah, home sweet home.

No trigger warns, PG15 for themes and sexy dialogue foreplay. I might post the full smut scene on here too but I’ll need to write it *tense charming smile*

I shut the door to our temporary home behind me when Kiel had entered.

The thick soaring fog of Sweet Root swirled in this room as it had downstairs and I took a deep slow breath through my nose. The heavy smoke tickled my nose and filled my skull in a tickle. I had been breathing it for hours while we talked to the blind brothel witch, however now it was getting to me with all its might, making me feel floaty like silk sheets in water, and starved like a caged tiger.

The Sweet Root was hitting me so hard and so suddenly because Kiel and I were alone.

In truth I had starting to drop my guard as soon as we had snaked our way up the spiraling staircase, even though I knew the Ruin City would never be safe for me. I was born the enemy. To Kiel and to his ancestor’s blood. The Red Ruler of the south and the daughter of a tyrant line. But in this shelter of privacy, a room with but a bed and a chair, both of our masks were gone.

We did not have to hide who we were in here.

I slid down my dark hood while keeping my hungry stare fixed on Kiel. He was leaning on the window frame in the far end of the dim room, only just lit by the last touches of dusk.

“Is it making you shift?” He asked quietly, his own sort of calm predatory gaze gleaming in the crepuscular shadows.

“Shift?” I muttered. My lips felt numb and soft. Ready to be kissed. Or bitten. Or both.

“The smoke. I grew up in it but I am sure it is affecting you. I should have warned you.” Kiel did not look like he was feeling particularly regretful that he hadn’t. The scar over the side of his lips twitched upward in a smirk.

“It takes more than silly whore weeds to make me into something I am not.” My fingers opened the silvery clasp on my cloak and it fell at my heels as I glided over the floorboards, towards my charmingly provoking prey.

“Of course. However, Rhav Root does not shift you away from yourself.” He uncrossed his arms and carefully pulled out of his black wool coat.

“It makes you the purest form of what we all are.” Kiel draped his coat over the back of a chair facing the unlit fireplace.

“Which is?” I was weightless, cut away from the world, but feeling unbearably intertwined with it. All sensation in the stars’ heavens, gathered, intensified and amplified, only to meet with my skin.

The ends of my new short hair, softly brushing against my cheekbone as I closed the last few steps between myself and Kiel, were a hundred lovers in themselves.

When I was within his reach, Kiel added his touch to my face, his warm hand stroking over my cheek and cupping my jaw. A helpless sigh leaked out of me before I had ever thought to stop it.

“We are flesh, Shiroin.”

I was transfixed by the points of Kiel’s teeth that revealed themselves when he spoke. His voice was so quiet and chilled in the night, but the words dripping out of his lethal mouth made my mind haze over.

I stood on my toes and pressed my palms to his chest.

My own voice was a hiss more than a whisper. A challenge more than an order.

“Then eat me raw, Kiel.”

The edges of his sharp smirk cracked to a shark-like grin.

It made my heart beat so hard in my ribs, that I believed it would explode and bleed me out from the inside.

-ciao-

#writing #romance #writeblr #original writing #weeds #dark aesthetic #dark fantasy #cawolters #riseoftheblooddawn #kiel #shiroin #themarkinironandbone

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cawolters · 4 years

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Mellow. Want a kiss?

WIP// Dark horror-romance fantasy

•T H E S E R P E N T K I S S•

#kiel #shiroin #illustration #writers of tumblr #writeblr community #doodles #romance #fantasywriter #kiss #vampish #riseoftheblooddawn #theserpentkiss #i suck at kisses but i cant help but to try anyway #the post is... just pretend it makes sense hahah ugh

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cawolters · 4 years

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- The King, the Snake and the Dead Man -

Do you crave some sexy gore and conflicted emotion?

What am I saying, of course you do.

This was a little scene I started sketching at a write-in and it’s Deria, Shiroin and Heikel in a room.

Get ready to be touched by something monstrous.

Book II of Rise Of The Blood Dawn - ‘The Liar Alliance’

Triggers - gore and sexual tension

18+ for theme

- The King, the Snake and the Dead Man -

Like the sweetest and softest of summer berries her shining red lips wrapped around my finger, then, her lightless black pits of death-magic eyes flicked up in mine. It was a void of nothing and everything, and I was instantly pulled into that cold darkness of a starless winter night.

My heart was pounding like the heavy beat of the mountain drum during a bore hunt and my voice was an uncertain rasp when I spoke.

”Shiroin…” I started but stopped in a hiss of delight as she sucked my finger into her hot wet mouth until the second knuckle.

I could still see the maimed body sprawled out on the middle of the floor behind her blond hair. Against my will my pants tightened over the crotch, unable to separate the sensation of her willing mouth from the fresh slaughter in the room.

The red face of Heikel, twisted and frozen in a permanent aghast scream, stared at me through his grimy and tussled hair. He had fallen like a broken doll with limbs spilling and tossed and his insides making arabesque patterns on the jade stone floors. One could have argued that the swirl and curve of his purple bowls matched the muted green of the intricate stonework, however I could not argue anything. I could not even move with Shiroin lodged between my open legs and her mouth chaining me to the armchair.

She sucked my finger harder and I felt my cock twitch. A thick drop of Heikel’s blood stretched itself long under her chin and fell in a reluctant bead.

I had to look away, but in my attempt I found the corpse again.

Heikel lay like dead men lay after they have been run through with a lance and hurled off their horses on the tournament grounds. Only Shiroin had not used a weapon. She had used her teeth.

She had ripped him apart with that same mouth that was making me stiff.

I flinched.

This was immoral. Even for me. It was macabre. It was- it was- wrong!

”Shiroin! Stop it!” I harshly tugged at my hand but her bloody nails had dug into my wrist, and her grip was impossibly stronger than ten men.

I had been nailed to the velvet armchair for as long as the fight between her and Heikel had lasted, and that was an eternity and a flash at the same time, but now I shifted in earnest. Eager to flee.

Her claws bit deeper and I desperately clutched the armrest with my free hand. There was no fleeing. No escape.

The fear and lust in a messy muddle of emotion made my stomach turn.

”Shiroin please, please, stop.” I was babbling my pleas. Quietly. A wounded man pleading the death shadow at the foot of his bed in the night “please, don’t kill me…”

She parted her lips and her beautiful tongue, gushing red, licked the length of my finger, painting it in Heikel’s shade and pausing to melt against my fingerprint.

I sighed and squeezed my eyes shut, too scared to see my own doom devour my hand and then soul.

Then her childlike voice made me dare a wincing peek.

”Why would I murder you, Deria?”

“Be-because I know. I know now what you are. I- I saw what you can do…“ I was swallowing my own tongue. Gagging on bile and despair through the words.

“Yes. And that means you are mine now, does it not?” She sighed too and stroked her sleek dripping face in my palm, smearing the vibrant ruby blood. “You will not betray or defy me now. You will not dare.”

I stared at her, the most primal of horrors drying my eyes.

Shiroin leaned on my knee; she looked like she was in some kind of satisfied daze, then she continued.

“I own you now. Like I own Kiel. Like I own the Empire. Everything that is wrong, is mine. Do you understand, little King?” Her lashes had clumped together in the wetness.

I shook my head. It was an honest reflex.

“I think you do.” She opened up her fingers and let my wrist go. I could not say if some of it was my blood in the gory handprints she left on me, but i felt the sting on my skin. Shiroin ran her hand gently up the inside of my breeches.

“No I...” I was shaking even as she reached my thumping ache and gave it a loving feel through the fabric.

“Oh yes. You know what it means to be owned by your own tainted voices. Do not think I have not always known what you are too.” Her expression was so cold, so reptilian and distant from the definition of ‘human’, and the vicious toothy smile that tugged at her lips, made me shiver.

“You are a monster, Deria. Just like me.”

-ciao-

#dark fantasy #paranormal #gore #writeblr #original writing #romance #riseoftheblooddawn #theliaralliance #cawolters #shiroin #deria #heikel

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cawolters · 4 years

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Hello, here’s a little snippet from The Liar Alliance (Book II) — it’s a nightmare scene at sea!

Shiroin is haunted by a dream witch and in this dream Farrah is using a Not-Kiel puppet to get to our sweet sweet main character.

I’ll go ahead and spoil that it’s working. Nobody is made completely from stone.

Some horror themes/some mild gore

Pg15

1500w

THE STORM SEA

The wind tore at the sails and as I looked up along the distressed, flailing sails, I was beginning to doubt they would hold. Far above the cotton and flaying rigging, the purple skies had gathered every cloud in Gailia and layered them, one on top of the next, in a dark ominous bruise.

Thunder rumbled from deep within the heavens, threatening with rain that had yet to spill.

“Your throne is only two months away, little pearl. A gleam of light in that deep crater of your thoughts is it not, Heiress?” It was a foul whisper upon the gust and I froze. I had recognized the voice immediately.

Farrah.

“Yes. I can hardly get any sleep, from pure excitement.” I said dryly with my jaw tense and my eyes searching the deck for Farrah’s dream shadow.

She laughed her bell-chiming laugh from all around me, already infecting every inch of my dream with her foul magic. This was a nightmare like all her nightmares, strange and twisted and no doubt about to split open my bowls and feed my organs to the gulls and crabs, but I was not worried because of that. At least not only because of that.

I was concerned because I had not noticed that this had been a dream before she had spoken.

The ship mast under my palm had felt entirely real, the wind tearing at the sails sounded like that had for a week at sea. Even my private thoughts about the storm, about to wash over my imperial ship had felt more real than reality, and it was not because I could not tell when I had a visitor in my head by now.

However, this time, the dream witch had slipped past my doze and directly into my subconscious without a fight. Maybe Farrah was getting better at enchanting me, poisoning me with her magic, or perhaps I getting worse at detecting her… I questioned if I was unhinging without noticing.

The beginning anxiety of her brewing nightmare started to flow down my arms and legs like a blood-carried venom, cold, tingling and faintly numbing.

“Have you found me, Snake Daughter?” She asked, the same maddening question ever night.

Find me, find me, find me Empress of Destruction, Pure One, My Love.

In that moment I wanted to grab her neck and strangle the words out of her, but if I did, the witch would only laugh louder. I knew. I had already tried in countless other dreams.

“Farrah. I found you once, I had you in my hand, but I speared you.” The most regrettable ting I ever did. “Even then you asked me to ‘find you’. Perhaps you need to elaborate what you want from me exactly.” I said, playing nice, but only playing and only because there was nothing else for me to do in here.

The ship creaked and moaned on Farrah’s conjured sea and the sway of the deck grew more vertical on the black storm-waves, timing with salty foam. I steadied my footing.

Now the clouds let their spiky icy rain, fall. It was a mute shower that immediately drenched the ship and I alike. A blurred silhouette of a woman materialized in the sizzle. She moved like a gliding ghost over the flooded tilting deck towards me.

“That is because you keep looking in the wrong places, Shiroin.” The distorted shape said softly. “The Divine Farrah wants you to triumph, but your gaze is facing the wrong direction, my little dove.”

It was my mother who stood before me. Her black thick hair flattened over her pale features by the unnatural heavy rain. It did not touch anything in my heart that Farrah should use the puppet of Ohtani Oi Hana. It was not a new trick and my face smoothed out in a plain mask as I closed off my emotions.

“Do you want to fail, Shiroin?” Another shape came up to me in the impenetrable shower of dark rain. My father. His face was wet stone and granite, carved with hate.

I could ignore him too.

“The world will drown in its own blood. They had it coming, but she will let me live if you let her in. You and I can be together then. Be free. Once you have ridden the realm of its scars.” Kiel spoke next and my face slipped. His gold eyes cut through the water veil and then the rest of his long body stepped out of the rain.

My logic told me it was not Kiel, only Farrah’s mirage, but the tug in my chest was no illusion. I should be running from her magic, avoid to look directly at it and find a way to wake myself up, but my feet were nailed to the planks while I stared at him.

“Is that not what you wanted?” Not-Kiel asked. His pointed teeth fleetingly showed between his lips when he spoke. “To be cut loose from yourself?”

“Farrah...” I breathed.

He took another step to me and I tilted my head back to meet his eyes that looked so much like polished amber. The tug in me grew painful.

Farrah’s image of Kiel was slightly amiss though. The lines of his face were too smooth and his eyes too warm. I could tell but something in me wanted to believe her magic. I had not seen his face this clearly since he had kissed me goodbye under the heritage roses and my pitiful longing heart wanted Kiel this close.

“That is why you called me Blade, right? Let me help.” There was a mild smile on his scared lip, almost like the one that Kiel really made, but not quite. Farrah’s interpretation of him was too gentle. It was a picture that the witch thought I wanted, not a picture of the true man.

And if she thought I ever wanted Kiel to be clement, she did not know me to my marrow. That comforting realization woke some of my willpower and I tore my stare away, fixing it down on my clenched fists instead.

“Always with the pathetic puppets, Witch.” My right hand gabbed the left and I dug my nails into the back of it.

“Pathetic?” Not-Kiel asked, he sounded on the verge of a manic laugh.

A laugh my Kiel would never make.

“Are you trying to leave me?” His hand slipped on top of mine. He curled his fingers around mine, and when he spoke again, I felt his breath in my hair as he bend down and whispered in my ear.

“Why are you denying us a way out? I love you with all of my soul.”

I glimpsed how not-Kiel’s other hand undid the buttons on his black clingy shirt.

“Kiel would never say it like that.” I retracted from him and found the mast at my back.

“I died for you. For your rage.” He whispered and the rain trickled in steams down the pale skin of his chest. The clear water ran red with blood on his left side.

I had to get away from the dream. I tugged at the hold not-Kiel had on me. His fingers on my hands turned to bones: held together with tattered strings of gray tendons, and so, so cold.

“I died so that you could feel alive for a moment, you selfish lying girl.” Not-Kiel’s hiss made me shiver.

Not Kiel. It’s not Kiel.

“He wouldn’t say that.” I tested his skeletal gasp again but he had locked his hand around mine in an iron clasp. I shouldn’t have looked up then, but I did. It was a frightened reflex. Where the deep pools of honey usually dwelled in his handsome face, now only pits of black rot sat. No eyes. No mouth. He was a dead man filled with black holes and gray decaying skin that slowly opened up to yet more holes.

I gasped and tore my hands from the undead cadaver.

His voice was ragged.

“You killed me Shiroin. You stabbed my heart out and then you filled it with more death.”

I shook my head.

“You killed me.” Not-Kiel was decomposing. Tuffs of his white hair dragging off his head with the rain and strips of flesh peeling away to reveal the cranium under it.

“My death was your fault.” He croaked.

“And mine.” Mother howled in the acid rain that rotted her too.

“And mine!” Father gurgled.

“AND MINE!” Yonta, Ehka, Maida, Jhon, the little girls, the soldiers, the bandits, the Elsalvians I had eaten in the Endlands all screeched and cried and staggered towards me.

Rotting. Bloating. Dragging their useless bodies over the slimy deck that rocked unrested on the stormy ocean. Their shrieks pitched, closed in. Ten, twenty, thirty! All shouting at me with their haunting voices. All sobbing and crying out in pain. Growing louder with the rain. Loud enough to make my head split open. Growing so loud I had to cover my ears.

“Stop! Stop it! Stop it!!” I screamed and flattened my back to the mast.

It was an unbearable wall of sound, drowning me in until my whole being filled with their pain! UNBEARABLE!!

Then Farrah snuffed it out and everything got deafeningly mute.

Abruptly Kiel’s quick whisper sounded deep within my skull.

“Demon girl.”

-Ciao-