The dragon dropped the trembling deckhand to the cavern floor and loomed in close behind Shaella, ready to attack at her command.
As Pael came around the circle he was pacing, still singing his binding, and still entranced in his ritual. Shaella charged him with her sword held high. The outer ring of flames leapt up like a shimmering emerald wall before her. The power radiating from them gave a clear warning. Unlike regular fire, demon fire would burn her flesh for ages. As angry, and as scared for Gerard as she was, she dared not passed through those flames.
“I hate you!” she screamed at the wizard. Then, she broke down, and fell to her knees, letting her sword clatter to the floor beside her. She put her face in her hands and cried for Gerard. It was all she could do.
Gerard heard her sobbing voice through the exotic symphony that Pael’s spell had created around him. She had truly loved him, she was truly sorry, she hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. Had she somehow betrayed him? He wondered. It seemed more as though the wizard had betrayed her. Gerard wanted nothing more than to run to her and comfort her in his arms. He wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right, even though he knew that it wasn’t. He didn’t even have the strength left to open his eyelids. The coldness of the black thing was moving through him again.
“Oh, Shaella, I loved you,” he rasped, as the last drop of his life blood ran down his chest. I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die! Were the only thoughts he could manage to think, as death’s maw finally closed over him.
Pael had almost lost his grip on the complex strands of magic he was weaving when Shaella had arrived. The dragon had startled him too. In the back of his mind, he remembered that he had started this even before the dragon had been collared. If Shaella had somehow failed him, the dragon could’ve returned and ruined everything. He had placed total faith in Shaella’s abilities, and she had come through.
Listening to her howl, cry, and carry on over something as trivial as love, made him wonder if he were a fool for having faith in her. He was giving her what every father alive wanted to give his little girl, what every little girl wanted from her father: a kingdom of her own to rule. Power, and the means to hold it all, was hers. Didn’t every little girl dream of being a princess or a queen? Now here she was, on her hands and knees, cursing his name, threatening him, and babbling on and on, right in the middle of the most important moment of his life. She was so much like her mother, he swore. So impossibly hard to please, so ungrateful for the sacrifices he made. Years of manipulating, and planning; schemes upon schemes he had hatched and played out for her. He had misdirected the eyes of Kings and Queens, and tricked the nobility of entire nations, to get Shaella into this position. Here he was, on the cusp of dark glory, as much for her as for himself, and she was crying over a dead boy. Pael cursed himself a fool for even trying to please a woman. He- He-
He suddenly felt that something was very wrong. The binding was holding perfectly, but Shokin was slipping away from him. How could this be? The demon wasn’t trying to break free either. It couldn’t. It was being drawn back into the Seal. Something had gone terribly wrong, but what? Pael searched the depths of his knowledge frantically for a solution.
For the briefest instant, there had been nothing but Gerard. No sight, no sound, no emotion. Just death. But the surge of magic from Gerard’s ring, as it made to carry out his last command, caught hold of him just in time.
Like a mother’s fingers, squeezing her child’s skin between her thumbs to force out a splinter or thorn, his pectoral muscles clenched against the dagger blade. It didn’t leave his body, but its tip slipped back out of his heart. The powerful magic of the ring couldn’t fill his empty body back up with blood, but it could heal the mortal wound, and it did.
The ring’s power held him there, on the brink of death, long enough for his heart to start beating again. Gerard’s soul was clinging to his body with all the strength of his love for Shaella. The surge of magical energy gave him the strength to hook his thumb in the dagger’s hilt, and pull it out of his body. The momentum of his falling arm caused him to roll onto his stomach. He couldn’t think. Every move he made was on instinct, or guided by some other force. The magic couldn’t hold him in life much longer, and his body needed liquid to make more blood. These realities came to him as afterthoughts, fragmented truths, telling him how dire his situation was.
Riding the tiny bit of strength the ring’s magical rush had afforded him, he pulled himself across the empty space he was suspended over to the landing of the stairway that spiraled down into the depths. He found that his hands slipped down through the invisible plain that had supported him.
The first step felt real enough when he touched it. The cold, dark thing that he had felt earlier, was pulling at his will again. It wanted desperately to keep him from going down. Gerard’s will wasn’t his own though, it was a thing of instinct, so the demon’s desperation was wasted. The magic of the ring was guiding Gerard. First one step, then another, he used his hands to pull himself down. Then, his upper body went over, and he went sliding. His blood-soaked front acted like a lubricant, and it was several steps later before he came to a rough, jumbled halt against the curving wall of the pit.
The sound of the wizard’s musical chanting had disappeared, and the cold black thing seemed to have found a way to crawl completely inside of him. It was screaming horribly in protest, and the sound echoed through Gerard’s head. With the last bit of magical strength left in him, he managed to pull one arm out of the shoulder strap of his pack. He wiggled himself a step or two down from it, so that it was at the level of his head. He then jabbed a finger-size hole in the top of the dragon’s egg, and put his mouth to it as if it were his mother’s breast.
He looked upward as he greedily drank in the dragon’s yolk. His bloodless body was craving the nutrients, and he didn’t deny it.
Above him, the world was a black smear, backlit by bright, wavering green light. It was as if he was seeing the world from underneath a frozen lake. He could make out the shape of someone as they stalked around, throwing out erratic gestures, but everything else was a blur. Somehow, he knew that it would be a very long time before he could get himself back into the world above him. As the screams of the icy dark thing in his head clashed with the fiery heat of the dragon’s yoke settling in his guts like lava, he began to wonder if he might be better off dead.
Shokin felt the revival of the sacrifice and began to panic. Pael’s binding held the demon to both the wizard and the dying boy, and now it was being pulled apart. Pael felt it too, but the persistent wizard wouldn’t let the spell break. Shokin screamed out in horror. He was bound to each of these men. He reached into the boy’s mind, found the place that controls human thought, and told him to stop; ordered him to stop, but it was no use. Pael wouldn’t let the spell break. Then, the boy tumbled through the Seal and down the stairs, and Shokin, the mighty spectral demon, was torn in two.
The demon’s horrified yell, blasted through Pael’s concentration, thus breaking the wizard’s spell, but it was too late. The demon’s essence was contained in two separate pieces of dark shadow, each with no form of its own. The part of Shokin that was free of the Seal, was bound to Pael, and the quick-witted wizard was gathering it all in.
Shokin wasn’t just a place in Pael’s mind now, nor was he another spirit in the wizard’s body. He was Pael now, and Pael was him. The demon’s power was Pael’s power, and the binding was holding true.
Shokin was a prisoner in two separate places, bound to Gerard in the world of darkness, and to Pael, in the world of men. The demon raged and screamed, his anguish slowly turning to a desperate kind of madness. How had the sacrifice regained its life? Why hadn’t it gone into the Nethers? The answer was irrelevant, for all that really mattered, was the fact that he was Shokin no more.
Pael had felt the spectral demon being torn apart and had concentrated all his will and power into his binding. He didn’t let himself panic; he had worked far too hard to make this moment possible. He would do his best to salvage as much control over the demon as possible.
When the spell was finally broken, he was rewarded for his diligence. As the emerald fire faded away around him, the surge of spectral power filled him like a lightning bolt. It was awesome and breathtakingly electric, glorious and enlightening. It was like a whole new world – no – a whole new universe of possibilities had suddenly come into being. It couldn’t have happened more perfectly. Now, instead of having a demon to do his bidding for him, he had the demon’s power for himself. He wasn’t exactly sure how it had happened, how the boy had kept himself from dying, but his blood tingled with vast demonic power and he found he didn’t really care.
So long and so badly had Shokin longed for revenge, that Pael felt the demon’s desires coursing through him now. All of that rage and determination would serve Pael’s purpose well. He found he was laughing
