When Blood Runs Cold - Chapter 241

The wolves continue to pace anxiously around the glen, their breaths pricking the icy air with a thick vapour. Waiting so listlessly in this enclosed forest, I all at once become filled with a familiar thought, a rush of familiar sensations that remind me so much of the end: The startling cold, the endless dark and… The most unnerving feeling that despite having your eyes constantly piercing the gloom in front of you, you are being watched from that obnoxious darkness.  Studied.

A little shiver shakes through the vertebrae on my spine.

When surrounded by such a suffocating atmosphere, and your only companions are two great lumbering wolves carved from shadow and blood, it isn’t exactly the most conducive environment from keeping the mind from wandering.

Suddenly, two wolves raise their heads, shocking me out of my daze. A silent exchange passes between them and a string of words I am not privy too. But when they turn back to me, the message is clear:

It will not be long now.

A few more seconds pass by with agonising slowness. After a little while of waiting, the fireflies all settle on the lulling reeds that poke from the stream, a faint droning hum filling the air as they linger in anticipation for what comes next. Then, just like that, there is silence, not even a whisper of wind daring to move.

I sense their presence before I even see them.

In little more than a second, all warmth seems to be sapped from the air like a leech sucking blood from under the skin. The atmosphere turns sharp, leaving nothing but a cold, dead chill lingering in the trees, the whole forest stilling to a bone crunching halt. It is different from the cold that Soren exudes- his power of hell. With Soren’s aura, while the surroundings may grow cold at his anger, (cold as they claim the fires of hell to be), you can still feel the air buzzing with emotions, alive and feeling, but terribly, awfully, cold.

With Soren, something remains. A wrath, or a passion, or a murmur of contempt.

With this, there is no feeling. Simply nothing. No life nor indication of the sort, merely a dead, icy foreboding as the breath is sucked from my lungs and turning the whole place into a vacuum. Crystals form in icy shards with each slow breath I manage to take, blossoming in the air before me.

A bush rustles, and both wolves raise their heads in voiceless alarm

“Ah, so this is the fabled hybrid Queen. You are different than I imagined,” comes a voice- a girl’s, from the darkness, each word so quiet it appears barely a whisper in the wind. Even with my new and largely enhanced abilities, I struggle to make out any discernible features from the gloom, except a pair of eyes, milky white and shining. The two wolves look back at me expectantly, their tails wagging faintly despite the cold. But I don’t need reminding. I know what I have come for. I know who I am addressing.

Stepping a little closer to that voice, I ask:

“And what did you expect of me?”

The voice goes silent for a moment, deliberating. Then, a few more rustles ensue, followed by a couple of yips from the wolves as they back up to pace beside the stream of water, watching. It would seem that the cold she brings along with her is even too much for the two of them to bear. But my body has no use for heat any more, and my limbs will not be seized by an icy chill, no matter how potent.

And so I remain.

The girl that appears from the thickets and brambles appears neither entirely existent, nor alive.

“I expected a Queen of angels,” she croaks, flicking back her dark streams of hair from around her face. Then she lowers her eyes at me. “But it would seem I have been presented with the Queen of another Kingdom, also.”

The first thing I notice about her is that her face is deathly pale. Not the kind of pale that vampires have from sheer lack of flowing blood and the dead immortality of their body, but almost a translucent pale, as though if I looked too closely I might just look right through her. Her skin seems fragile, thin, as though at any second it might just split to reveal the bone underneath. Her eyes, too, seem too prominent against her face, surrounded by circles of darkness that suggest a never-ending lack of sleep.

The way her body moves is not human, her jet black hair floating with a strange etherality down to her shoulders, her limbs clouded in a fine mist. It clings to her form, her veiled translucent violet wings, her fingers like she is not entirely solid, neither existing in one state or another, but somewhere in between. As she walks, her feet seem to barely skim the ground.

“Well perhaps I disappointed you,” I smile thinly. “I seem to be doing that a lot recently. Though I was told that you cannot see- that you are blind, but you appear to see me perfectly fine.”

After a prolonged and deliberating silence, she answers, waving me off with a bony, white hand.

“Au contraire my sweet little child. Rather, you have made things much more interesting for me. And I can see perfectly well, thank you,” she says with a prompt dip of her head. “What you have heard is merely an old fabrication that people have created to explain me, though the truth of the matter is that I am quite unexplainable.”

She gives a cold laugh.

“I dreamt of your arrival here about a moon ago, so it is strange to see you so different. It appears you have been greatly changed in a month. In my dream you had wings on your back, and no horns on your head. And yet you are the person I have been seeking, for the hell hounds have brought you here.”

A little gruff bark echoes from behind me in response to her words followed by the charismatic wagging swoosh of a tail through the air. At the sight, the young lady gives a soft smile, the air around us feeling suddenly at little less bone chilling. Fondly, she drifts over to one of them, her hand airing over the top of its head in a manner that barely seems to touch it at all. And yet the satisfied, grumbling hum that echoes from the hellhounds throat is enough to tell me otherwise.

“They arrived here about four days ago carrying news from an old friend of mine,” she says fondly, scratching under the wolves chin with her long, black nails.

“Old friend?” I ask slowly, the words like sticky clumps of honey upon my tongue. She raises a brow.

“From the newly crowned King of Sezeria. He tells me that the souls are in danger, and that I must flee from this place before another finds me. He asked me to join him, but alas,” she sighs, her voice a ghost like whisper as it drifts among the trees. The leaves shake in trepidation at the cold that surrounds her. “I saw your arrival, I had to wait for you. I had to warn you. But the magical walls closed around the palace shortly afterwards, now neither of us can leave. ”

My blood runs cold through my veins. A fearful chill spikes my skin, causing the hairs on my arms to stand up in terror.

“Warn me of what?”

Leaning closer, she dangles before me, her milky white eyes scanning mine blankly as the wreathing coils of her hair slides past my face. A small smile plays on her blue lips.

“The palace is watching you,” she whispers, her voice low. “The Prince of Deception has built eyes into its very walls. Do not let yourself slip to them. He will not let you escape. The walls around this palace are shut and will remain so if he suspects you of trickery. Do not let your façade fall, if you do, your future will only be filled with death.”

She says little more as she pulls herself away, their air trembling with the ominous words of foreboding that linger between us. I hardly dare to speak, move, as she slinks back towards the shadows, her eyes half lidded, a ghostly white creeping across her face like pale streams of moonlight. The trees moan against the wind, the ample chatter of birds absent from the air, as though each one had died and frozen over from the icy cold that creeps across this dark earth.

It is her doing. Whatever she is. This is the power of death.

“He wants you,” I blurt out, likely an unwise thing to do in times like these were keeping your mouth shut is of the essence. But I have never been particularly good at that to begin with. “Azrael. He wants what you have, he wants-”

“My soul?” she enquires, turning back around to stoop over towards me, her pearly teeth flashing. “I know what he wants, Hybrid Queen. I dreamt it before it was even real. But one does not go looking for death, he will not find me. I will find him. Just as I found you.”