Mask of Poison (Fall of Under Book 1) by Kathryn Kingsley (great novels to read txt) 📕

to a wall. No. He was still tucked between two stone columns in the cathedral he had once called his home.

But he wasn’t alone anymore.

He shot up to his feet, teetered, fell, and groaned as he impacted the floor. His raw wounds—if the fact he was missing most of his organs and skin could be considered a wound—screamed in pain from the hit.

Everything still hurt. At least in his sleep, the pain had gone away for a little while. He pushed back to his feet more slowly, wavering, and turned to see who had snuck up on him.

Oh.

Hah.

“Hello, children.” He chuckled. There, standing among the pews and statues, was a small horde of mutilated bodies. Missing pieces, eyes, chunks of ribs, it didn’t matter. They stood there, staring sightlessly at him.

He tilted his head curiously at one of them. Their faces were intact…but he saw no marks. He took a step toward them. These weren’t the dead bodies he had raised while fighting Lyon. Their clothing was a hodgepodge of leather and fur. Bits and pieces of a dozen articles of clothing dashed together. It was hard to tell how much dirt was fresh and how much of it was old.

Rxa tilted his head the other way.

There was not a mark on the man in front of him. He was not of Under…

Like his little dove. She had been dressed in the same fashion. These corpses were from Gioll.

And they belonged to him. He could feel them, like extensions of himself. It was like standing in a field and sensing every blade of grass, yet none at all at the same time. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation. He knew it well. When he had been beautiful, and the King of Blood, he had been a creature made of light. He could split himself into a hundred thousand copies if he wished. Each one individual, and yet each one part of the whole.

But that power, like his command over the chains that had once answered his call, had been taken away. And what it had been replaced with was…corpses, it seemed.

Lots and lots of corpses.

Shitty deal.

I liked my chains.

He walked down the line of bodies and examined each one. A few had mangled ink on their faces, ripped apart and rendered useless by hungry teeth or digging nails. But most of them bore no ink at all. And their stages of decay belied that they had been shambling creatures far too long to have been Rxa’s fault.

What is going on?

A new moon…a new king…

A new Ancient?

He shook his head and immediately regretted it. He stuck out an arm to grab one of the zombies beside him to stop his fall. The corpse didn’t respond. They were all just standing there waiting.

A new Ancient is impossible. But so is all of this. “None of that explains why you folks are here.” He didn’t expect an answer. But he had a tongue now, and he was going to use it, dagnabbit.

All of this should be impossible by the rules of their world. But it seemed like the rules had been recently thrown out the proverbial window by the Ancients.

Rxa pointed at the bodies and started to count. “One, two, three…” He lost track. “One, two…” He smacked the heel of his hand into his temple, trying to shake his brain back into place. Or out of place. Or whatever was wrong with it, he wanted it to stop. “Never mind. There are a lot of you.”

Wait.

“I have an army.” He cackled. “How quaint!” He wondered if he had an army before. Or if he was his own, one-man, hundred-thousand-part army.

Rxa struggled to remember anything that happened to him after Aon killed him and before he crawled out of the Pool of the Ancients as a monster. A bloody, starving, poisonous monster. He looked down at his hands. Bony and bleeding that blackish-yellow goop as his body processed the red meat and blood he had consumed and turned it into the thick, terrible substance that seemed to fill his body.

He walked away from his corpses to stand before the giant statue of the multi-armed Ancient at the head of the cathedral. He had spent his entire life praying to it. But now, he didn’t speak words of reverence. Now, he made demands. “What am I? What did you do to me?”

Silence.

“Just once, y’know, it’d be nice if you fucking said something!”

Screaming at the top of his lungs at an empty building didn’t help anything. But it felt nice. No, that was a lie. It felt like itching and burning. He still was missing part of one of his lungs. But it was still a little cathartic.

There is no afterlife, is there? We just turn into…nothing. Nothing but bits of matter and memories that they can play with like children’s building blocks. They put me back together and filled in the parts they lost with whatever they could fit.

He was shaking. He realized after a long moment that he was also weeping. Pulling his shattered mask from his face, he wiped at his cheeks with one of the stained bandages on his arm. Ember had tried so hard to wrap his wounds. Sweet girl.

Putting his mask back on his face, he wandered around the sanctuary of the place he had once loved and adored. He knew every nook, every cranny. Every painting held a memory. Every piece of furniture he remembered polishing with care.

He didn’t care for the puddles of blood he stepped in. They were cold and gloopy, but…he was gloopy.

He needed a bath. But it was fair to say it didn’t matter when he was still covered in more wounds than he was flesh and missing more of himself than he suspected he had. He strolled through the center of the sanctuary, letting his fingers trace over the rows of pews as he went. Finally, he stopped and looked up at the shattered stained-glass window. He knew how it felt.

“I thought I was