The Price Of Hatred

Chapter 26 - The Inheritance of the Flesh

​The final reckoning of the Pitch House had devolved into a temple of suffocating, crimson madness. James stood upon the marble steps of the raised dais, his blackened hand still hoisting Arthur by the throat. The broadsword in his right hand hummed with a hungry, high-displacement frequency, the edge of the blade vibrating as he pulled it back to deliver the executioner's strike.

​But the dead down below were not entirely finished.

​From the pile of mangled, melted bodies at the base of the stairs, a single, mortally wounded syndicate soldier managed to lift his trembling arm. His fingers, charred down to the raw muscle, locked around the grip of a discarded tactical pistol. He didn't aim for the head. He pulled the trigger blindly, seeking only to disrupt the apex predator.

​BANG.

​A high-velocity round tore through the smoke, striking James squarely through his left wrist—the exact hand he was using to choke the life out of the syndicate leader.

​The concussive force shattered the black, crystalline veins in his forearm. A guttural, monstrous roar tore from James’s throat as his fingers involuntarily violently unclasped. Arthur dropped heavily to the marble floor, gasping and hacking for oxygen, while James stumbled backward up the stairs, his balance completely fractured.

​As James fell back, the world slowed into a terrifying, silent vacuum. He rolled his torso to right his weight, his bottomless, glowing violet eyes scanning the smoke.

​Through the haze, his gaze locked directly onto Tidder, who had been standing up the stairs behind him to stop his descent into madness.

​Before his human mind could even register her silhouette, the ancient, parasitic consciousness of the Sixth Stone took absolute command of his motor functions. His wounded arm flew out like a striking viper, the broadsword cutting through the air in a blind, instinctive defensive arc.

​CHCK.

​The sound was sickeningly soft. The master-crafted blade drove straight through the center of Tidder’s chest, piercing her flesh right through her heart. The momentum of the strike was so immense that the bloody tip of the steel erupted clean through the back of her leather tactical vest.

​Tidder’s eyes snapped wide, a gasp of pure, unadulterated shock escaping her lips as her hands flew up to clutch the cold metal of the blade. The light in her eyes instantly began to fracture. Together, bound by the length of the sword, brother and sister collapsed heavily to the concrete floorboards.

​“No…”

​The word was a tiny, fragile rasp as the human inside James violently fought his way back to the surface. He ripped the broadsword out of her chest with a panicked, frantic motion, casting the weapon aside. He lunged forward, sliding on his knees through the pool of expanding blood to cradle her limp form, lifting her head and shoulders into his trembling, blackened arms.

​“No, no, no… Noooooooooo!”

​James screamed, a primal, shattering sound of absolute grief that tore his vocal cords to ribbons. But within the dark chambers of his mind, the surge of his raw agony only acted as premium fuel for the parasite. The Sixth Stone pulsed against his ribs, its voice slithering through his consciousness in a low, seductive hiss:

​‘Kill him now… kill the architect of your suffering… take the throne and everything… WEEEE desire…’

​The absolute hatred inside James surged to a boiling point, completely drowning out his sorrow. He stood up in a single, flashing motion, his fingers locking onto the hilt of the broadsword like a bolt of lightning. Before Arthur could even lift his head from the floor, James blurred across the dais, driving the broadsword downward with the force of a falling meteor.

​SHALCK.

​The blade pinned Arthur through the center of his chest, driving so deep into the wood of the raised high seat behind him that the metal groaned under the tension. Arthur was literally crucified to his own throne.

​“Die with absolutely nothing,” James hissed through his bared, black teeth, his face inches from the old man's nose.

​Arthur spit a thick torrent of crimson, his eyes wide with a dying, malicious spite as he stared into the violet voids of James's eyes. “You… you are a devil.”

​“Devil cannot make Hell look beautiful, so he makes beautiful roads that lead us there,” James spoke, but the inflection was completely gone. The human voice was entirely swallowed by an ancient, overlapping majesty that shook the very foundations of the room. “I am Nexaroth. The Sovereign of the Mountain.”

​The entity that lived within the Sixth Stone looked through James's flesh, its gaze burning into Arthur's fading consciousness. “And you will show me exactly where you kept my brothers.”

​Without waiting for an answer, James slammed his left palm directly over Arthur’s forehead.

​BOOM.

​James’s head snapped backward, his chin locking toward the ceiling as his eyes rolled into absolute blackness. His mind violently breached the final barriers of Arthur’s dying brain, dragging his consciousness deep into the old man's locked memories.

​The vision was a cold, memory-scape from fifteen years ago. James found himself standing in the freezing, howling winds of the Mountain of Life and Death—the exact desolation where the four original pioneers had first uncovered the artifacts.

​Arthur was younger in the memory, his coat whipping around his legs as he knelt in the gray dirt beneath a monolithic, ruined archway. He was digging into the frozen earth, his hands covered in mud and sweat. He had brought three of the stones back to the mountain to hide them from the reaching hands of the growing factions.

​But Arthur didn't bury them all.

​James watched as Arthur placed only two of the artifacts into a reinforced iron lockbox—the Immortality Stone and the Advanced Healing Stone. The Wealth Stone was conspicuously missing from the chest.

​As Arthur slammed the iron lid shut and buried it beneath the stones, he didn't merely cover it with dirt. He drew a silver dagger across his own palm, squeezing a heavy stream of his own biological blood over the soil, binding the chest with a lethal, ancestral seal. Only upon the exact moment of his physical death would the bloodline seal fracture, allowing the dormant frequencies of those two buried stones to awaken and breathe again.

​James’s consciousness pushed deeper, hunting frantically through the temporal pathways of Arthur’s mind for the location of the missing Wealth Stone. But every single memory path regarding that artifact didn't lead back to the mountain.

​They all pointed toward a single, glittering coastal skyline across the ocean: Sydney.

​GASPPPP.

​James’s eyes snapped wide open, the black void within his irises fracturing as he violently pulled his hand away from the old man's skull.

​“Where is MORVEX?!” James and the stone roared in a terrifying unison, the sound concussive enough to shatter the remaining light fixtures in the war room. “Where did you hide him?!”

​With a brutal twist of his shoulders, James yanked the broadsword clean out of Arthur’s chest. A massive spray of dark blood erupted from the wound. Arthur’s head fell forward, his chest collapsing as the last spark of life left his eyes, his pathetic, broken body slumping off the steps of the throne to hit the floor like a sack of stone. The master of the Pitch was dead.

​James stumbled back three paces, his chest rising and falling in ragged, violent gasps as he shook his head side to side, his human consciousness desperately clawing through the violet static to regain control of his hands.

​Inside his skull, the cold, ancient voice of Nexaroth slithered through his thoughts like liquid mercury. ‘The seal is broken… my brothers are awakening beneath the stone… I must find them…’

​“No… No!” James growled, his hands flying to his temples as he fought the parasite for possession of his muscles.

​‘You will have to die, James,’ the crystal whispered from the deep center of his chest, its tone laced with a chilling, absolute certainty. ‘Your fragile frame cannot house the expansion. You must perish…’

​Under the forced thrall of the stone, James’s arms moved against his will. He lifted the heavy broadsword with both hands, slowly, mechanically turning the weapon around until the razor-sharp tip of the steel was pointed directly at his own breastbone.

​Every single muscle in his body trembled violently. The black veins along his arms pulsed with a frantic, volatile light as he fought with every ounce of his human soul, refusing to surrender the final, bleeding piece of who he was.

​‘…so that we can both be reborn,’ the crystal continued, its voice echoing with the weight of five thousand years of slaughter. ‘And live forever within the same immortal flesh.’

​The invisible grip of the stone tightened over his motor cortex.

​The sword moved closer.

​Closer.

​The sharp, freezing tip of the steel pressed against the blackened skin directly above his beating heart, drawing a single line of dark red blood. The crystal was no longer trying to guide him as a weapon.

​It was trying to erase his very existence.

​“No…” James growled through his clenched, blood-stained teeth, a terrible, guttural sound rising from his lungs.

​His entire physical frame shook as he forced his hands to lock in place, halting the blade's progress by mere millimeters. The metal of the sword vibrated under the immense counter-force of his willpower. For one brief, terrifying moment, man and monster stood perfectly balanced on the edge of the blade, fighting for possession of a single body.

​“There’s no… WE!” James roared.

​A sudden, catastrophic surge of pure human willpower exploded outward from his soul. With a violent, screaming motion, he tore his arms to the left, ripping the sword away from his breastbone and letting the weapon crash heavily against the marble floor.

​CLANG!

​The sharp, metallic ring of the steel echoed through the massive, ruined war room, bouncing off the concrete pillars.

​Breathing in ragged, frantic gasps, James dropped hard to his left knee. He pressed both of his blackened hands directly against the glowing violet shard embedded deep within the tissue of his chest. His eyes burned with an agonizing mixture of physical pain, deep-seated hatred, and unbroken defiance.

​“I own my flesh,” he said, his voice shaking with exhaustion but completely unwavering. “I decide who lives inside this body.”

​The crystal pulsed violently beneath his skin, sending waves of hot, agonizing static through his nervous system.

​“I decide whether I live forever as a god… or die right here as a man.”

​The violet glow intensified, threatening to blind him, but James refused to let go of his grip. He dug his fingers into his own skin, drawing blood as he fought the internal pressure.

​“I was never born to become your vessel.”

​His fingers dug deeper, his nails clawing at the edges of the crystal matrix as if he wanted to rip the cursed thing straight out of his thoracic cavity with his bare hands.

​“I have lost my mother,” his voice cracked, a raw, bleeding strip of emotion breaking through the static. “I have lost my father. I have lost pieces of my goddamn self that can never return to the light.”

​He gritted his teeth, the violet veins on his face pulsing. “But every single scar belongs to me.”

​The crystal screamed inside his mind, a high-pitched, deafening frequency of pure fury.

​“Everything I suffered…” James whispered, slowly forcing his head up to face the empty throne.

​“Everything I became…”

​The dark, volatile energy began to swirl around his frame like a localized cyclone, kicking up the dust and plaster from the floorboards. James’s expression softened into a look of profound, tragic peace. “Every pain. Every failure. Every single ounce of hatred in my soul…”

​He clenched his fists so tightly the leather of his gloves began to split.

​“…belongs to me.”

​The crystal’s voice turned utterly furious, losing its ancient composure. ‘You cannot survive without my strength! You will bleed out on this floor!’

​A faint, mocking smile appeared on James’s bleeding lips.

​“Then I’d rather die right here as James…” he whispered, his legs tensing as he slowly, agonizingly forced himself to stand at his full height. “…than live forever as your fucking vesssssssssssel.”