I flexed my fingers, begging my Phoenix to rise or my magic to return, but it was as if neither of those things existed in me. I was a mortal willing power to come to me which didn’t live in my bones, and it looked like Lavinia knew it.
“Did you think you had beat my curse?” she asked with an evil smile pulling at her mouth. She twisted her hand through the air again and I was yanked forward by some dark pit inside me, pain making me scream as I clutched my stomach. “Your Phoenix has put up a good fight, I’ll admit. It wasn’t meant to take this long. But now you’re here and my power is far greater than ever, you cannot stop it.”
“What have you done to me?” I gasped.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Lavinia sang as she ignored my question and I could feel claws ripping up my insides, making me scream once more as some dark thing seemed to crawl its way through my chest.
“Stop,” I groaned, staggering as the pain became nearly unbearable.
“Let her go!” Orion bellowed, but I was fully in Lavinia’s grasp now and as she came to stand before me, I saw a chasm of hatred in her eyes.
“Ambres tenus avilias mortalium avar,” Lavinia growled and my head fell back so I was looking at the sky, rage opening up in my chest and darkness racing into the place where my magic should have lived.
“Stop,” I begged again, my voice nothing but a puff of air leaving my lungs, my whole body taken charge of by her.
“You’ve been a bad, bad Vega. If you want to save all these people, then why have you been hurting them?” Lavinia purred.
Memories unfolded before my eyes and I watched in horror as I saw myself turning to smoke in mine and Orion’s room, slipping away under the door in the night with bloodlust rising in me. I was soon outside beyond the farmhouse behind the first set of guards who’d been found murdered. I followed one of them all the way to the barn and suddenly the smoky form my body was in shifted into a huge beast. I was coated in thick black fur, my paws equipped with razor sharp claws. And I was full of nothing but anger and hunger and hate.
No, that’s not me.
But it was. I was that beast and it had been responsible for the murders. I had been responsible. For all that death and pain and fear.
I watched the memory as I dragged the first man into the barn, killing him with claws and teeth, his screams echoing around me and drawing the other guards. But the moment they arrived, they fell prey to me, their power nothing compared to mine as I ripped into their bodies, devouring pieces of them while leaving the rest strewn across the hay in the carnage.
Memories tore through my mind of each of the murders, of me slipping in and out of our room in that smoky form at night then slicing into the victims I found. And all that I felt was rage. It was consuming and blinding and it ate away my power, my Order. Every time I killed, it grew a little stronger, and my magic was tugged from my grip more firmly. My Order had fought back, I could feel the beast’s rage at that, but now I stood before the queen of shadow and she owned this monster in me. This creature which had stolen away everything I was, and it wanted more, so much more.
“The Shadow Beast has taken root in you,” Lavinia purred as I snapped out of the memories and looked at her in terror, shaking my head in refusal of what I already knew was true. “It feeds on your power piece by piece by piece. You fought it well, but not well enough. And now it is sated and you are nothing but a mortal bound to a beast. And that beast is mine.” Lavinia twisted her hand again. “Come out and play, beastie.”
“No,” I gasped in terror, raising my hands again, trying to will my Phoenix to the surface, but it was gone. Like it had taken flight from my body and abandoned me, and I had never known anything so terrifying as this reality.
“Get away from her!” Orion cried and Lavinia glanced over at him where he was bound in her shadows at the mercy of his own sword, then she looked back to me.
“I think the beast is hungry. Novus estris envum magicae. Avilias avar!” She flexed her fingers and suddenly my rage was all consuming and my flesh was tearing apart, my armour bending and buckling as an enormous monster fought its way out of my body. The armour was forced off of me, falling to pieces around me with a series of clangs as they hit the ground, the sound like a toll of death to come. The necklace at my throat snapped and the Imperial Star tumbled away, lost to the mud.
My huge paws slammed into the earth as I towered above Lavinia and every part of me was forced to let go as the animal took over on the inside too.