Ashes of Chaos (Legacy of the Nine Realms #2) - Amelia Hutchins Page 0,5
their forced copulation fed the spell.
Grabbing onto the handrail, I climbed the darkened staircase, compelling myself to move faster before I heard another body hit the ground in death. I searched each of the darkened rooms, peering out the windows into the torch-lit night. I searched for a view of the courtyard. Window after window, all of them faced other windows and stone siding to the cottages next door.
The last room I entered had a perfect view of the monstrosities playing out in the courtyard. I settled into the shadows, observing the scene as dark figures wearing masks depicting demons and hideous beasts, danced around the couples continuing to encourage their participation. Long daggers glinted in the torchlight, ending life after life of those that didn’t dance fast enough, or hadn’t been pleasing to watch. Hecate, the goddess, demanded the most beautiful and purest men and women to mate, coupling to offer a child for her altar.
I’d never actually seen the dance of death playing out, but I’d read about it a thousand times. The House of Magic told us about the evilest, vilest enchantments, whispering to us in warning of spells and dark sorcery that we couldn’t allow practiced. The house itself was a vessel of magic, a calling to be pure of the darkness and bathed in the light of true magic. I was always eager to hear the tales and learn, much to my sisters’ chagrin. They found it boring and tedious to listen to a house.
This was the third town in which I’d found all the inhabitants dead. The dance was a new touch of carnage, but the dark figures inducing the magic weren’t. Each village had shown an escalation of violence, their acts growing viler as the spell grew more potent and more ominous.
This spell was smothering and powerful, forcing my skin to pebble and my soul to recoil. I knew the difference between darkness and light, having been tested for both types of magic after my mother declared to my teachers that I was a practitioner of the dark arts. I knew how each felt and what the magic of the light offered to avoid the darkness. The magic in these villages was darker than any other I had ever experienced.
I wanted to examine the horror unfolding, needing to sense what was at work after I stumbled across the first town. The Neanderthal chasing me made it difficult to manage, though. Each time I entered a village, Knox was hot on my heels, forcing me to take in what I could quickly before I had to portal out or chance getting caught. He was making it extremely difficult to do anything about the current state of affairs in my house. I portal-hopped until I was partially drained, slaughtering an entire manor of witches, escaping by the skin of my teeth from the last realm I’d visited.
I was growing more exhausted every day, worn down until my body was a mass of burning muscles. Resting my head against the window, I noted the dark figures were placing their victims into a pattern. I blinked, scrunching up my nose, frowning, and fighting the urge to vomit. I peered down at the scene below. I was forcing myself to look past the carnage to examine the shape that the masked figures created with their victims’ corpses.
They arranged the bodies in a large pentagram pattern, draining each person of all blood and bodily fluid before placing them on the ground, posing their faces, forcing cloudy eyes to stare sightlessly at the midnight sky. Their arms stretched above their heads, touching the fingers of the body above them, connecting each of the victims to create a grid of power fueled by their sacrifice.
My heart pounded in my ears, echoing each beat as I trembled violently. Closing my eyes, I tried to concentrate, searching through memories for where I’d seen this pattern before. Feeling a twinge in my leg, I opened my eyes and frowned. I bent down, running my nails over the cut in my thigh that itched as the skin healed.
Thinking back, I recalled seeing pictures in a book depicting a similar design. The book filled each page with morbidity, and atrocious patterns of human corpses, giving me nightmares. To witness it happening in person was much worse. It was the shit of horror shows that even the most creative of minds would have had trouble bringing to life on film.