Traitor’s Row groaned in the stiff breeze that bludgeoned Lyath Syr. The prisoners that still lived shrieked and wailed high above the blood splattered, hard-packed path that ran between the black pillars. Nets of barbed wire hung in between them, the gaps between the brutal, slicing barbs closing in as the street loomed closer.

King Adoran had no need of a prison. Traitor’s Row was all that those who betrayed him deserved. It stretched the full length of the city, from the front gate to the Palace, and there was never a shortage of blasphemous, insolent people to fill its hungry nets.

He watched the closest Traitor where she lay, close enough that he could reach out and touch her. The coldness of his stare was reflected in the colour of his eyes, so pale that the irises were almost indistinguishable from the whites.

Wire cut through the Traitor’s body, digging inches into her side. Her fingers sought frantically for purchase, but they were slick with blood and the nets were remorseless. She slipped and screamed and the barbs bit further into her side.

He didn’t know her name. All he knew was that his son had left the city and he had not heard about it until it was far too late to locate him or the human whore he kept at his side.

He still bore the marks of Kariel’s fury. At some point in his life he was sure that he had reached for the approval of the Goddess of Death, but no longer. Unfeeling, he reached up to probe gently at the hand-print shaped burn that still tingled across his throat. He didn’t remember how he had come to the Goddess’s service. He didn’t care. He only knew that he was hers.

She had only ever asked two things of him. Keep the heirs to the throne inside the city. Find the Heart of Iliamys. These were the only threats to her plans and his people had failed on both counts. Years of careful search had taught them nothing more than the legends surrounding the Heart of Iliamys. Prince Arkreth was gone. Adoran’s soldiers had let him slip past them. Adoran’s scholars were not looking in the right places.

He reached out for the edge of the net and gripped ahold of the wire, ignoring the brief stab of pain as the barbs pierced his palm. The Traitor met his eyes, an act that was punishable by death. She had nothing more to lose and it had made her bold.

“Please,” she begged. He wrenched the net cruelly and she howled. The wire sliced in further and her ruined flesh began to knit itself back together around it.

It would take this woman months to die. Her intrinsic connection to the world’s magic would maintain her, restoring her body wherever the nets tore at it. She would live in perpetual agony until they found their way to her heart or her throat, unable even to starve to death as the weak northern races could.

He felt the brush of something soft against his mind. His psyche lashed out defensively and the gentle sensation recoiled, whispering instead against the pale grey skin of the back of his hand. He grit his teeth and willed the vision to recede, but it pressed insistently and he knew he had to let it come.

He had thought his foresight would be a gift he could turn to Kariel’s great purpose, but his visions were indecipherable. On the rare occasions he understood them, they did not lead him to the knowledge he craved. They brought him to a person he did not want to see.

He opened his eyes, and the world was subtly different. The viscous air was brighter and more pungent. The shimmering smears of grey-purple magic hidden amongst the clouds were more vivid, weaving like a mirage through the shrouded sky. The hissing of the Quicksilver Sea as it ate away at the ground beneath them was louder and more impassioned, as though he had raised the ire of the land itself. The Void glass spires which made up the city seemed to move, and the fury of the agonised god that had created them raged ever more violently against its prison.

He didn’t have to look at the man beside him on the balcony. He had memorised every detail of his face from the soft, bronzed peach skin to the bright blonde hair cut so neatly to his shoulders. The top layers would be clipped back as they always were, and not a single strand would be out of place. His gently glowing golden eyes would be lined immaculately in black and subtle blush would accent the shape of his face. Every inch of him was embedded within Adoran’s memory like an arrowhead in a deep, festering wound.

“Hello, sweetheart,” the High Priest of Kariel said, in a voice which dissolved his defences into nothing. Adoran turned his head away and sank his black teeth into the flesh of his cheeks hard enough to draw blood. The High Priest had not been there when he needed him. In his weakness he had abandoned his king and the goddess he professed to serve.

He had made the decision to exile Luce. It had been the right decision. He knew that claiming the title of High Priest for himself would not allow him to channel Kariel’s power the way Luce could, but it had taken political power from a man who had always been determined to stand in his way.

“Is that really what you believe?” Luce asked. When Adoran finally turned to look at him his painted lips were turned down in a frown not of distaste, but of concern. It infuriated Adoran, but he found he could not think of a single thing to say in response to the accusation.

“You turned me aside because I was reminding you, wasn’t I? I still loved you, Adoran. Part of you still loved me. I was trying to bring you back and it was too difficult for you, so you exiled me.”

“Shut up,” Adoran snapped, ineloquently. He loosed his grip on the balcony’s obsidian railing and turned away from the High Priest.

Luce was ahead of him, waiting patiently, leaning on his shoulder against the frame of the wide archway that lead into his bedroom. He smiled openly and tiredly, stirring something in the bottom of Adoran’s heart. The King pressed the feeling down and rounded on the High Priest with a frustrated snarl, magical flames bursting between his fingers.

Luce took his hand. If he felt the flames burning, he didn’t let it show.

“You know I’m right, my love,” he said. He moved closer to where Adoran stood frozen and reached a hand towards his face. Adoran closed his eyes as Luce’s manicured fingernails brushed lightly against his jaw, a surge of electricity shooting through his spine and melting his resolve.

“You should never have let me go,” Luce whispered, his mouth mere centimetres from Adoran’s.

“I know,” he murmured back, closing the gap between them. He pulled Luce close and kissed him, the feeling of his lips bringing back a flood of emotions and memories that had been locked away long ago. He couldn’t remember why.

The flames were everywhere, but he didn’t care. He was full of the calm, floral scent of Luce and the taste of his lips, things he had never quite managed to forget. He couldn’t tell where he ended and his lover began until a sharp and sudden pain exploded into his chest and shattered everything.

He gasped for breath as Luce stepped calmly away, and fumbled for the hilt of the long-bladed knife embedded in his chest. Adoran’s clumsy fingers bumped against it and a fresh wave of pain tore into him.

“Luce,” he stammered, blood bubbling up into his throat.

The High Priest was no longer the same man. His eyes were cold and sharp, studying him with clinical disdain.

“You’ll never find the Heart,” he said, his rich voice flat and unfeeling. “And if you think that I could still love you after everything you’ve done, then you never truly knew me at all.”

Suddenly, Adoran could feel the flames. They began to hiss and lick at his skin, which cracked and bubbled in a heat so intense that he couldn’t breathe. His eyes were burning, full of smoke like acid clinging to the underside of his eyelids, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from Luce’s figure, silhouetted against the fire.

Darkness was descending upon him again. It was wrong, somehow - everything was wrong, and he was going to forget why. He needed Luce.

“Luce!” he called, forging a stumbling path forwards into the blistering inferno. He fell and the cold, glass floor rushed upwards to meet him, and the vision ended as abruptly as it had begun.

He gasped for breath, his hand still gripped tightly around the thick wire at the edge of the net. His own blood was streaming down his forearm and pooling in the folds of his shirt.

“Luce,” he whispered. He let the wire go and dropped like stone to his knees. He buried his face in his bloodstained hands, curling in upon himself until the scent of Luce’s perfume mixed with acrid smoke began to fade.

His body shook and his heart hurt, but with each passing second it was becoming less. He felt further and further from himself. He closed his eyes and waited, and the last thing he felt before the ability to feel anything ceased was a sense of utter and all-encompassing regret. He stood and glanced over his shoulder towards the nets that hung above Traitor’s Row. They groaned again in the reluctant breeze as though welcoming him back.

Inside his chambers, he sank his bloodied hands into a pool of cold, clear water. He watched the black blood bloom, twisting itself into odd, fractal shapes, refusing to mix with the water. He scrubbed until it came away, wet a cloth, and wiped it from his face. When he looked up into the square of mirrored glass above the basin, he barely recognised the man looking back at him. It didn’t occur to him to care.

He needed to contain the threat to Kariel’s plans. He needed to find the Heart of Iliamys, and he knew exactly where to look.

Next Chapter: Chapter Seven