Page 105 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

“How does your brother do it? He was perfectly alive last time I saw him.”

“No, but his magic isn’t,” he explained again, like it’s supposed to make perfect sense to me. When he looked over at me, he saw the confusion marking my expression. “You never paid attention to Adriata in any form, did you?”

“How would you guess such a thing?” I could have cared less for anything when I was a child. And after I got crowned I already had too much to worry to bother myself with learning about Adriata. I knew how to kill them and that was plenty.

He gave me a helping hand as we jumped over a fallen pillar. Shouldn’t have worn a dress for this, but my leathers felt too saggy after losing weight. “Never wondered why an Obscur is often called an Orcus, why they are called death itself? Soul killers?”

I glanced at the empty prison chambers while we passed through the corridor. “Should I have?”

“Possibly, considering you are now married to one.”

“I’m not afraid of him. If that is what you are implying.”

“No, you’re not afraid of Kilian, but you are afraid of his magic. Still, it isn’t what I meant.”

I stopped and so did he. “And what did you mean?”

“Kilian taught his magic to read emotion like an Empath, he even went as far as to manipulate his darkness into using shadows instead of darkness itself. I’m not trying to say that Kilian is perhaps the most skilled Obscur since the time of gods, because he is, what I’m saying is that he would rather lose sleep and spend years learning anything else than use his god given magic. Do you want to know the why?”

“Why, Mal?”

“Because an Obscur is also called a cursed Aura—a cursed god blessed.” He kicked a rock from our path, leading us further in the corridor. “When a prime Obscur at the time of Henah in Adriata attempted to breach a path to the Otherworld, they were caught by the guardian of death himself. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it did something worse to the Obscur. The Otherworld guardians are quite the jesters, you know. ‘If you wish to see death, be death’ was the wording of that curse.”

Oh.

“And like that,” Mal continued. “The blood of all Obscurs mutated and changed through the curse to what Kilian stands now to be. The very core of death. To be tied with it. Father was an Obscur, it is why my magic, too, is more mutated from other Empath’s—why I can control the dead. It is also why Kilian is the only remaining Obscur. Many think that what happened to the dark Aura was fair, mostly those that had seen what an Obscur could do. Gods in this realm of human.”

“And to think that I am the one being feared.”

Mal scoffed. “Believe me, they fear him alright. But Kilian fears what he can do more than what others fear him. When we take a life, it chips away part of our souls. Fragments, really, but when you are in the position that we are, where we are the face of wars and battles, you really underestimate how quickly your whole soul could shatter.”

I didn’t know that.

“Is that why he sent others to do his dirty deeds? Because he was afraid of tarnishing his perfect little soul?”

Mal stopped again. For a long while I expected him to say something, but he didn’t.

Light filtered through the half-splintered roof of the top floor; the angry winter sky poured a light coat of snow on the sphagnum moss infested floor.

“Perhaps I was wrong,” I said, peeking in and out of the chambers Aryan normally used for his activities. There was no sign of any life or any sliver of magic pervading. I would have felt their presence—I always did before, even when we were hiding.

Mal squatted in front of the broken north wall facing the view of the Hollow Sea crashing against rock. “Snow, does this look like a claw mark to you?”

I glanced over his shoulder to a dent near the edge where the wall had broken off. “Looks like it. But—”

“There are no animals on this island and surely no fish crawled from the Hollow to do that.” He pointed overhead. “Or that.”

Three slashes dented the grey rock.

“They held no animals in here, only Aura and din-Aura, sometimes an unblessed or two. Never an animal.” I ran a finger over the dent, comparing the size of my hand to it. “Especially not one of that size.” Something clicked in me, and I dropped to my knees, shovelling rock away. “Mal, see if you can find any remnants of fur or scales, anything green really.”

The two of us dug and hauled rock and moss and dust like mad.

Mal stopped digging and lifted a rock to my face. A single strand of fibre attached to it. Viridescent green, almost luminescent. “This is getting creepier by the minute.”

The thing from Hanai, it had to have been kept here. How and why in the hells?

I dropped to the ground. “How did my father get hold of such a beast?”