Page 224 of Keldori By Daybreak

“I am not your weapon,” I growled at Ferrin through gritted teeth. “I’m not Tamora’s weapon. I was not Galahad’s weapon. I am done being used by assholes!”

All that Skal bearing down on me, paralyzing my limbs, threatening to turn me inside out—I pushed back.

Ciarán was there too, forcing Skal back towards Ferrin.

The tide shifted, the weight of magick lifted, and Ferrin’s mind opened up inside of mine.

I saw all of him all at once.

I saw the lonely young man who accidentally stumbled into a foreign world that was both full and completely devoid of magick. I saw his fear become curiosity as he learned the world’s strange ways and how to navigate them.

He visited every chance he got, crossing the Rift as a self-projected Nightmare, but the ever-present magick of the world corroded him. Skal had a way of turning Magicians hungry, and he was no exception. Each visit to Keldori left him needing more, until being home in Skalterra was no longer enough.

And it wasn’t just the magick, but the world itself that demanded his attention. The people, the technology, the abundance of Skal going unnoticed and unused—it could all be his if he could figure out how to get his real body across the impassable barrier between realities.

He couldn’t stop returning to the strange world and all its wonders, but each morning when he returned, he’d been stripped away just a little bit more, and what had been taken was replaced by that insatiable hunger.

He was all hunger and thirst for something he could never get enough of, but he would try, and he would kill if that meant finally satiating his appetite.

He wasn’t a rotsbane, but he was something worse. Where rotsbane lost all sense, he’d maintained his. He was calculating and manipulative and constantly scheming.

A rotsbane would be easier to kill.

So be it.

If Skal was what he wanted, then Skal was what I would give him. It poured from the open Rift at my back, and I could feel it swirling on the air. I siphoned it into myself, felt it tear through my body and my mind, and threw it down the tether at Ferrin.

Ferrin grunted and keeled over on the ice.

“You think that’ll work?” He spat into the frost and growled through the pain of the surging Skal. “You think you’re stronger than me, Wren Warrender?”

“You’re not strong.”

“I’m stronger than all of you combined,” he seethed. Bones snapped and his fingers elongated into claws, but he fought the transformation. “Stronger than you, stronger than the Sovereigns, stronger than your mother and her mother, and stronger than that whelp of a Grimguard.”

“You are nothing,” I said. “You are a murderer and a coward. No one with real strength has to claw so desperately for power.”

“Strength is sacrifice, and I sacrificed everything. You’ve sacrificed nothing. And you’re the one who will spend the rest of her life clawing at Skal, not me.”

Ferrin’s body shuddered.

We’d have to be fast once he transformed, but we’d faced rotsbane before.

He would be easy to kill.

His back arched as he shivered, but then he raised his face and grinned.

Skal slammed into me from his end of the tether a second time, stronger than before. It ripped my body, tore at my skin, burned me from the inside.

No. I was stronger than him. I was stronger than the rotsbane that wanted to burst out from inside me.

Except I was losing. The rotsbane was rising within me. I knew the feeling all too well, but this time, there was no Grimguard to save me.

He was trying, of course. Ciarán screamed my name, and commands to fight Ferrin’s push reverberated in my head loud enough that I wasn’t sure if Ferrin’s magick or Ciarán’s voice would tear me open first.

The fire of the dome weakened and dimmed as Ferrin sent every shred of Skal he had left down the tether, and when I screamed in fear and pain, the shriek of a rotsbane overlaid that of my own.

And then the crushing weight of Skal disappeared.