His friend flashed with him to the cool underground caves beneath his palace grounds and deposited him into the cold cavern waters. With a sense of shock, he noted the sizzling hiss and the wispy smoke rising around him. He sank deep, allowing the water to close over his head, and he stayed there for several minutes until it was necessary to breathe.
When he rose, Acheron was lowered onto his haunches, staring into the water, his multi-hued eyes of green, blue, and gold, cold and watchful.
"There are black inks of gold, blue, and green painted all over your chest and arms. And your flames…it is melding with a black chakra."
Gavyn glanced down. “The cursed marks.”
He felt his friend’s worry and curiosity sharper than he'd ever sense any emotions. They had a bitter yet sweet flavor to them, and he tipped his head to the ceiling of the caves and inhaled deep. A pleasure rush hit Gavyn's gut, and the snarl that slipped from him resounded in the cave. He felt out of control, fevered, and hungry. Except he did not know for what he craved.
Xian.
Memories of her sultry taste, her husky laugh, the sweet clasp of her pussy ghosted over his cock and increased his hunger a hundred-fold.
"The marks are expanding," Acheron murmured. "Your eyes are pure black, except for a pinpoint of flame atop your iris. What is going on my friend?"
Power hummed in the air, and Acheron’s waist length silver-white hair crackled with energy, as the power of the warlord inside of him roused.
“I am like you,” Gavyn rasped, trying to breathe through the fire twisting through his insides. “I’ve known it for almost four hundred years.”
Acheron was a melting pot of breeds, being part necromancer warlord, part Serangite, part Nurian. It made him an outcast in many circles but a powerful ally of Nuria, the only part of his twisted origins which had claimed him with open arms.
Acheron frowned, and shrewd calculation shifted through his eyes. “Know what?”
“I am a half-blood.” He snarled, slapping a palm to his forehead as splinters of pain stabbed inside his mind, and heat burst through him in a fiery wave. “I kissed her…made love to her, tasted her chakra, watched her rode away with him…and since then…since then something is wrong.”
His back bowed as pain writhed inside of him. He screamed, and fire poured from his throat and washed through the cavern. It disappeared as if sucked into a vacuum, and he glanced up to see that it was Acheron who had taken control of the flames and had contracted them into a small spinning ball which he sent deep underneath the waters.
“I must summon the healers,” Acheron clipped, his eyes glowing with worry.
“No,” Gavyn said, gripping the stone edge and dragging himself from the water. “Get Tehdra.”
Crawling, he laboriously pushed from the waters and dragged himself along the cold, stone floor.
Acheron closed his eyes. "That is the darkness I always have sense," he murmured. "You are a Darkan mongrel."
A cold rasp of laughter jerked through his frame. “That I am. And I am about to betray the only home I’ve ever known.”
“Xian,” Acheron said with a slight smile. “She is your mate.”
“I only know she is my reason for being, and I must go for her.” Something unrecognizable inside of him hungered for her, and somewhere unfamiliar inside burned with the unrelenting need to be by her side.
And damn the consequences.
He felt the sun slipped behind the mountains, and shadows seemed to creep along the floor of the caves and its walls. Gavyn realized the shadows stretched from him
like tentacles. Something monstrous prowled in the dark recess of his heart, and a furious hunger pounded through him.
His back bowed, and a roar of torment slipped from him and resound through his palace. Since he'd discovered his dark origins, his honor and loyalty had been the crutch he relied on to resist the dark powers it offered in his dreams. Another scorching wave pummelled his body, and he twisted and convulsed as if invisible arms turned him about on the floor. A crack echoed, and icy agony danced up his spine.
“King’s teeth,” Acheron breathed hoarsely. “Wings are sporting from your back.”
His bones cracked and twisted, and Gavyn burned from the insides, and he writhed and scream from the pain that gave him no relief.
“I am shifting,” Gavyn said hoarsely, primal knowledge settling deep into his bones.
“Darkans do not shift.”
But I am.