“I smeared it onto your hoe. A day never passes without you using that thing.”
The Anchorite processes this and then grows visibly angry. “You would kill me for a Faraswa slave?”
“I’m merely following your teachings, Mamakuru,” Kelafelo says. “You told me I need to stain my soul if I’m ever going to reach my best Axiom, so that’s what I’m doing. It just so happens there’s no one else to sacrifice but you.”
The Anchorite gasps again. “You won’t do it.”
“You’re right. Not without help.” Kelafelo picks up the vial on the table next to her and holds it for the old woman to see. “Fortunately, you made this elixir of compulsion for me. Once I drink it, I won’t be able to stop myself until you’re dead. You taught me well, Mamakuru.”
“Perhaps too well.” The Anchorite begins to sink back onto her pallet, the poisons starting to debilitate her body. Her eyes remain wide open, though; Kelafelo made sure she’d be awake until the end.
“For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be doing this if you hadn’t killed Akanwa. I’d have run off with her. I was actually considering giving up magic and my quest for revenge, if you’ll believe it, but you set me straight. I owe you for that.”
The Anchorite is wheezing now. “If you do this, the underworld’s darkness will consume you. You’re not strong enough to resist its call. I can see it in you. Why do you think I sent the girl away?”
An unexpected bolt of searing anger comes from nowhere, and Kelafelo almost shoots up to her feet. She holds it in, however, turning it into the hatred she’ll need to continue with her plans. “You killed her, Mamakuru. Let’s not beat around the bush.”
“Curse you, girl. Curse you and everything you touch.” By now the Anchorite’s tongue is numbing and her speech is slurring, but the rage seething off the old woman is almost tactile.
Kelafelo’s task will only be easier.
Without a second thought she reaches for the compulsion vial and downs its bitter contents, thinking about the thing she knows she needs to do. A witchwood knife rests on the table; she picks it up, gets up from the chair, and slowly approaches her immobilized mentor. “A glimmer of light had returned to my life,” she says, “but you snuffed it out, Mamakuru. Now darkness is all I have left. I am a monster of your making.”
Suddenly the Anchorite laughs.
The compulsion has yet to take Kelafelo, so she still has the sense to pause and be wary. Paralyzed and helpless on her pallet, the old woman somehow manages to summon the will to look up at her. “Foolish girl. Do you really think I am powerless over an elixir I made?”
Dread cools Kelafelo’s skin. “What are you talking about?”
“I am no bumbling amateur. I knew I couldn’t trust you, so I took precautions. You now have the most powerful compulsion magic in existence flowing in your veins—magic I created. You are completely at my mercy.”
“Lies.” But Kelafelo instantly knows it is true. She can already feel the stirring of magic inside her, twisting her thoughts, realigning her will.
The Anchorite wheezes and coughs. “Perhaps it is fitting that I die now. But you, oh, you will rue this night forever.” She gasps and her eyes go wild, and Kelafelo stands helpless as she utters one last malediction, a hateful curse that will echo into the future, long after she is dead. “You will be a slave to the one you hate the most.”
“No.”
“Upon my death he will know of you,” the Anchorite continues, “and he will come for you, and you will serve him as you would a god.”
Kelafelo takes a step forward, the compulsion taking root. She wanted this just a second ago, but now she tries to fight it. Her legs move forward anyway. “No.”
“Your thirst for vengeance will consume you, you will hate your enemy, you will wish him evil even as you stare at him, and yet you will lack the strength to lift a finger against him.”
“Stop!”
“The darkness will take you, my dear girl. You will lose yourself to it.”
In a wild rage Kelafelo rushes forward and gives in to the compulsion, screaming as she lifts and thrusts her knife over and over again, its blade flinging a rain of dark droplets. The world goes crimson with warm blood and rage and moonlight, but Kelafelo doesn’t stop, not until she has cried herself hoarse and the blood has soaked her to the skin.
That night, Kelafelo dies for the second time in her life, although this time, there will be no way back for her.
Two full moons later she journeys a hundred miles upstream to an old altar at the top of a lonely mountain and calls down her redhawk from the heavens. She feels no fear as the arcane bird descends before her wreathed in a firestorm, and she does not tremble when it touches their heads together and brands her arms with cosmic shards.
The contact brings with it an explosion that splits her mind open, as if a great chasm has been dug into the foundations of space and time and she can suddenly see what was hidden inside. A culmination of over a comet’s worth of tears, sweat, and endless hard work, and yet she knows this is only the beginning.
If she is ever going to break the Anchorite’s dying curse and accomplish what she vowed to accomplish on the day Urura was taken from her, then she has more to do.
She begins by digging out the mind stone from the dead tronic centipede; she has no doubt that the key to breaking the curse will be hidden within its lattices. To her mild annoyance, she finds that the mind stone is now locked behind a wall of protective charms, but this does not trouble her too much. She will find a way to break through the wall in time. How hard could it be?
In the quiet isolation of the Anchorite’s hut, she puts her ancestral talent to use for the first time, rooting her shards to the Anchorite’s old domain. She finds that she can’t spread herself far in any direction before she encounters other powers rippling like currents in the land—in effect, boxing her in—but the little there is adds a second ring to her shards.
She commits all the old woman’s tomes to memory, building up her arsenal of spells and rituals.
She learns how to anchor herself to the Void by bonding her soul to a secondary vessel; changing forms becomes the simple matter of switching vessels, bringing one into the world while sending the other into the Void. For a secondary vessel she chooses the plague of blackflies that invades the Anchorite’s overgrown garden, where she disposed of the old woman’s corpse.
She learns to tap into physical agony to improve the potency of her sorcery, beginning the process of marking her flesh with ciphers of Blood craft so painful she has to abandon clothes altogether. The pain is a price she is willing to pay, a constant reminder of why she is still alive and not with her daughter on the Infinite Path, why Akanwa had to die.
The mind stone proves to be more challenging than she anticipated, and she grows more frantic in her attempts to break through the charms protecting it, knowing that it holds the key to her freedom.
Such is her state of mind when, on one rain-soaked afternoon, an unusually tall man veiled in shadows rides into the hut’s compound on a great sable antelope and waits beneath the witchwood tree. She feels him before she sees him, a presence that seems to shift the earth beneath her feet and coil wrongly inside her mind, compelling her to go outside and meet him.