He whirled, coming face-to-face with a creature that he could not immediately put a name to. Rashid refused to let the whimper that had settled in his chest escape.Ĭrack. Flowers burst forth, crimson and burgundy and pale violet and dripping with blood. Green and wormlike and splitting across his arm. He swallowed back bile as something broke forth. He flinched at a shivering underneath his skin, slithering within his forearm. The spaces between them becoming so narrow that soon he would be trapped. The trees-broad and vast as the eighteen pillars in the temple where he had been hidden away as a child-were slowly closing in. Wouldn’t he like to learn, finally, what it was that settled beneath his skin, waiting to break forth? If he stopped, the vines would curl around his ankles, tightening, whispering that it was better to stay. A guard and a captive and a boy from the desert who was in over his head.

He paused and grazed upon that sleeping power but pulled away. He kept moving, boots crunching through underbrush, wishing he had a torch or a fancy blood mage spell to spin light into the air. He wouldn’t be remembering what he had forced into darkness, waking it from its slumber. The if onlys spread out like a spiderweb, a hundred thousand different avenues where he could have chosen differently, and he wouldn’t be here. If only he had remained ignorant to politics and its intricacies, remained what he was supposed to be: a guard and a captive, nothing more. When Parijahan had shaken him awake to run, he should have said no. Too late to wish that he had taken a different path. He had buried it deep-long abandoned, but never forgotten-that was a mistake, too. Rashid was alone, in a dark forest that pried and pulled and tried its very best to rip him to pieces, and all he could think was, This was a mistake.ĭon’t worry, it only wants those of us with magic, Nadya had told him, in a tone he did not want to contemplate, her gaze pinned on Malachiasz.

Blessed monsters emily duncan