Page 18 of Bought By the Manticore

The guards bowed and marched out of the room. The door latched shut behind them. Iaso lingered by the bed for a moment, adjusting the blankets over Ianthe’s shoulders. Her snakes let out a soft, fretful hiss. Then the healer turned and walked into the adjoining chamber. The scraping sound of a stone pestle grinding against a basalt bowl soon drifted through the open archway.

She was close. I had to be silent.

I slipped out from beneath the floor, keeping to the shadows cast by the bedframe. I slithered up the wooden post, tracing the familiar route I took every night to reach her.

When I slid beneath the blankets and brushed against her leg, I expected to taste the chaotic pulse of the parasite. I expected the disease I usually drank from her flesh.

I tasted nothing.

An impenetrable barrier coated her veins. The potion the snake-woman had mentioned was violently potent. It was like a wall of magical frost. It locked the frantic growth away, forcing the disease into a deep paralysis.

I probed the skin near Ianthe’s wrist, where the thorns pulsed closest to the surface. The barrier repelled my energy. The parasite was trapped safely under the potion’s influence, hoarding its strength in the dark.

I couldn’t reach it.

I needed to consume the sickness. I needed to clear it from her blood. But Ianthe was still so fragile. If I forced my death energy through the shield, the disease could awaken and retaliate. Or the clash of powers could outright shatter her body.

I pulled my vine back, retreating from her wrist. If her physical body was locked away, I needed to find a path the potion could not protect.

I shifted my form, thinning my main vine until it was delicate. I crept upward, trailing across the curve of her shoulder and stopping near her face. She lay impossibly peaceful in the dim light, entirely free from the grimace of pain that usually haunted her features. Her chest rose and fell in a slow rhythm.

Slowly, I rested a single bloom against her temple, right where her pulse fluttered weakly beneath the skin.

I let my pure essence pool at the point of contact, sending a gentle current of death energy directly into her mind. I bypassed the physical realm entirely, sinking my consciousness into the quiet depths of her slumber.

The waking world faded away, replaced by the vast landscape of her thoughts. I reached for her dreams, waiting in the shadows to show her exactly who was keeping her safe.

7

Scattered

Ianthe & Skaros

Eryx’s draught was not unlike the bite of a particularly vicious winter. It coaxed me into a half-conscious daze, my awareness fading into a relaxing, dreamlike state. I felt no pain. I just drifted, trapped in a void where even my own thoughts couldn’t reach me.

Then the cold began to withdraw. A silver-blue twilight crept in at the edges.

I opened my eyes.

I wasn’t on the padded bench in Thanatos’s Temple anymore. I stood in a strange garden, though it was nothing like I’d seen before, either in Asphodelia or in Korinos. The ground beneathmy bare feet was solid basalt, dark and polished. A low mist coiled around my ankles, damp and heavy with the smell of turned earth. But the terrain was covered in roots—thick, pale, writhing things that choked the stone. They thrummed with a life the rest of the Blighted Lands didn’t have.

“Ianthe.”

A sudden voice cut through the mist. The plea carried a weight that reverberated deep in my chest. I turned, following the sound into the deepest part of the shadows.

Kneeling in the center of the garden was a massive two-legged creature with a broad, muscled chest, tawny fur, and the heavy muzzle of a lion. Leathery wings rested half-open behind him, and a thick tail ending in a curved barb lay near his feet. A manticore.

In my village, such beasts were known as the most dangerous of the Blighted Ones. Their venom could melt skin directly from bone, and their claws could rip a man apart in seconds.

But the moment he met my eyes, I knew. He was not just any monster. The energy radiating from him was the exact same soothing hum that crept into my chambers night after night.

“You’re the presence in my room,” I said, my voice sounding incredibly small in the vast quiet. “You live inside the asphodels.”

“In a way,” he replied. “My name is Skaros, and the flowers are a part of me.”

He shifted his weight, and the movement drew my eyes to the ground beneath him.

He was a prisoner. Thick vines coiled around his wrists, his waist, and the base of his wings, rooting him to the obsidian floor. He strained against them, muscles bunching, his jaw tight with effort. I stared at the bindings. They looked exactly like the stems the harvesters had worked so hard to destroy.