The Cursed ones

Chapter two

But this thing was wrong, horribly wrong. Skin hung in bloody ribbons, hollow sockets leaking black ichor, mouth stretched in a scream layered with a thousand dying children’s voices. “Mother… why did you carve out my Echo while I still screamed?” It lunged, spectral claws raking across Elizabeth’s chest. Real flesh parted. Indigo essence sprayed in hot, hissing arcs.

Behind it rose a second horror: a younger Elizabeth, knife trembling, standing over the grave she had wept at years ago. The phantom laughed with wet, maniacal glee and drove the blade into her own chest again and again. Black blood sprayed in burning arcs that sizzled against the real woman’s skin. 

“You wanted to wear their skin,” the phantom hissed between gurgles. “You wanted to devour your own children to ascend. Look at what you became!”

“Get out of my head!” Elizabeth shrieked, blood streaming from her eyes and nose like tears of tar. The phantom’s jaws were locked around her throat, gnawing viciously while the eye drank the released dream-essence in greedy gulps. The braziers died. Darkness bled outward from Vandal’s pupil like spilled ink.

The eye gave him strength no starving child should possess. Resonance essence, stolen Echo fragments, devoured dreams, flooded his veins like cold fire.

He caught fractured thoughts that weren’t his own, something about “Echo,” pieces of soul essence that warriors absorbed from the world to grow stronger. Echo warriors were those born with soul energy, connected to the forces of nature. The knowledge felt stolen, like scraps ripped from her mind, replaying in his head as if they were scenes from a movie.

Then deeper memories, heinous. Twisted.

His body knit itself together: cuts sealed, bruises faded, exhaustion burned away in an unnatural rush of vitality. He felt… healed. Revitalized. Stronger than he had ever been.

But the hunger wasn’t his.

It wanted more. It wanted to rip her apart, suck the marrow from her soul, wear her screams like a crown. The thoughts weren’t his.

They were the eye’s and they terrified him.

With trembling hands he slapped his palm over the throbbing socket and pressed. Hard. Fingers dug into the skin around his eye, forcing the lid down over the vertical slit. Sharp, splitting pain lanced through his skull like an ice-pick driven between the hemispheres. A migraine exploded behind his eye, white-hot, nauseating, but the suction stopped.

The nightmares vanished.

Elizabeth staggered back, gasping, clawing at her own throat where phantom teeth had torn real wounds. Purple flames still licked from her palms in short, violent bursts, unstable Ruin power she could no longer control. The ritual circle cracked wider. Stone groaned overhead. The chamber began to die around her.

Vandal didn’t wait.

He rolled free of her collapsing weight. His fingers, now steady, unnaturally strong, snapped the reed bonds like dry twigs. Legs that should have buckled instead propelled him upward. The stone door had never been locked; she had been too arrogant.

Behind him, Elizabeth howled, a sound of pure animal rage and terror. “I WILL KILL YOU!” Another unstable burst of purple flame erupted from her body, chewing through the far wall and turning ancient stone to black ash. The ceiling buckled. Cracks raced like lightning. The mountain itself began to collapse in her wake.

Vandal ran.

The cave tunnels blurred past, rough walls scraping his shoulders bloody, bare feet slicing open on jagged rock. Elizabeth’s screams chased him, mixed with the wet ripping of her tearing at lingering nightmare wounds and the thunder of falling stone. Her decaying flames ate the world behind him in greedy, erratic pulses.

Cold night air slapped his face like a giant wall of fresh air when he burst from the hidden cave mouth into dense forest. Moonlight sliced through the canopy in silver blades. Freedom tasted of blood, pine, and moss.

Three desperate minutes he sprinted.

Roots clawing his ankles, branches whipping his cheeks, until even the stolen vitality could no longer outrun the cost. The migraine throbbed behind his forced-shut eye. Legs began to shake. He ran unsteadily into dirt and moss, while somewhere far behind him the mountain continued to squirm in purple fire and Elizabeth’s broken voice echoed.

His vision swam. The power he had unleashed burned through his small body like fuel through an engine. Legs gave out. He collapsed face-first into the carpet grass, the world spinning into merciful darkness.

He was twelve again, curled up on the cold floor of the Abuja flat. A woman’s fist came crashing down, once, twice, thrice, for daring to inquire about his father. "You resemble him too much," she spat, her breath heavy with gin. "You should have gone with him. Gotten lost along that damned Cameroon coastline!" Blood dripping from his split lip, warm and coppery.

Sandra smiles at him, her face the picture of pure innocence. They were taking a walk at their favourite spot in UNILAG, a place fondly called Make out corner.

“I love you, I will always love you” She said forming her dainty palms in the shape of a heart.

“Always and forever Vandal”.

He smiled.

Delivering a kiss to her forehead.

“Always and forever Sandra”.

*thud*

He stared down at himself, a knife plunged into his chest.

She was still smiling sweetly at him, one hand holding his palm, the other hand holding the knife buried in his chest.

Her dainty palm roaming across his chest,  then closing like a vice on his neck felt coarse like scales across his skin, gripping  ever so tighter.

Hisssss!

A soft yet sharp sound drew him back to consciousness. Struggling to breathe, he felt the constriction around his neck, the slithering feeling on top of his legs.

With great effort he forced his eyes open.

 A heart shaped head with eyes that seemed to shine like tiny mirrors stared right into his.

Fangs dripping, maw dislodged at an impossible angle, it dived like a homing missile towards his neck but his reflexes kicked in, grabbing  the neck just as its head had almost reached his nape.

He held back the golden striped snake as it struggled to sink its fangs into warm flesh, his flesh. Fragments of knowledge, stolen from Elizabeth during the ritual when the eye had fed, slipped into his mind. He didn’t fully understand them yet, and the sudden flood unsettled him.

Pulling from the memories felt like he was using someone else’s muscle memory, his own muscles struggled to keep up. Some memories were so complex and terrifying he could not focus on them for fear of fracturing his mind.

Super poisonous beast… can threaten even guard Echo Warriors… One bite is instant death.

He immediately squeezed hard with all his strength on the wind pipe as it struggled to bend its head, fangs dripping venom until the final snap, then it became limp. He broke its neck.

However he had used too much force, his palm ended up being cut in several places by the sharp scales.

 

Staring at his bleeding palms, he counted himself lucky. If the golden striped snake had sunk its fangs into him, he would have died instantly. Melted into a puddle from the venom.

The golden viper’s eyes and teeth pulsed with power. He instinctively knew they were extremely valuable, something even Echo warriors desired. But right now, with Elizabeth possibly hunting him, his only thought was survival. 

He needed every scrap of strength he could get just to stay alive.

With shaking hands, he gouged out the eyes and pulled out the fangs, trying not to vomit at the wet sounds. An echo fragment resembling a golden viper rose from its forehead and sank into his skin like smoke. 

A rush of heat flooded his limbs. He felt stronger… but the sensation was deeply wrong.

“This must be a specific power of my eye,” he whispered, voice hoarse.

He pictured the viper in his mind. His fingernails instantly lengthened into sharp claws, dripping with deadly venom. Vandal stared at them in horror, heart hammering. How is this even possible? Unease twisted in his gut.

 The power had come too easily. It felt like something evil had taken root inside him.

He quickly willed the claws away. They retracted with a sickening wet sound.

Looking back in the direction he had come from, he wondered if Elizabeth had already recovered and was tracking him. Panic clawed at his chest. He couldn’t stay here.

He forced himself deeper into the forest.

Leaping onto the nearest tree, he nearly lost his balance and almost fell. Taking deep, shaky breaths, he pushed off from one branch to another. His body moved with surprising ease, almost weightless, but every leap sent fresh fear through him. 

This wasn’t normal. None of this was normal.

He didn’t know what he was becoming. He didn’t know if he could trust this power ,  or the hunger that still whispered at the back of his mind.

For now, his only goal was simple: survive the night. Get as far away from that mountain as possible. Figure out the rest later,  including what Sandra had done to him, and why Elizabeth had tried to sacrifice him.