Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 723: Hideous Things

Kaiden watched from his knees.

His body was still shaking from the Wrath’s withdrawal, his skin hot and wrong where the splits hadn’t fully closed, but his eyes were clear. Clear enough to see his mother standing between him and the three people who had just tried to kill him, and clear enough to see that the shadows pouring off her were moving with purpose.

Vespera looked at her children.

Selena had taken a half-step back. Cassian was on one knee beside Calix, one hand on his brother’s shoulder, both twins staring at the woman who had birthed them with the wide, unblinking focus of animals that understood they were no longer at the top of the food chain.

Vespera’s expression had not changed.

”I look at you,” she said, ”and I see my failure as a mother.”

Her voice was quiet. It carried across the ridge without effort.

”My failures have shaped you. What stands before me are beings I can no longer recognize.”

Her gaze moved across the three of them.

”Hideous things,” Vespera spat, ”masquerading in the bodies of my children.”

”You haven’t failed us, Mother!” Calix begged. ”You haven’t!”

Vespera looked at him. The void behind her eyes shifted, and for one moment Calix saw his mother in there, looking back.

”I am sorry, my children.”

Then the shadows moved.

They came from everywhere. From the stone beneath the twins’ knees, from the cracks in the ridge, from the darkness pooling at Vespera’s feet. They surged inward like a tide reversing, and the first wave hit the twins before either of them could stand.

Cassian threw his hand forward and his mana flared, a wild burst of raw energy that hit the shadows and vanished. Swallowed. The darkness ate it without slowing, the way a bonfire eats a match, and the next wave slammed into his chest and threw him backward across the ground.

Calix shouted. He pushed himself to his feet and his hands blazed with shaped mana, Flux energy crackling between his fingers, and he hurled it at the shadows closing around his brother. The blast detonated against the darkness and the light punched through for an instant, a hole in the black that showed the stone beneath.

The hole closed before the light faded from his retinas.

The twins looked at each other. The tether between them was dead. Their combined power had already failed against Kaiden, and Kaiden was their mother’s son, not their mother. The math was simple and the math was terrible. Both of them arrived at the same conclusion in the same heartbeat.

They ran.

Cassian hauled Calix upright and they bolted, scrambling across the broken stone toward the far edge of the ridge where the rock dropped away into the valley.

”Mother, please!” Calix’s voice cracked behind him as he ran. ”We didn’t mean - please!”

The shadows pooled ahead of them. The edge of the ridge went black, the ground vanishing beneath a layer of darkness so thick it looked like the mountain had ended and the void had begun. The twins skidded to a stop and turned to go right.

The shadows were there too.

Left, behind, every direction sealed, the darkness closing like a fist, and Cassian’s mana flared one more time in a wild, formless blast that hit the dark and disappeared without a sound.

”It was Father!” Cassian shouted toward Vespera. His voice was hoarse and climbing. ”He ordered us to do this! We were following his command!”

Vespera did not look at him.

The shadows caught their ankles.

The darkness wrapped around their legs and pulled, slow and patient, a pressure that was in no hurry. The twins clawed at the stone. Calix’s fingers left grooves in the rock as the shadows dragged him backward across the ridge. Cassian grabbed his brother’s arm and held on. It didn’t matter. The shadows were pulling both of them.

”Mother!” Calix screamed it this time, raw and desperate, his fingers scraping stone. ”Mother, I’m sorry! Please!”

They were dragged back to the center of the ridge, and the shadows pinned them there. Flat against the rock, arms spread, mana guttering and dying inside them because the darkness was pressing down on their cores with a weight that made breathing optional and casting impossible.

Vespera had not moved.

”We’re your children!” Cassian choked against the stone. His face was pressed sideways into the rock and the shadows were tightening across his back. ”You can’t- Father sent us! This was his plan! We didn’t want to...”

The shadows pressed harder. His voice cut out.

Selena stood alone.

The eldest Ashborn child watched her brothers pinned to the ground like insects and her face was white, but she hadn’t run. Her hands were raised, mana gathering at her fingertips, and the glow of it was brighter and sharper than the crescents she’d fired earlier. The light concentrated along invisible lines until her fingers trailed edges of mana so thin they disappeared when viewed from the side.

She cut.

The crescent that left her hand was nothing like the attacks she’d aimed at Kaiden’s team. It was a hair-thin line of white light that crossed the distance between her and the advancing shadows in less than a blink, and where it passed through the darkness, the darkness split.

The shadows peeled apart cleanly along the line of the cut, like fabric parting under a razor, and for one moment there was a gap in the darkness wide enough to see beneath it, the original color of the ridge visible for the first time since Vespera had arrived.

The gap closed before Selena could draw her next breath.

Selena cut again. Two crescents, then three, each one carving the darkness open in patterns that would have dismembered anything with a body. The shadows closed behind every cut before the light finished fading.

”Damn it!”

Selena cursed and cut faster. Her hands moved in sharp, clean arcs, each motion releasing a crescent that found its line and severed. She was good. She was better than good. The accuracy of her attacks was extraordinary, each cut finding the exact point of maximum disruption, and the shadows came apart beautifully under her edge.

And it did not matter.

The shadows filled back in behind every cut. Each wave was heavier than the last. Each new tendril of darkness that reached for her was thicker, denser, and Selena was breathing harder while Vespera hadn’t moved.

Then Vespera took a step forward.

The shadows tightened. They became more. The ambient pressure on the ridge increased as if the altitude had changed, and Selena’s next crescent cut through the dark and it closed over the wound before the light finished fading.

Another step. The shadows pressed inward from the sides, narrowing the space around Selena. Her crescents were coming faster now. Ragged. She was throwing them with both hands, each one precise and desperate, and the darkness swallowed them the way the sea swallows rain.

Vespera walked. Each footfall was silent against the rock, but the shadows surged with every step, and the world around Selena shrank.

Selena’s hands were shaking. Her mana was draining, each attack of her class, Severance, pulling from reserves that weren’t bottomless, and the shadows had no body she could cut down. They were an environment. She was trying to carve her way out of the sky.