Words cannot express how sorry I am to leave you guys hanging for so long. Words can probably also not express how grateful am to everyone who reviewed. Keep up the good work! (and I'll try to keep up mine).
Crack!
Lucivar shuddered as the whip broke open his skin, adding to the streams of blood running down his back. Shuddered and, with a phenomenal effort, kept his mouth closed in a tight grimace. He wouldn't cry out. Wouldn't scream. Wouldn't cry out. Wouldn't cry. Not in front of Daemon.
Crack!f
Not that he could see the Bastard. But the black-jeweled aura centered only meters away and pulsating with fury was impossible to miss. Lucivar could only imagine one thing that could arouse Daemon's fury to that extent, and he realized with a sudden chill exactly how Dorothea would go about it. The Bastard would be watching his only friend from another room, bound, half-delirious, helpless while Dorothea murmured in his ear, whispers placing the blame for the drugging, and the whipping, and the other tortures that Lucivar had been going through for two days. It's your fault. Dropping guilt like a boulder…right on Daemon's shoulders.
Crack!
Her manipulations were an old game for the pair of them. Malice, hinted; subtle tensions and suggestions of betrayal, insinuations of duplicity. Usually they were easy enough to spot, and almost as simple to laugh off – it was obvious what the Priestess was doing. She wanted to separate them, turn one against the other, break their bond. Break their souls.
Crack!
But this approach was new, and frightening. Using their strengths against them. Using their friendship as a tool to undermine Daemon's very sanity. Dorothea was learning, and that knowledge would always be dangerous for her enemies.
Yet even that wasn't what scared Lucivar most. He could feel the real danger in the air, in his Ebon-gray jewels – and in the rippling waves of Black power that throbbed incessantly.
Daemon never got this angry.
He was the ice-cold one, the clinical, emotionless killer. Torturing, being tortured, murdering, having his soul slowly murdered: and never, ever, ever, losing control. Because down that path lay madness.
Yet now…now, Daemon had succumbed. He'd held on for so, so long. He'd been the rock that anchored both of them. Lucivar couldn't believe it. Did Dorothea even guess how effective her actions were? Did she understand the total destruction that she could drive Daemon to unleash? Because, if she did, it would be sheer madness to continue.
Lucivar registered numbly that the whipping had stopped. Was it…was it over? He lifted his head as footsteps sounded in front of him. A witch…with a vial…of sapphramate.
Hands grabbed his jaws from behind, holding them open even as Lucivar uttered a wordless, bestial scream of rage. No use, no use; the sapphramate went into his mouth, taking effect after only a few seconds. He could feel every cut, every bruise; every current of air that brushed against his skin, every beam of light that struck his body.
The whipping resumed after a minute.
And, like a tidal wave, the Bastard's anger grew. And grew. And grew.
Hours later, Lucivar lay in his cell, shivering. Not because of the pain; he'd had worse before, though barely. It was the knowledge that hurt deepest: the knowledge that his only companion, his sole friend and entire family (oh, Daemon) was falling. Falling, needing help desperately, needing a hand to bring him back up into life and hope and that cruel sort of world-weary cynicism that pervaded his every action, but was better than anger, better than blind rage.
And Lucivar was helpless. He couldn't return the aid that Daemon had so freely given centuries before. No, all he could do was sit, and tremble, knowing that far from being Daemon's salvation, he was the cause of the pain. The cause of the anger that would so certainly be his friend's demise.
Down that path lies madness.
And who should know better? Lucivar, the Eyrian, the warrior, the slave who fought and fought and never gave up fighting. He had burned with hatred; taking every opportunity to lose himself in the all-consuming fire of destruction.
He'd never remembered what happened, during those spells. Memories blank when he woke, lying on the floor, bodies strewn around. He'd always managed to persuade himself that the deaths were deserved, the bodies all belonging to Dorothea's court, the departure of their souls making the world a better place. The part of him that asked the hard questions – "Why would Dorothea allow the deaths of her followers? If he was the hand of justice, why did the bodies lie so…randomly? – was buried beneath the unconscious desire not to know. For him, the only evidence lay in the horrified eyes of anyone and everyone he saw in the street – yet those eyes were always quickly averted, and he, in his foolish pride, had thought it was merely a mark of respect.
Then, one day, he woke with the severed head of a little girl by his side. And, for the first time, he'd remembered.
Alone in his cell, Lucivar clutched his head in his hands and moaned. The memories...hadn't faded with time. And Lucivar suddenly realised two things.
One. When Daemon unleashed his rage, no force in the Realm would be able to stop him.
And two, a thought that sent a shiver up Lucivar's spine. Dorothea knew exactly what she was doing...