Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Ten

Endarion

Dykumas, Kalduran

13th of Satimus

Ten minutes after stretching out on a too-short flimsy camp bed in his equally flimsy field tent outside Dykumas, Endarion shot awake and found himself on Alzikanem, hundreds of miles away.

The gothic edifice of his mother's ancestral estate loomed before him, the total darkness of a moonless night granting the building an ominous aspect. He paced towards its entrance, stalking a front garden fuller and livelier than he'd known it in decades, and halted beneath a front wall unscorched by the fire he knew should've left visible scars.

He realised, when he caught his reflection in the grimy window flanking the front door, that this wasn't his estate as he'd last seen it, when he'd left his daughter Tali behind to answer the Caetoran's summons following Novissa's assassination. The face glaring back at him was half his age, unlined, the cheek not yet marred by its lurid scar, with longer, thicker hair untainted with grey.

He was twenty-four years old, and this was the night his parents died.

The interior was as dank and forbidding as its exterior, and he slunk down the hallway, passing unlit sconces he knew should be aflame. His mother had always disliked the dark and peppered her home with light to chase away the shadows. That they were cold now was an ill omen, even if he hadn't announced this visit and had meant to surprise his mother.

He was reaching for the door to his mother's office when it swung open, and a flurry of blackness whipped out at him. Dark as it was, the sheen of a blade still flashed as it stabbed at him and pure instinct had him reaching for his own plain arming sword and raising it in a defensive arc. He caught the attacking blade and, before his assailant could dodge away and move in again, he stabbed them, violent and panicked and forceful. His sword drove all the way through their stomach and out their back, before he yanked it free in a spurt of gore.

His opponent lurched back into his mother's office. The weak glimmer of a smouldering fire left in the fireplace bathed the face of the individual he'd just skewered.

"Mother?"

As Phaedra Boratorren sank to her knees, her hands grasping her opened stomach, he tossed his sword aside and knelt before her, pulling her close and trying to assess the wound in the failing light.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know it was you." He lifted her shirt, his hands dark crimson with her blood, and found a deep, ugly puncture in the centre of her gut. A killing strike, having pierced her all the way through. Already her lifeblood soaked her. She quickly turned pale. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Please, it's not that bad. I can get help."

She slumped and he caught her, cradling her head in his arms. "My son, I'm so sorry," Phaedra mumbled, strained. "I thought you were him. Thought he'd come back. Did I hurt you?"

He spluttered at the absurdity of the question, then snagged on what had preceded it. "Thought I was who?"

He noticed, for the first time, the fresh bruises colouring her delicate face, and the odd angle of her left arm.

"Where's father?" he asked, pushing aside his horror for a moment. "Did he do this to you? Did you think I was him?"

She raised a hand to the side of his face and held him, as gently as she had when he'd been a child. He laid his own over it, returning her soft grip with his hard one.

"You'll be okay. You'll be okay. I'll get help, and you'll be fine." He said it to reassure himself, because he knew if he didn't, he would explode. He would explode and there'd be no coming back.

Her teeth were spotted with blood when she smiled. "Don't let him hurt any of you anymore," she said. "You're such good boys, all three of you. You deserve better."

"No, mother, I've hurt you."

"You didn't mean to. I attacked you."

"You thought I was him."

Him. His father.

Her grip on his cheek weakened, but he held her firm. Tears pricked at his eyes and thickened at the back of his throat. "Mother, please don't. I can't let you go like this."

"Have to." Her voice was so weak now, barely the ghost of a whisper. Her eyes glazed over, something like peace settling onto her battered features.

He was a scared little boy, begging for the impossible. "No, please. Please."

"Love you, son," she wheezed, the breath leaving her in a soft rush. He lifted his hand and hers fell limply onto her sundered stomach. Her eyes were glassy, the life fled, her blood painting the floor beneath them both.

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For what seemed like hours, they sat there, her body grasped in his arms as if he could wrestle her soul back into her corpse by sheer will alone. At twenty-four he'd already seen the myriad faces of death, and dealt a good deal of it himself, but nothing compared to this. His mother was a pillar in his life, a woman who would always be there when he needed her, as constant to him as the sun. She couldn't be gone, especially not by his hand.

He slapped himself in the face, hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough for his liking. He flicked his eyes over to his discarded sword, forever corrupted by his mother's blood, and wondered how easy it would be to slide it into his own gut and bleed out next to her. He could slit his own throat, if he tried, or hold it against the wall and lean onto it.

No, he couldn't do that. He had a child now. A daughter, Daria, born only a few months ago. He couldn't rob the girl of a father at the same time as a grandmother, nor could he abandon his two brothers and leave them with the gory aftermath of his sins.

One glance spared for his mother's serene, bruised face convinced him of what he needed to do. She'd said his father had done this. His father's tyranny had driven Phaedra to such unthinking fear that she'd attacked her own son.

He returned to the main hallway, bloodied sword in hand, licking his lips in predatory anticipation. Asterion Boratorren was a predictable man. He preferred his own company, and often sequestered himself in his office, at the other end of the estate. When Endarion halted before it and knocked his knuckles against the door, his father's hoarse voice answered.

"Finally ready to apologise, are you?"

He let a slither of his rage manifest in his kicking down of the door. It slammed into the wall it was hinged to and rebounded with a splintering crash, causing his father to jerk from his seat behind his empty desk.

"Endarion, what are you doing back here?"

Rather than answer, he levelled his sword at his father's aged face—so like his own, in the present—and snarled. He advanced a few steps, grinned with satisfaction when the older man pressed himself against the far wall.

"What are you doing, boy?" Asterion demanded, using the harsh tone he'd always employed when wishing to frighten his children or their mother.

Endarion slapped the flat of his blade into his father's face, angling it at the last moment to allow the sharpened edge to glance into the cheek. It opened a wound that made Asterion, a nobleman unused to hard labour or injury, yelp in surprise. He snatched his hand to his cheek and drew it away, looking down at his blood-spattered palm in shock. When he opened his mouth to scream, he pulled the wound in his cheek further apart. Blood drizzled down his face, spattering against the collar of his shirt.

"Why?" he slurred.

Endarion set the sword on his father's desk and stepped in close, grabbing the man's collar and pushing him into the unforgiving stone wall. He'd been taller than his father for some years now and used the strength he'd earned during his military training to lift Asterion up onto his toes. Gone were the dark childhood days of Asterion dominating and terrifying all three of his sons.

"Mother's dead," he managed. "I know what you did to her."

"What?" Asterion replied, tears mingling now with his blood. The injury in the side of his face flapped grotesquely; it made Endarion angry. "I didn't kill her."

"You terrorised her," he said.

He punched his father, his fist squelching into exposed flesh and skimming across bared teeth. The wound tore open further, splitting all the way towards his ear in what resembled a horrifically wide smile. Asterion shrieked, then choked on his own blood.

"There was… blood on your sword… when you came in," he insisted, struggling with words now. "You killed her… didn't you?"

"No, father. You did that." Repeat it to himself enough times and it would become truth.

He spun his father around and threw him bodily against the desk; Asterion's skull caught the corner as he fell. He sprawled, insensible, at Endarion's feet, his head weeping where the desk's hard wood had cracked it. The gaze he turned to his son, who loomed over him now, was one of drunk confusion. Endarion was disappointed his father wouldn't be lucid enough to appreciate what happened next.

He straddled this man who'd menaced his mother, the man who'd neglected all three of his sons and treated them as the unwanted result of a marriage Asterion had always contested, and slammed his fists into his head. Over and over, long after Endarion had beaten the life out of his father. Long after Asterion's features blurred to pulp and blood and bone and teeth that sliced into his knuckles. Long after the man had stolen any enjoyment he could reap from the act by expiring too soon.

Monster.

A whisper in his head, yet louder than anything he'd ever experienced. It hissed along his brain, soft as smoke and jagged as broken glass.

Tyrant.

More insistent now, even as he pulled back fists speckled with bits of flesh for another punch.

Mad dog.

A deafening bellow, he slammed his hands to his ears to muffle it. But it was inside his head, and when he screwed his eyes shut against the mental assault, he felt the wet ichor from his father's face and head dry and flake away, the pressing mustiness of Asterion's office replaced by a stifling heat.

Suddenly, he was back in the torture chamber on Shaeviren, tied naked to a rock, his unseen torturer just out of sight.

Monster. Tyrant. Mad dog.

Repeated endlessly, like droplets of water dripped onto his skin over a span of years. Behind him, the malicious presence festered, and he imagined claws extended and mouth split like his father's in a bloodthirsty leer.

I made you.

He tried to raise his hands to his ears again, but they were bound stiffly at his sides. The chains chafed at his raw wrists, and for a mad moment he thought to saw through his limbs and free himself that way.

I will find you again.

His back prickled with the nightmare's closeness, its malice flickering around him as a near-tangible smog of predatory hatred. As always, it wanted to undo him.

Allow the madness in. It beckons. It has always been there.

"It was a mistake!" he shouted, throat flaming from abuse. "I didn't mean to kill them!"

The Iron Wolf is as much a predator as I. Do not deny this.

He felt something gnarled and bony skim across his throat, the touch intimate in its softness.

I will reclaim you.

His lurch into the waking world was abrupt and violent, as if his tormentor had pushed him bodily from his nightmare. Basirius raised his head from the corner of the tent but settled down again when he saw there was no real threat.

The thin blanket was twisted around Endarion's legs, and when he reached to untangle it, he saw blackness spidering across his hands, illuminated by the splinter of moonlight spearing through the ajar tent flap. With a curse, he recoiled and shook his hands, but when his heart stilled the blackness remained, tracing his veins against his skin. As he watched, his breath sawing his lungs, the discoloration faded in time with the thrumming decline of the adrenaline rush his nightmares had lent him.

By the time he'd woken enough to investigate further, his veins had returned to normal. All that remained of the vision of his parents' deaths at his hands was a lingering sense of unease at a twenty-four-year-old memory forcibly resurrected from the mental graveyard he'd buried it in.