"My king, we found—" a guard rushed in, breathless.
Tenebrarum turned, a swift movement that made his cape swirl like a storm cloud. "You found her?"
"No, my king. We… we found Potens. Your wolf." The guard's words faltered as he met the void behind the king's mask.
Potens? Escaped?
The thought was absurd. He hadn't even known the beast was missing. He had braced for the name Flavia, for any thread leading to her. But the wolf? That was a variable he hadn't calculated.
"Where is Calvus?" His voice was low, but it carried a vibration that made the air feel thin.
Then, his own mind answered him like a slap: You haven't seen Calvus for days.
The guard's face paled. It was dawning on him, with dawning horror, that the king did not know. That no one had told him Lady Aurelia had vanished with the help of his own slave.
"My kin..ng," The room grew deathly still after the guard's cowardly shuffle faded down the hall. The silence wasn't empty; it was pregnant with a revelation that turned the air to ice in Tenebrarum's lungs.
He understood. The escape, the prolonged silence, the missing wolf—it was not a desperate flight. It was a meticulously planned betrayal.
Orchestrated not by a desperate woman alone, but by the man whose throat he had once saved from a slaver's knife. The man he had fed, trained, and armored.
Calvus.
A low, guttural sound began in the depths of his chest, climbing his throat like a living beast.
"Humans are never to be trusted!" The scream erupted, raw and ragged, shattering the quiet. "LEAVE!" he roared at the empty doorway, his voice a physical force that shook dust from the stone arch.
He was alone.
She saw me as a fool! Escaping with that idiot. The thought was a brand, searing his pride.
I should have known. She was always the harlot everyone called her.
His mind conjured their whispers, throwing them at the ghost of her memory.
They are both useless creatures. Never worthy of trust.
"Just pray I don't find you, Flavia," he whispered, the promise a venomous caress in the ruined quiet. "Or your head will be the first thing I mount on my gate."
The moment the words left his lips, a white-hot fury, purer and more violent than anything he'd ever felt, detonated within him.
His right fist, encased in its black leather gauntlet, curled and shot forward, not in a wild swing, but in a brutal, focused punch straight into the solid stone wall beside him.
CRACK.
A spiderweb of fractures exploded outwards from the point of impact.
He didn't pause. He pulled back and drove his fist into it again. And again. A percussive, savage rhythm of destruction. With a sickening tear, the fine leather of the gauntlet split open at the knuckles.
Beneath, his skin was shredded, but what welled up wasn't the red of normal blood. It was a darker, viscous liquid, like molten rubies, shimmering with an inner heat. It dripped, sizzling faintly where it struck the stone floor.
He didn't care. He punched harder, each blow landing with the sound of a small avalanche.
The dark blood smeared across the fractured stone, making it look as though the wall itself were weeping great, grotesque tears.
He was beyond anger. This was a fury that threatened to unmake him. The surprise of it was the sharpest cut—not from her, he expected duplicity from a captive—but from Calvus. His slave. His creature.
The boy he had pulled from the filth, whose loyalty he had never once, in sixteen years, thought to question. Had he loved him? In his own twisted way, yes. More than his own treacherous brothers.
He didn't even feel the change begin. It was the fury given form.
The air in the room thickened, grew heavy and hot. A deep, aching pressure built at his temples, and with a sound of rending bone and splintering gold, two great, curved horns erupted from his skull.
They shoved the heavy iron crown from his head.
Crang...crin!
It clattered across the floor like discarded scrap. The horns themselves, black and gleaming like obsidian, swept back and up, forming a new, savage crown of flesh and bone.
His body followed, expanding, the fine embroidery of his tunic straining and shrieking as it tore at the seams.
He grew taller, broader, his frame swelling with terrible, primal power. Coarse, dark hair sprouted along his jaw and the sides of his face, and his fingers lengthened, the remaining tatters of the gloves falling away to reveal hands that were now more like talons, tipped with sharp, black nails.
"HAAAAAAAA!" The roar that tore from him was no longer fully human. It was the sound of a rift opening in the world.
He drove his transformed fist into the wall once more. This time, a chunk of stone the size of a man's torso shattered and crashed to the floor.
It still wasn't enough.
The fury was a volcano with no vent. He raised his clawed hands, palms facing the remnants of his chamber—the maps, the trophies, the fine furniture. From his palms, a wave of pure, concussive force erupted.
It wasn't fire, but something older and more destructive: a raw, magma-hot energy, the color of a dying sun. It blasted forward in a silent, expanding ring.
Everything it touched did not simply burn—it unmade. The oak table did not catch flame; it blackened, crystallized, and dissolved into ash in the space of a heartbeat. Tapestries depicting his victories vaporized. The shattered portrait of Aurelia, its torn shreds still on the floor, was incinerated into nothingness.
He was not burning the room. He was scorching their memory from the very air, trying to purge the betrayal from the stone itself.
When the wave dissipated, the room was a smoldering, blackened shell. Smoke curled from the scorched walls. In the center, wreathed in tendrils of heat-haze, stood Tenebrarum—no longer a king in a mask, but a beast-lord in a crown of horns, his chest heaving, his bloodied fists clenched at his sides, the last echoes of his power crackling in the absolute silence he had created.
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To be continued...