Page 169 of Eternal Ruin

He found the rotted ground before he laid eyes on her. Something was eating at the soles of his sandals like a bed of coals, but nothing mattered except her.

Talaa’s beautiful brown skin was webbed with black veins, her pink lips bruised as blueberries, eyes unseeing and white.

“No.” Samson dropped next to her, letting the black flames burn his knees and hands. “No.”

He drew her to his arms and shouted to the sky, a flock of birds taking flight.

The heartache was maddening, Kidan writhed and tried to break free of the memory but couldn’t.

Samson carried Talaa back to the castle, feet blistered and arms burning. Something was rotting but he didn’t care. He was stopped at the gates by a dozen guards.

Susenyos appeared, no tears this time, a crown fixed on his head. His father lingered at the back, watching.

“We have to burn the body,” Susenyos ordered.

“What?” Samson snarled. “We bury her.”

“It’s a plague. Everyone will die.”

Samson spat at Susenyos’s feet, and every sword whistled in the air as they were unsheathed. Susenyos held up a hand, and they stopped their thrust.

“Put her down.” Susenyos’s face was the terrifying mask of his father.

Samson refused to have anyone touch her. He gave the king and his son his back, waiting for five arrows to fall on him, and walked into the woods. No arrow was fired.

Samson buried Talaa himself. Hours later, he showed up at the gates again, his left hand and arm blackened with rot.

“You’ll have to kill me as well.” Samson panted and collapsed.

Susenyos gritted his teeth. “I told you it’s a plague.”

Samson lifted his hand, such acute pain. Was this what she felt all over her body? “I’ll be with her soon.”

“Bring him inside.” Three men held him up with makeshift gloves.

“No!” he shouted. “Let me die.”

They threw him into a cell. With a gloved hand, Susenyos grabbed Samson’s thrashing head, forcing it still. “I will not let you die.”

Imprisoned, Samson tried everything to stop the pain. He lifted his fist into the air and brought it down to the hard ground, to the sound of blinding agony. Again and again. But the pain never once relented, spreading up to his forearm, intent on consuming him entirely.

The next time Susenyos visited him, it’d been to turn him into a vampire. Samson had been too weak to refuse, flickering in and out of life. When Samson woke up, everything was stark. And the court was filled with sleeping bodies, caught in transition between life and death. The black rot had stopped spreading. Instead, it continuously fed off him, draining his energy so he would never have his full strength.

He looked up and saw Susenyos, newly transformed, ageless. And a dark-skinned girl with ancient, feline eyes, whom he’d soon know to be Arin Tawendyo.

Kidan screamed as her own hand burned along with his. The vision melted back into her room and her head fought gravity. Susenyos and Taj were still unconscious.

Please, wake up, she pleaded inside her mind.

Samson wiped his mouth of her blood. “Painful, isn’t it?”

She was still writhing, trying to erase what she felt.

“You’ve had your share of pain too,” he said, eyes creased in an unreadable emotion. “Killing your own mother… it’s a scar that will never heal. Then your sister’s betrayal. It destroyed a part of your soul. I can sense it now. You have lost too much to move on. You must bleed the world for it.”

His words exposed him further, his need to be heard, understood. It was pervasive, almost desperate. Dimly, she knew she had to use this opportunity. Draw out as much information as she could.

“I’m sorry he did that to her, to you,” she whispered, shaking from the restrained disgust. “It was… cruel.”