Depths of Madness - Erik Scott De Bie [126]
The demon priest pronounced the final syllables of his spell just as Twilight ran, brokenly, toward him. Burning, fiendish power filled the room as the magic took hold, and black fire burned between Gestal's hands. It shot forth in a line of red toward her heart, and Twilight felt more than heard the very air vanishing, destroyed, and the surrounding humidity rushing into the blast's wake. Briefly, Gestal's shadow vanished, but reappeared when the flame came at her.
Running at approaching death, Twilight did not even attempt to dodge.
Instead, she danced into the disintegrating shadows barely a pace from the roaring, slaying spell and reappeared in Gestal's own shadow. She threw herself into his arms, hideous and desiccated as his demonfleshed body had become, caught his face in her left hand, and locked her lips to his. His spell tore into the cavern wall, boring a hole more than two paces wide and ten deep.
His hands, warped and withered into claws, flexed impo-tently for a heartbeat, then closed, tenderly, around her waist. Twilight clung to him and kissed with all her strength, spending herself entirely in that exchange, as though her existence would cease the instant she broke away.
The stillness stretched. They stood in the eye of a magical storm, the wrath of the Abyss raging about them, but neither looked away. Gestal's power faltered and faded, and they heard two dimly audible hisses echoing around them-hisses that became roars.
Liet pulled away from Twilight's lips then, and his blue eye shone like the rising sun in the sky after a storm at dawn, the green like the seas of the west. His flesh might have been blasted, his health stripped and torn away, but there was more love in those eyes than Twilight had ever known or dreamed. And when he reached up and caressed her face, his touch was soft despite his petrified skin.
Twilight knew she had saved him-that he was free of Gestal forever-that he understood, and more than that, accepted all. And for a heartbeat, all was perfect.
For a heartbeat.
His eyes shifted to confusion, then to pain. He looked at Twilight, his lips forming a question that would never come. He coughed, and blood splashed from his desiccated lips to strike Twilight's face. Then, with a sigh, he staggered and fell, his fingers whispering down her cheek and leaving a scarlet trail.
"Daltyrex," he murmured as he slumped to the floor. "Why?"
Twilight could not move her left hand, which had been touching his face, nor her right, until the man she had known alternately as Liet and Gestal lay crumpled at her feet.
Then, as though a bolt of lightning struck her, the elf raised her scarlet-drenched right hand. Holding Davoren's stiletto up to her face, she collapsed to her knees.
She smeared Liet's blood across her cheek and sobbed. Then she hurled the deadly blade aside, cradled his body in her arms, and wept into his chest.
CHAPTER Twenty-Nine
She sat there for a long time. Then, after what seemed days, or years, a shadow loomed at the door, making panting and wheezing sounds.
If the elf heard the shadow, she made no sign. She merely sat there, cradling her friend in silence. The blood had ceased to flow, and the places where it had drenched the elf s garments had hardened into a firm hold. They might have been bound together, she and the corpse, their blood and flesh and hearts linked.
Not that it would matter to the creature stalking her.
It was ravaged: battered, bruised, broken in arm, leg, and rib. A withered left arm, formerly muscular and sleek, flopped uselessly at its side. The cracked and poorly mended legs propelled it at a ponderous gait, half-limping, half-sliding. The once smooth body had been ruined beyond repair.
The thing loomed over Twilight where she sat, neat the pit full of dying flames and beneath menacing, stained spikes. It reached for her shoulder with one arm.
"Gargan…" she murmured.
It growled low. She turned her head and looked up without comprehension.
"Kill you! Kill you, pretty elf!" the troll