Page 48 of Lord of the Lone Wolf (Bonded Hearts #3)
Together, they surveyed the battlefield, assessing the situation with tactical eyes. The Valzerna forces were holding their own, but for every lichen they destroyed, another ten seemed to take its place.
Dragon shifters battled in the sky with courage and skill, yet their enemies outnumbered them, and exhaustion took hold. Three of Kitsuki’s dragon warriors had already fallen, their bodies lying broken on the battlefield below.
A necrowing rushed toward a wounded shifter struggling to maintain altitude.
Kitsuki and Jaega moved in tandem, intercepting the undead dragon before it could reach its target.
Jaega’s orange flames engulfed the undead creature’s wings, while Kitsuki’s ice magic froze its chest cavity, immobilizing the soul within.
With a synchronized attack that spoke of centuries of fighting together, Jaega’s claws were wreathed in orange fire and Kitsuki’s in frozen flames.
The combined magical assault proved too much for the trapped soul to withstand.
It broke free of its bonds, the green light dissolving into white as it ascended to the Beyond Realm.
The skeleton disintegrated, its bones turning to dust that scattered in the wind. But he couldn’t celebrate the victory when more necrowings circled above, and the battle on the ground continued.
Kitsuki intended to assist his uncle, but a shadow passing overhead gave him pause.
Another necrowing had positioned itself above him, its skeletal form silhouetted against the dark sky.
It differed from the others; while most necrowings were almost all bone, it retained more patches of desecrated flesh and sinew, giving it a decomposed appearance that was more disturbing than clean bone.
The creature opened its maw, green fire gathering in its gullet. Instead of releasing its deadly breath, it seemed to inhale, drawing the flames back into itself.
Far below on the battlefield, lichen exploded into dust clouds.
Kitsuki watched in growing horror as hundreds of souls torn from their obliterated hosts pulled skyward in spiraling streams. The souls screamed as they rose, their ethereal voices creating a symphony of anguish that made Kitsuki’s dragon recoil in revulsion.
The necrowing’s body distended as it swallowed the ascending souls, its bones bulging with each one it consumed. Black fire erupted from its eye sockets as the consumed spirits struggled within its body, their green light flickering like dying candles behind translucent patches of rotting flesh.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the transformation began.
The patches of preserved flesh bubbled and spread, flowing across the skeleton like molten wax infused with the essence of the devoured souls. Each absorbed spirit added to the creature’s mass, bone blackening and thickening as it swallowed the life force of hundreds of fallen lichen.
Its skull elongated with sickening cracks and pops, the jaw extending to accommodate rows of new fangs that gleamed with the trapped light of consumed souls.
Most horrifying was the change to its wings.
The tattered membranes filled in with a substance resembling rotting flesh, veined with glowing channels where the stolen souls raced through its body like luminous blood.
Its chest cavity pulsed with an unnatural rhythm, no longer containing one tormented soul but hundreds.
The mass of trapped spirits writhed within the creature’s bones, their combined anguish creating a black-green glow that pulsed like a diseased heart, sending corruption seeping through every fiber of the creature’s being.
A sound emanated from the beast as hundreds of voices cried out in eternal torment.
Soulvore .
The word surfaced from the depths of Kitsuki’s memory, drawn from ancient texts he had studied centuries ago.
Whispered legends from the darkest days of the Necromancer War spoke of necrowings that gained terrible sentience by consuming not only their own souls but hundreds of others, transforming into something far more horrific.
They were creatures whose consumed souls could never return to the Beyond Realm, forever trapped in undeath, their essence feeding the abomination’s power.
Before his eyes, the transformation accelerated. Bone and tissue fused in a grotesque amalgamation that defied the laws of nature.
But the horror didn’t stop there. The vertebrae of its neck began to split and multiply, dividing into three separate spinal columns that erupted from its shoulders.
At the end of each new column, additional skull matter coalesced from the darkness itself, forming two more heads that flanked the original.
Each face was terrifying. The left bore multiple gnashing jawbones that chattered with the voices of consumed souls. The right sported horns that grew inward rather than outward, piercing through the bone in a crown of self-mutilation that wept black ichor.
Additional limbs erupted from its torso, not mere appendages but weaponized growths that defied natural anatomy.
Six massive scythe-blades of blackened bone burst through its corrupted flesh, each longer than a dragon’s tail and edged with crystallized necromantic energy that hummed with deadly resonance.
The blades flexed and rotated with impossible dexterity, as if each possessed its own malevolent consciousness.
From its edges dripped the same ooze from every joint of its body, each droplet floating upward against gravity before dissipating into oily smoke.
The eye sockets of all three heads deepened into abyssal pits; the green flames were extinguished and replaced by black fire, drawing light and warmth from the surrounding air.
When the central head opened its mouth, it revealed not a throat but a spiraling tunnel lined with counter-rotating rings of serrated fangs, stretching into what appeared to be infinite darkness.
With the transformation complete, the soulvore hung motionless for a terrible moment.
Then all three heads moved in perfect unison, regarding Kitsuki with an intelligence that no undead creature should possess.
It was no longer a puppet animated by necromantic energy but a predator that had sacrificed its chance at eternal peace for immense power.
The soulvore raised a claw, now transformed into a gauntlet of overlapping bone plates, with fingers that ended in foot-long talons of crystallized darkness, and made a beckoning gesture.
Air tore between them, as if reality itself split to reveal a glimpse of an abyss. Black energy emerged from the void, shooting toward Kitsuki with unnatural speed.
Kitsuki twisted, his instincts saving him as they passed through the space he had occupied a heartbeat before.
Where they touched a passing cloud, the vapor didn’t dissipate but ceased to exist, leaving perfect cylindrical holes through the mist as if those portions of reality had been surgically removed.
The soulvore attacked again as the central head opened its infinite maw, pouring forth not fire but a concentrated beam of anti-light so dense it bent the surrounding air.
Its left head spewed a torrent of sharpened fangs, each propelled as a projectile.
The right head’s horns detached, revealing themselves as barbed harpoons connected to the skull by chains of animated vertebrae.
Kitsuki folded his wings and dropped, the lethal energy passing overhead with a sound like reality screaming.
The projectiles followed his descent, adjusting their trajectory with unnatural precision.
He twisted in midair, his tail lashing out to deflect the nearest teeth while his ice magic formed a barrier against the rest. The harpoon-horns circled wide, attempting to flank him.
Where the anti-light beam struck a distant mountain peak, the stone didn’t melt or shatter but vanished, leaving a perfect concave depression as if that portion had never existed.
Dread settled in Kitsuki’s heart. For the first time, he faced an enemy that might be beyond his power to defeat. The soulvore wielded powers that defied the natural laws of magic, drawing on the forbidden energies from the void between life and death. A direct confrontation would be suicide.
The creature’s three heads swiveled to track Kitsuki’s movements while its body remained stationary.
Six bone-scythes whirled in a deadly dance around it, each strike rending the very fabric of reality.
From those wounds spilled different manifestations of necromantic power.
One released living shadows, another unleashed ghostly flames that decayed everything they touched, and a third exhaled fragments of shattered souls that screamed with voices from the Beyond Realm.
Attacks converged from multiple angles, forcing Kitsuki into a series of desperate evasive maneuvers.
A bone-scythe caught him across his hindquarters, the crystallized edge slicing through scales that had repelled dragon fire and steel alike.
Pain exploded along his flank, both physical and spiritual, as the necromantic energy corrupted the wound, preventing his natural healing from taking effect.
Where the blade had touched, his pearlescent scales turned dull gray, the life leeched from them.
A ghost flame caught the edge of his wing, frosting the membrane over with black ice that spread inward. Kitsuki concentrated, channeling his ice magic to counter the corruption, forcing it back through sheer will.
Jaega appeared beside him, orange flames erupting around the soulvore’s central head. The fire, hot enough to melt stone, should have incinerated the creature. Instead, the fire absorbed into its body, the black energy pulsing brighter as it consumed the magical attack.