HOFAS AU. Unhinged!Tharion. Rated M for strong language, dark themes, torture, character death. Complete.
Tharion Ketos was drowning.
The press of water was everywhere. Brine and rust eroded into every pore in his lithe body. But the rage of the sea barely echoed the rage inside him.
Fucking. Monsters.
He was going to kill them all. And he would make them suffer.
The constant screaming was enough to make Tharion roll his eyes.
The drama of it all. The male just wouldn't fucking die. The other fae—the screaming one's compatriot—had gone to the House of Flame and Shadow hours before to the musical chomp of piranhas.
Tharion knew Pax—Hypaxia, not Pax. Never again Pax. He couldn't think of her as his friend, not after what he done, what he was about to do. She would be disturbed. Heartbroken. Her gentle soul would never forgive him, but he didn't care. Not anymore. Not after what had happened. What he had lost.
Eventually, it was the iron crowbar that did the persistent fae in. The mer did appreciate some human inventions.
The pit was empty. The wet walls were rank with the stench of stagnation and stone.
"Poor little fish." A silky voice crooned. Her voice grated against his ears, rattled in his skull.
The odor of acid and blood wafted up into his nostrils. He had no idea how she managed to speak so smoothly with a broken jaw and rivers of blood from her nose and mouth, but talk she did.
The Viper Queen had always been measured, clipped in her words and manner as she had been cruel, unforgiving and a bane to Lunathion in everything else.
Tharion made it his mission to watch her unravel from that impenetrable facade. He wanted the snake uncoiled, broken, weeping, limp at his feet. The only hint that the Viper Queen was affected was the constant talk. She rambled, babbled, hissed platitudes, crooned poetry, sang ballads in a language he didn't understand. She wouldn't shut up.
"Foolish, foolish little fish…" She hissed.
He cut her piece by piece with a shard fashioned of coral and whalebone he had made himself years ago while still a young officer under the River Queen. She laughed until the moment he cut her throat. Blueish-green blood burned down his hands, dripping down his fingers before bubbling onto the ground beneath him.
He saved her tongue for last, carving it out of her ruined mouth as she slumped, finally dead, into the sand of her own fighting pits...but her mocking voice followed him, gnawing deep into his bones.
Tristan Flynn stood behind his parents.
The marble slab in front of them was overwhelming in its detail and opulence. It was designed to distract the mourners from the horrors and wrongness of a fae dying. Or so fae tradition taught.
Damn all tradition to Hel. Despite the layers of black silk, his little sister's body was on public display. There was no distraction possible to him.
Tristan had disliked her, kept apart from her. But he had never hated her. Only now, in the years since the fall of the Asteri, with a new world knocking at the door, had he seen a different way of life. A life where Sathia was an asset, rather than a chafing reminder of the yoke of the House of Hawthorne.
Tristan shook, his palms clammy, his eyes burning. He wanted to scream—just fucking bury her already, stop looking at her like this, why is everyone staring—
Breathe. Ruhn's voice eased into his head. Flynn's breath caught, stuttered, then blew out of him in a rush.
He felt a shift and a hand on his elbow. Dec. Flynn hated being touched, something that his brothers in everything but blood never had a problem with themselves. He never initiated even causal touch and squirmed away from too-long hugs. But right now…Dec was keeping him from collapsing.
They all stood around him like pillars, there to hold up his crumbling, shattered soul. Dec to his right, a steady pressure against him. Marc on Dec's other side, the leopard shifter with a haughty curl to his mouth, daring anyone to come near him.
Ruhn was an arm's length behind, not touching, but Flynn could feel his gentle presence in his mind nonetheless, soothing in its familiarity. He knew Lidia was there somewhere, though he hadn't turned around to confirm it. Ithan was at a distance in front of him, creating some of perimeter around him and his parents. No one well-meaning—or otherwise—got close them.
Flynn absently wondered if they had pre-planned to play bodyguard today. Any other day, any other circumstance, would've made him roll his eyes and mutter—Alphaholes—but silently he was grateful. He heard of rustle of feathers in a stray breeze. Athalar was in his peripheral vision, his face guarded and impassive, his wings raised stiffly against a stale breeze. Ah. So the males had definitely talked then.
The loud click of a camera jarred Tristan from his dark musings. He turned in time to see Bryce Quinlan—the not-Queen of the Fae—suddenly move from beside the gray-winged angel to face something behind her. He heard a definitive, mechanical crunch and a yelp. Bryce turned back, catching his gaze with blazing eyes. He hoped his returning nod was grateful. He knew that the media couldn't stay away despite the bribes and requests for privacy. Where there was death, there were always vultures.
And yet—they were all there. His family. His pack. Guarding, grieving alongside him. Well, not everyone, he realized as anger cut through him.
Where the fuck was Tharion?
Lord and Lady Hawthorne had been annoyed at the lack of respect and adherence to tradition but secretly relieved that their daughter's husband wasn't present. Ithan had scowled but remained silent. The others had exchanged looks, not in anger or disappointment but something else. Something foreboding. Flynn didn't want to know what that had meant.
Sathia had died under…violent—No. No, he hasn't going to go there now. Wasn't going to think about how she was dumped on his doorstep, a charred ruin—
Ruhn stepped forward then, a hand tight on Flynn's shoulder. Dec pressed a little more against his side. The tears flowed then, hot and angry.
Oh, Sathia.
"You're going to make me late."
Tharion's voice was hoarse, cracking as it echoed in the hollow room. It took him another moment to realize that it was because he hadn't spoken in almost five days. His hands had worked while his voice remained silent, unyielding to the death he had wrought. One final act. One last piece of vengeance was left.
Ariadne stood before him. Blocks of gorsian weighed her bruised feet down in a pool of black, bloody water.
While the Viper Queen and her fae guards'—including that Hel-damned Colin McCarthy—tongues had loosed (the snake's still hung at his side, curling up, fetid as the days went on), Ari had remained silent. Her lips bleed, her teeth ground into her skull as she grimaced, but she never made a sound.
Ironic that now it was her that was silent before her death while his own tongue loosed from where it had stuck to the roof of his mouth. Even in the hours he slipped away to submerge in the Istros, his mouth was parched.
The glib tongue that fashioned the former head of intelligence—Captain Whatever!—had died. Along with her.
"You're making me late." Tharion repeated. "Her funeral is today...her parents are going to bury her, you know. They don't trust sailings anymore, especially as a fallen witch queen as the head of House Flame and Shadow. They could've cremated her, but everyone had balked at that for…obvious reasons. So she'll just rot forever underground with no sunlight or wind or rain, nothing but the fucking dark—"
The dragon said nothing as his voice choked off. Ari did not blink, did not waver.
The mer swallowed against the bile rising. Poor, naïve Sathia. Thinking she could overcome venom with fae hubris. She just had to try to rescue, redeem Colin McCarthy.
He knew as soon as he saw the burns who had murdered Sathia. His wife couldn't, wouldn't forget Colin. Even after almost two years of what could only been called a miracle of developed respect and domesticity and love that had flooded between them.
Yes, he had loved Sathia. And while he knew she had cared for him and given herself over to him as the partner he had always wanted and never deserved, a piece of her still hurt over Colin. Fucking. McCarthy.
Bryce had hated the fae and torn down their monarchy, their houses. Politically, he never saw it as a sound move when she tore down the fae way of life in a single press conference but… he understood it now. Their inbred sense of arrogance and superiority was their ever-present downfall. Being immortal was so damn boring. Why not self-sabotage just for fun?
Whatever Sathia had been thinking when she had gone to the Viper Queen before meeting her death by Ari, was forever lost. He'd never know what exactly had happened. Neither the fae males, Colin included, with their venom-scrambled minds had known before Tharion sent them to their fates. The snake in all her talk had said nothing useful.
Ruhn probably could've torn it from their minds, but he didn't dare bring the others into this. Their self-righteousness would've never allowed what he had wrought.
How could they understand? How could they do anything but laugh at his damn luck?
How could they ever understand what it was to know that his mate had killed his wife?
Actions. Consequences. And somewhere betwixt the two, Tharion was crushed and cursed. Well, fuck it. He wasn't going to whine and bemoan his life anymore. If Ogenas, Luna, Solas, whoever the hell wanted him to take responsibility for himself, here he fucking was.
Ariadne, his doomed mate, one he could've loved if it wasn't for those fighting pits so long ago and Ithan and Sigrid and the Asteri and failed deals and—
He blew out a breath. Oh, Ari. What we should have been.
Only then, did he see the flames in her eyes flicker uncertainly. Ah, so she knew too. Knew just like he did that day in that bathroom in the Viper Queen's den what they should have been. What they had suppressed and ignored and rejected. Tharion sighed, releasing all love, hope, dreams from within him. It was too late now. Much too late.
The torrent of water erupted from every pipe, spigot, the air itself, everywhere at once, and wrapped around Tharion Ketos striped arms in submission.
Ariadne, the dragon, was drowning.
The press of the water was everywhere, brine and rust burned into every pore of her steaming, hissing, rapidly cooling body.
The rage of the sea choked her.
Fucking. Monsters. The both of them.
The dragon's gaze bore into the mer's haunted, lost eyes. She stared at him, blazing, burning, branding him until the mer screamed against the abject defeat and wrongness of their cursed fates.
Then, oblivion.
Baxian Argos flew above the procession, his flight silent and unnoticed by most of the mourners beneath him. Athalar had asked for his help from Avallen as aerial support, and he had been more than happy to escape the island even for something as macabre as this. The former Umbra Mortis had told him over that phone call what had happened to poor Sathia Hawthorne.
"Fucking hells, Athalar. Sounds barbaric."
"Yeah. She was burned alive. For hours. The fucking murderers left her at Flynn's doorstep."
"Fuck…how's Ketos?"
A pause. "We can't find him, Baxian."
"Doesn't surprise me. He's a slippery one, no pun intended, he's probably wanting to mourn solo."
A sigh on the end of the line, like it was conversation the gray-winged angel had had before.
"Yeah. Maybe."
"…But?"
"She was burned, Bax. Fucking cooked. That feels like a fucking message to a mer if I've ever seen one."
"But from whom?" Whom, indeed. The angels had briefly speculated, but the conversation soon ended, the topic weighing heavily.
The question continued to circle his mind, even among the perfect wind lifting his wings, the sun warm enough to make him arch towards in and sigh in a moment of joyous respite—
Suddenly, he felt the temperature change. The air grew heavy. Rain. Baxian frowned. A storm wasn't in the forecast and magic-users were forbidden from manipulating weather. He glanced down to Athalar, the only one he knew with the skill and the balls to do it—again. No, the angel's face was furrowed as he glanced up to the sky, his own confusion evident.
Then, Baxian smelled it, his Helhound blood curdling. He didn't have the scent for linages like Danika had had, but he knew what it was.
Mate-Killer.
Orion Hunt Athalar had never seen Tharion Ketos look this pristine in the entire time the angel had known him.
The former captain's undershirt, a high-necked velvet thing lay snug and contrasted under a suit cut from the deepest of mourning blue-black. His overcoat was tailored like a cape, clasped by a silver wirewrought fish clasped across the mer's neck, holding it place as it draped around his shoulders, its iridescent undertones catching in ripples of blue, purple, and black. Boots made from rare eel-leather hugged his calves, ending just below his knees. The only thing that could be contrived as out of place was the mer's auburn hair. It was slicked back, still wet and dripping. Like he had hurried to fix it as he pulled himself out of the water. Maybe he had. Where had Tharion been—
Hunt heard Ithan gag and stumble. The wolf turned away from the marble slab being marched out in front of them, glancing askance at Ketos. The alpha turned gray. That's when Hunt noticed Baxian circling closer to the eyes snapped back to Tharion and the mer lifted his eyes to meet his gaze.
Hunt's breath caught as the scent reached him and his stomach dropped. His friend was no more.
Did you kill her, Tharion?
A hysterical, wet laugh bubbled from the mer's throat. He didn't turn to look at the mourners closest to him — Lord and Lady Hawthorne—scowl in pure hatred at him.
Tharion. This isn't a fucking joke.
Then why are you asking silly fucking questions, Daanan?
You smell like…(a beat. Then several more followed). Who'd you kill, Tharion?
Ah, now you're getting it. You remembering Sathia wasn't my mate?
It didn't matter to anyone—
No, but you knew. Everyone did. They could smell it. A too loud chuckle—Or not smell it as it were. The lack of our bond…
Who was it, Tharion?
Tharion looked behind him, finding Ruhn's —not Flynn's, Ogenas forgive him— dark, disturbed gaze. He mouthed with lips tight and cracked, light and moisture and love and softness having abandoned him.
"Check my bathtub."