HAPPY FRIDAY HUMANS AND HERE’S A VERY SPECIAL DOUBLE UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHH

These two chapters I’ve been working really hard on, and they come with songs for those who listen to music (they’re all in the Aiasthlyn playlist on Spotify), but there are so many so here’s a list:

Chapter 34
– Prayer by Keaton Henson

– My Soul and I by Anna Leone

Chapter 35
– when the party’s over by Billie Eilish

all nice and depressing 🙂

Alright, don’t forget to comment up and enjoy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

————————-

Aiasthlyn

˚

My eyes land on my neck, as they always do when I am faced with my reflection.

It was unimpressive. A strap of black leather no wider than my wrist, but thick enough to retain warmth. There was a time it was my only warmth, and that too had felt like its own twisted game amongst the rest. But the games were done, its players dead, and yet, I still wore the damned thing.

I had to take it off. I had known that for a long time, but there was always an excuse that seemed perfectly plausible whenever Malcolm pointed it out. I needed to play my part. I needed to appear weak. I needed to confuse.

In truth, I needed to remember.

It was the most glaring reminder of what I had suffered, and while wearing it burned my skin like dragon’s fire, doing so ensured that I never softened to this world. Or so I told myself.

I watch my fingers glide over the centre of it, the tremble in them imperceptible.

There was another truth as well, a far less righteous one that I never allowed myself so much as glance at when I lost myself to the recesses of my mind, but one that I force myself to stare at now, even as it scorches my soul.

At some point, I started putting things into the collar. My rage, my pain, my indignation, the memories themselves. I started putting them all into this meagre scrap of leather, with the console that once it was over and I was home, I would remove it and deal with all I’d locked within it then, but not a moment before.

And therein lay the mistake, because without warning, the collar became something I could not take off, for fear of what might be unleashed should I do it. Would I shatter into a million pieces, or burn with rage so hot that I massacre the entire blood-soaked race? I did not know, and could not find out, so the collar stayed on, my ingrown manacle.

But I did not have a choice in the matter anymore. Things were changing at the most rapid of paces with a war on the horizon, my unfurling Charge, and Malcolm. Malcolm, who kept proving to be a greater component than I had ever foreseen.

I could not afford to continue weakening myself in a realm that afforded no weakness by clinging to a pain that owed me nothing. Playing the battered elf was one thing— letting myself become it was entirely another.

I trace the collar’s edges again, forcing myself to do so until my fingers stop their incessant shaking. There was no room for fear anymore.

My fingers wrap around the leather, and my glamour tightens around me with matching ferocity. I take a breath and hold it close before I force myself to do it.

It breaks with unsurprising ease. A touch of purpose from my mind applied through my fingers, and the threads within snap, allowing the cruel relic to slip from my neck and hang limply in my palm like a silk ribbon.

A shuddered exhale releases from me, another quickly following— the only proof of my feeling anything as I stare at it. It is even more unimpressive in my hand, a snipped, tattered thing that would hardly suffice as kindling to a fire. But for what it lacks in grandeur, it more than makes up for with memories.

The night they placed it on me, the others where they dragged me by its fastens. In the beginning, it was easy to tell myself that, as it was a suffering I allowed, it was not suffering at all, but that became difficult to remember in any fashion when one was in fact suffering.

I set it down, smoothing its cold edges over the empty wardrobe’s vanity before I lift my gaze to the mirror again. Paler skin than I remembered arriving with awaits me in a thick band around my neck. Time will make it disappear, but I do not wait for time as I press my fingers onto the taint, spilling warmth into myself until my skin blends into one shade.

I am as I was, unblemished, and yet, I still see the lines it leaves behind. I do not think they will ever go away.

Dragging my gaze higher, I meet the golden eyes that stare back into me, and try to read the emotions soon to overflow from them. But there are none. There is no sadness, no misery, no rage. There is not even a flicker of relief. Only cold indifference.

“Oh, Aiasthlyn,” I whisper to myself as I watch my lips tug into a listless smile.

There was never any chance of breaking, neither here nor in the safety of my realm that was only safe because it was familiar. I did not break. I had not been allowed such privileges since the day they set the crown on my head, and that was before the title of Protector came to join that of king.

I was never going to break.

The fact that I believed I might have was a testament to how far off course I have strayed. How I have allowed this realm to weaken me, and how selfish I have been as of late, as Aias.

No more.

Aiasthlyn did not break. Aiasthlyn did not stray from duty. Aiasthlyn did not succumb to tortured memories, and beneath this felted skin, I was Aiasthlyn.

I press that reminder to the forefront of my mind and do not let it budge.

Duty came first, and duty demanded that I stop prodding at the edges of my Charge and face it once and for all.

The next time my fingers trace the edges of the collar, it is to set it aflame. It burns as I leave my room, leaving nothing more than a tendril of smoke that my magic soon swallows, so there is no further proof of my suffering or my selfishness.

˚

I find him sitting at the countertop within his kitchens.

There is no reason for him to be here with his diet, or lack thereof, but when I considered it, I found Malcolm here more than anywhere else in his home, and I suspected that was because it was where he knew we were most likely to meet.

My heart pounds, flinging itself at my chest as it has developed a terrible habit of doing, but I ignore it like the rest of my urges to go to him. I observe him instead, not allowing him to become aware of my presence. Not yet.

I would be leaving soon to find the place he entered this world, and had to ensure he would not follow, but that would soon come.

For the moment, I simply stare, studying him as he glares down at the paper he anxiously scribbles atop with several more spread around him. There is a single glass beside him with less than two fingers’ worth of blood, but by the streaks lining the inside, he’d already drunk his fill.

Preparations for war— he’d likely been making them from the night his olden friend took Kalem, but I had not noticed.

I had not seen many things when it came to Malcolm. I thought I did. I thought that I’d been handling him and his mind properly, but then yesterday he used his fingers to speak to Lincoln, and questioned things about Kalem I had only ever classed as suspicions. Yesterday, Malcolm revealed himself to be several leagues ahead of where I’d placed him, and he’d done so boldly.

It was a unique sort of terrifying to realise that you were playing a game with someone you thought was an equal, who suddenly proved themselves to be much more. And that’s exactly what Malcolm was— so much more.

He was as soft as he was lethal, and the most dangerous player in this game I was still learning the rules of. He was also the one I had somehow found myself perilously entangled with.

I pass my gaze over him, allowing myself the single indulgence before I shed the magic masking my presence and step properly into the room to level the playing field.

Malcolm’s head snaps up, grey eyes locking on mine as they always do. There is joy and relief, but the pair are washed away as his eyes drop to my neck. Shock engulfs him, forcing his lips to part as he inhales deeply.

“Aias—” he breathes, his wide eyes blinking several times as he tries to stop them from sinking to my open neck again. “H-Hi.”

“Hello,” I reply as I approach him, taking advantage of his surprise to peer at the papers spread under his stilted pen. This one is not in an indecipherable language meant to lock me out. “This is a list of the strongest of your kind?” I ask, knowing already that it is. I had glimpsed a similar list of names just the day before in his pasty friend’s library.

Lincoln’s accounts on the origins of his species had been thorough, and included the names of the Prota generation—the first set of vampires created—but the list Malcolm constructs includes a set of locations.

“You are trying to find them,” I conclude as I return my gaze to him. He is still staring at my neck. I resist the urge to cover it.

“Yes…” he whispers as he forces his gaze to mine. “It’s best to know where everyone is.” I hum as I glance over the list again, committing it to memory this time. This information was likely as important as that of their creation.

“Aias,” I look at him. Something gentle shines in the grey of his eyes, something that tests the resolve of my glamour. “Are you o—”

I slide my mouth over his, stifling the words before they can pierce me. He whimpers and melts, giving in immediately, and I follow suit with improper eagerness.

The kiss is familiar in a way it shouldn’t be, but is. It is comforting too, and with how raw my neck and soul still feel, I consume comfort without restraint.

Malcolm cranes his head back as the kiss deepens and my tongue finds his. He offers himself to me as he always does, making himself pliant and willing and mine. I slide a hand around his neck and feel the way it vibrates as he whines for me.

“I will be out for the day,” I inform as I drag my lips from his and my hand from his neck too. I slide it instead to his waist and grip it firmly while I splay the other over his stomach. “We can finish this then,” I promise against the nape of his neck. His skin is chilled there, but it soon warms for me like the rest of him as his stomach trembles beneath my fingers. “Do not follow me.”

I feel a shiver run through him and consume this too as I drag him closer to me.

This, I tell myself, is what I have to do. The only way to disarm Malcolm, to stay ahead, was to distract him. I could not allow him the chance to figure me out, nor my Charge, and he would if allowed the time. So, distraction, and if what I have to do coincides with what I wanted, then that wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t—

Selfish…

My blood runs cold. Made rigid, I drag my fingers away from him and take a step back, and then another. Malcolm leans back as if to follow, a soft sound escaping his lips before he catches himself. He clings to the counter and heaves over his papers, causing them to lift over the edges.

When his eyes meet mine again, they’re wild and desperate, and my heart tightens as much as it tries to swell.

“Do not follow me,” I repeat, and his breaths shallow, then quickly fall further out of step when he realises that I am waiting for an answer from him.

“Okay,” he agrees, nodding dizzily. “I won’t.”

And I know that he will not because, for all his plotting, Malcolm was honest, ruinously so.

“Good,” I praise, and I watch his eyes glaze over until he tears them away from me.

Nodding again, he casts his gaze on his papers and stares blankly at them as if he no longer recognises the characters littered across the sheets.

Even better.

˚

I think a small part of me did not want to find this place. Or had already, and had been slow in sharing the news because it knew what lay here, and it knew it would be terrible. And it was terrible.

In the cells, I could picture nothing more perverse than a space in a living world that purposefully blocked life out. It had not been the first experience with the depravity of this realm, but the most horrific, and I could not fathom ever experiencing anything nearly as abhorrent again… but I was wrong. I was so very wrong.

My fingers spasm at my sides, the only movement my stiffened body allows as cold horror slinks down my spine. I had felt this before, but it is worse this time than when I had been thrown from a stairwell and into the gaping pit that would become the setting for my nightmares. It was much worse, because here in the open, the sun shone overhead, and yet, life in every form had been excavated.

My fingers continue their twitching. I do not know what I expected— perhaps a normal landscape with faint traces of an ancient power only visible to those with the eyes to see it. Ruins, overrun by foliage or buried beneath desert sand. Idealised images, I realise. Fantastical.

What I find, what is left, is a traumatised crater in the Earth rippled with the cracks induced by the ones who had abused it.

I stand at its edges, unable to take a single step within the void that’s non-existent cries screamed louder than any I had heard from the rest of this tortured planet, for there was nothing here to make a sound.

It was as if some great beast had gouged out a corner of this world, marrow and all, and had never bothered to replace it.

I can not speak, can not offer my apologies let alone manage a breath for fear of consuming the still, drained air that hovered over this place— the barren birthplace of the vampires.

My fingers extend to my neck, tracing the skin where the collar had been, and I do not know why. Can not begin to assume why, only in my mind, fragments of a grim picture are beginning to form, and I do not know if I am ready to look upon it.

There was a stone table. They had all awoken on it, greeted by a stomach gorged with blood and the gleaming eyes of the ones who brought them into this world. The accounts in Lincoln’s book, which I was surprised to find were authored by none other than the first vampire himself, said the process was the same each time he witnessed them create a vampire after him, but the results always varied.

He did not think that they meant to give them abilities. That seemed to be an unwelcome, but intriguing side effect of the magic they were ‘dallying’ with— magic they were still uncovering with each day. Magic, he still could not slot within any one of the known witches’ magic.

It was his assumption that they had each mastered one strain— earth magic, dark magic, and ancestral magic— and had conjoined their power as one to call on magic from the heavens, the earth, and the great beyond. All to create more of their kind until their coffers ran dry and they realised that humans could be turned into still-functional versions of their creatures, and at the cost of far less power.

It was a plausible theory, one that matched my accounts, and one I believed until I stood at the site myself, too frightened to move a muscle.

The magic used here was not of this realm. With iced sterility, I knew this as a fact.

The magic of this realm was unrefined. They took energy, reformed it with worded spells, and did not bother to return it. They had done that in part because this land was bare, stripped eternally of all life and power, but that hadn’t been all.

This… the echoes of the magic used here lifetimes ago, this specific type of magic, was the mirror vestige of a power I had only learned about from a darker history.

It was also… terrifyingly… familiar.

————————

ruh rohhhhhhh

Thoughts??????

Thoughts on this entire chapter for Aias??? His thoughts??? Fears??? The realisation at the end????

If it does not make sense, I promise with the next it would. I mean it should, but also if you read Master it should all make sense too! Ughhh I feel so bad for him, like it feels like he’s genuinely crumbling in this place, and is just barely holding it all together.

But on to the next! And good luck!!!!!!!!!!