"I want to live." His voice was a raw whisper, ragged and small in the dark. Sweat beaded on his forehead and trickled into his eyes. Each breath came too fast, too shallow, as though his ribs were made of glass that might shatter at any moment.
The two cloaked figures moved without sound.
They took their places at his sides, two voids draped in shadow, and when their hands closed over his, Krycan expected the chill of death only to find warmth.
Their grip was steady, unnaturally warm, and when they bent nearer the room filled with the sound of their voices, which no longer seemed to come from outside but from inside his skull.
"You will live," they hissed, voices like wind rattling through dead trees. "For you are the perfect vessel."
Krycan blinked in confusion, but before he could ask, their words fell like hammer blows, His hand flew to his chest as a fresh stab of pain lanced through him. He tried to sit up, to wrench away, but the world tilted. Heat crawled behind his eyes; the world narrowed to that single sharp point where his heart hammered against his ribs.
"The vessel for Damokai ! The Devourer of Light."
His pulse thundered in his ears. "Vessel...? What are you saying?"
"You will live, but not as you were. The One has chosen.
Your body shall house his power, your soul shall be the gate." Their unseen faces bent lower, crimson eyes gleaming in the dark.
These words should have made him
scream.
He tried. His lungs convulsed; his mouth opened.
Nothing came out. No sound, not even a rasp escaped. Panic rose in him like bile as tears Threatened to spill down his face, carving clean tracks through the sweat. He pressed both hands to his sternum as if he might hold his heart inside by force of will.
Heat flooded his skull, spreading like molten fire through his veins. He clutched his chest, writhing, gasping. "W-What did you do to me?!"he croaked. He wanted to call out for Grandparents, or anyone. .. Bianca His Betrothed, ,he wondered where she is at a time like this !
A searing fire ignited from the base of his skull and flared through his veins. Pain cut him into pieces. He saw so clearly as if the world had unreeled before him images that did not belong to the present: his mother's laugh like wind chimes on a warm evening, the way his father used to lift him onto his shoulders and shout his name so the whole yard would echo with it. He remembered being smaller than his grandmother's hand, tucked under her chin as she hummed old lullabies until his eyes closed. He remembered his Grandfather's slow, steady footsteps in the hall, the way those footsteps made him feel safe.
"Grand_ Mother " he mouthed, and a single, useless tear fell. Memory became lantern and knife there was the first birthday where his parents had surprised him with a wooden horse; their hands on his face the day they promised always to watch over him. He had loved them fiercely. They had been taken like morning fog gone before he could even learn how to be brave without them .
His grandparents had given him everything after that; discipline, warmth, a stubborn insistence that he must grow into the man the House of Luther needed him to be.
Faces,voices came and went in shards. Regret pooled at the base of his skull. He thought, dimly and desperately, of the life he'd been building: the ring tucked away beneath his pillow, Bianca's smile when she teased him about being too proud to drink tea without stirring it three times. He wanted to hold that life close, to squeeze the memory so tight it would not slip away.
They ignored his screams, their voices rising in unison
"It is written for every fifty years, a Saint is born to oppose Damokai... but no Saint can rise without a shadow to fight."
Your flesh will be the gate. You will live after you die."
He felt, as they spoke, a brand press into his skin: bright, burning and then fading; a sigil flaring on his forehead like a star being born and snuffed in a single breath. He saw it reflected in a fallen glass by his bed black lines coiling into a mark that matched the words the shadows had forced into his mind. The mark burned not on the mirror but under his skin, a promise stitched into the marrow.
His hands loosened, shuddering, and trembling,as strength drained from his body as the shadows vanished. His heartbeats slowed, his vision dimmed.
For a moment an impossible moment he felt something like clarity: the people he loved, the faces he would never forget, wrapped around him like a cloak he could never wear again, Lady Amara's smile, King Lutheran's pride, and he wished they would forgive him for not being strong enough.
Tears kept coming, hot, helpless.
He tried, with the last of his strength, to force his eyes open and to memorize the world so that if the darkness took him, at least those memories would be left untouched.
Alone, his body convulsed violently before falling limp. Darkness swallowed him whole.
"So This is How i die " he faintly whispered as he breathed one last breath .
The Shadow whispereing slowly like a breeze as they vanished!