Page 21 of Craving Their Venom

VAROS

T he truce is a fragile, ugly thing. A three-headed serpent, each head turned inward, ready to strike at the others.

We stand on my balcony, Zahir a pillar of simmering crimson violence, Kaelen a river of silent, silver-blue sorrow, and I, the fulcrum, the cold, golden center around which they pivot.

The conversation was a necessary poison, Kaelen’s words of prophecy and hidden enemies a bitter medicine we were all forced to swallow.

The enemy has a name: Tikzorcu. A house of swamp-vipers and back-alley assassins.

The knowledge is a cold, hard stone in my gut.

But the more immediate problem is the volatile, unwilling alliance I now find myself in.

My hatred for Zahir is a clean, simple thing.

This new reality, this forced interdependence, is a tangled, messy knot I have yet to unravel.

And at the center of the knot is her. Amara.

The thought of her is a constant, low-grade fever in my blood.

I see her in my mind’s eye, a ghost of memory and desire.

The defiant fire in her eyes. The feel of her soft skin beneath my claws.

The taste of her surrender. The way she looks at Kaelen with a fragile, dawning trust. The way she looks at Zahir with a terrified, unwilling fascination.

She is the heart of this, the prize, the fulcrum.

And she is in my chambers, a captive bird whose cage is now besieged by two other predators.

I need to see her. I need to re-establish the order of things, to remind her, and myself, of the truth of her position. She is my property. Her safety is my responsibility. Her fate is mine to command. The thought is a familiar comfort, a return to the cold, clean lines of logic and control.

I leave them on the balcony, their simmering tensions a weight I no longer wish to bear.

I walk the silent corridors to my own chambers, my mind already formulating the words I will use, the precise application of pressure and command that will bring her back into line, that will erase the softness she has begun to carve into the granite of my soul.

The two guards outside my chamber door are new. My personal elite. They are the best, loyal only to me, their faces impassive masks of lethal competence. They bow as I approach.

The door is slightly ajar.

A sliver of unease, cold and sharp, pierces the armor of my composure. I never leave my doors ajar. My servants are too well-trained, too terrified of my displeasure, to make such a careless mistake.

I push the door open. The silence that meets me is wrong. It is not the quiet of a sleeping captive. It is the hollow, ringing silence of a void. An absence.

The room is in perfect order. The furs on the pallet are smooth. The silver tray from her last meal sits untouched on the obsidian table. But she is not here.

My gaze sweeps the room, my mind a cold, calculating machine, cataloging every detail.

And then I see it. On the floor, near the high, barred window that overlooks the garden, lies a single, perfect, blood-red blossom.

One of the soulless flowers from the garden.

It does not belong here. And beside it, almost invisible against the dark stone, is a single, dark thread.

A piece of the simple, homespun cord she wears around her neck, the one that holds the mystic’s foolish, protective stone.

It has been snapped.

The world does not explode. It does not shatter. It simply… stops. The air in my lungs freezes. The beat of my heart ceases. For a single, eternal moment, there is nothing. Only a profound, absolute stillness.

And then, the glacier inside me begins to move.

It is not the hot, brutish rage of the General.

It is a cold, silent, all-consuming fury, a force of nature so vast and so absolute it has no need for sound.

The temperature in the room drops. The crystal lamps flicker as if in a sudden, icy wind.

My vision narrows, the edges of the world turning grey, until the only thing I can see is the broken thread on the floor.

They took her.

From my rooms. From my protection.

The insult is a physical blow, a violation so profound it bypasses rage and becomes a state of pure, lethal purpose.

They did not just steal a human pet. They have stolen a piece of my soul, a piece I did not even know I possessed until this very moment, and the void it has left behind is a screaming, black hole of annihilation.

“Captain,” I say. My voice is unnervingly calm. It does not even sound like my own. It is the voice of the glacier, the voice of the abyss.

The guard captain appears in the doorway, his hand on the hilt of his sword. He sees my face, and the professional calm in his eyes shatters, replaced by a raw, primal fear.

“Seal the palace,” I command, my voice a flat, dead thing. “No one enters. No one leaves. Not a servant, not a noble, not my own father. Anyone who tries is to be cut down where they stand. Send a runner to the city gates. Seal them. Now.”

He does not question. He does not hesitate. He simply bows and vanishes, his footsteps a frantic, running beat in the sudden, terrible silence.

I do not go to Kaelen. Not yet. I do not go to my father. His political games are a child’s amusement. I go to the one place in this palace that understands the language my soul is now screaming. I go to the barracks.

I find Zahir in the armory, a cavernous space that smells of whetstones and steel. He is sharpening a massive, double-headed axe, the muscles in his back and arms cording with the effort. The sound of the stone on the blade is a rhythmic, angry hiss. He has not yet heard.

He looks up as I enter, his golden eyes narrowing with suspicion and a familiar, hateful fire. “Come to finish our… discussion, Prince?” he growls.

I walk toward him, my steps measured, my body a vessel of pure, cold fury. I stop before him, close enough to see the fine, blue line of the scar I gave him.

“They took her,” I say. The words are flat. Devoid of emotion. They are a simple statement of a terrible, undeniable fact.

The whetstone in his hand stops. The angry hissing ceases. He stares at me, his massive body going utterly still. “What?” The word is a choked, disbelieving whisper.

“From my chambers,” I continue, my voice the calm at the center of a hurricane. “While we were posturing on the balcony like fools. They came through the garden and they took her.”

The change that comes over him is terrifying.

The smoldering anger in his eyes erupts into a raging inferno.

A roar of pure, animalistic fury is torn from his throat, a sound of such profound rage and loss that the very weapons on the racks around us seem to vibrate in sympathy.

He hurls the axe he was holding. It spins end over end and embeds itself deep in the far wall, the stone groaning in protest.

“I will tear this palace apart, stone by stone!” he bellows, his hands clenching into fists the size of boulders. “I will flay the skin from every guard, every servant, until I find who is responsible!”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” I say, my voice cutting through his rage like an icy shard.

He turns on me, his fangs bared, ready to charge.

I do not flinch. I meet his fire with my glacier.

“Your rage is a blunt instrument, General. A forest fire that consumes everything in its path, including what you seek. We do not need a fire. We need a blade. Cold. Precise. And utterly without mercy.”

He stares at me, his chest heaving, his mind struggling to process my words through the red haze of his fury.

“They want us at each other’s throats,” I continue, my voice a low, deadly whisper.

“They want you to rampage through the palace, to create chaos, to give them cover to escape. We will not give them what they want. We will give them what they have earned. A cold, silent, and very, very painful death.”

The fire in his eyes begins to recede, replaced by a dawning, terrible understanding. He sees the truth of my words. He sees the cold, lethal purpose in my eyes, a reflection of the same savage need that is clawing at his own soul.

“What do we do?” he asks, his voice a low, gruff growl. The word ‘we’ hangs in the air between us, a strange, new, and unbreakable thing.

“We find the mystic,” I say.

We move through the palace together, a storm of gold and crimson, of ice and fire. The rivalry is not gone. It is simply… irrelevant. A petty squabble in the face of a holy war. We are no longer our fancy titles. We are two predators, hunting the same prey.

We find Kaelen in the Orrery. He is not meditating. He is standing before his scrying bowl, his back to us. The water in the bowl is black and turbulent, swirling with dark, ugly currents. The air in the room is cold, tasting of ozone and despair. He knew. He felt it the moment it happened.

He turns as we enter, and his face reflects grim, terrible certainty. The sadness in his eyes has been replaced by a hard, cold resolve.

“Jalma,” he says, the sound a hollow echo. “The Tikzorcu.”

The name is a confirmation of the truth we already knew in our bones.

I walk to the center of the room, to the pool of starlight on the floor. I am the Prince. I am in command. “The vision,” I say, my voice the flat, dead tone of a judge passing sentence. “Give it to me. Every detail. Every scent. Every shadow.”

Kaelen begins to speak, his voice a low, urgent murmur, painting a picture of swamp rot and tarnished silver rings. As he speaks, I turn to Zahir.

“Gather your five best trackers,” I command. “The ones who can follow a ghost through a hurricane. And your five most ruthless killers. The ones who enjoy their work. We will not be taking prisoners.”

Zahir does not question. He does not challenge my authority. He simply nods, his golden eyes burning with a cold, murderous light. The beast has been leashed. And it is now aimed at our true enemy.

I look from the General’s savage resolve to the Mystic’s grim certainty. The three great serpents of the prophecy. United at last. Not by wisdom or by honor, but by a shared, savage, and absolute need.

The Tikzorcu think they have stolen a pawn. A fragile human girl to be used as leverage in their pathetic games of power. They have made a fatal, unforgivable miscalculation.

They have not stolen a pet. They have stolen the heart of a naga. And its wrath is now upon them. The hunt has begun.