Permission Pt. 1
Mentions: @draconecastle
@daily-writing-challenge
TW: tree…gore? Implied SA, threats
The practicality of evil is a cruel calculus. There is no bargaining with it. To touch it, to entertain it even briefly, contaminates. When one gives evil permission, it takes root in the fetid soil of the soul.
For evil does not force itself, it asks for sanction. And to see the culmination of all his workings done, Tristan Black allowed evil to burrow deep into his soul.
He slid his gloved hand over the rough bark of the iron tree. “Mother,” Tristan murmured, “will you still say nothing? You must know what I mean to do. Would you not give a single word to escape my wrath?”
He waited for the golden glow of her eyes that had only ever opened for the Shadowglades. Her favored children, he thought with an ache so profound he could not breathe around it.
“Not one word to spare your children?” He whispered. “I will end them. Every last one of them,” he hissed in desperate threat.
When only the creak of her dying branches answered him, he despaired. Though Tristan was a breath away from his ambition, it was not truly what he desired. “Have I not been punished enough?”
Tristan paused to collect himself, his chest heaving. Well he remembered the last time he had done the terrible thing he was about to do. He opened his mouth to demand that she speak again, but soft footfalls stole his desire to attempt what was clearly futile.
Ahnariel had come as he’d commanded. Tristan would shelter her no longer. He couldn’t bear the soft, sad look she held in her eyes when she gazed at him. It felt like accusation. He would end this foolishness, disavow her of her soft notions and childish affection. She would know what they really were. What he was. And what he’d done.
He half turned away from her, long fingers curling around a long, narrow branch. It felt brittle, almost like it was hollow.
It would take several branches this time.
Tristan lifted the saw blade to the branch. Ahnariel made a strangled gasp.
“What are you doing to Mother?” She cried.
“I tried, you know. In the first centuries. I tried to save her,” he said, lip ticking up at the corner. “Nothing I did would open her eyes to me. And she stopped speaking a century ago. Of course…she never spoke to me. Just your…ancestors.”
The saw blade bit into the branch as he dragged it across it. Ahnariel cried and begged him to stop. He wouldn’t relent. Even when the gush of thick, dark red blood flowed from his sawing.
Tristan watched the understanding widen her eyes and drain her cheeks of color. Her lip trembled and she took a step back.
Ah, there it was. The limit of love.
“If…Mother can’t speak and doesn’t wake…” Ahnariel trailed off as the horror of her conception became plain to her.
Tristan smiled slowly and without pleasure. Blood spattered over his face as he separated the branch from the tree with a squelch and crunch of bone. “Do you love me still? Will you still call me father so sweetly?” He asked, thin amusement wrapped around his words.
He watched her mouth work silently. Her beautiful face twisted in grief and rage. She did not…or could not answer him. A tiny sliver, pain like a shard of glass, slipped into his heart. He looked at his sister with the sting of disappointment.
“I thought not,” he said smoothly.
“You’re a monster,” she whispered, tears sliding down her cheeks.
He hmm’d softly, though the sound was quickly lost to the wet sound of his sawing. “Yes,” he finally agreed. “And so are you.” Once he’d sawed through enough, he snapped the branch. The sharp crack made him flinch.
“Abomination though you surely are, you get all the gifts, don’t you?” He mused, not bothering to mask the bitterness. “Ascended form,” he spat. “Mortality.”
He grunted as he began to saw through a thicker branch. Just one more. “But not I. Trapped in pathetic flesh not even death frees me from.”
He stepped back and smeared the blood from his face. “For the crime of my birth. So yes. We are monsters. Because we come from monsters.”
He knew he had her compliance then. With sadistic pleasure, he watched her give permission to his evil words to fill her with poison. The root of all evil always begins with the self.
***
It pleased Tristan that the courier had not been beaten. He didn’t trust Dawnfire’s goons to have the wit to follow directions, so he was pleasantly surprised. He moved to stand before the bound man. He drew his fingertips along his jaw. The courier flinched, red eyes wide in revulsion and anger.
“You’re afraid, aren’t you?” Tristan asked the courier gently. He could hear Ahnarirl’s soft snuffling behind him. “You needn’t be. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He smiled down at the man but his dark gaze was unblinking and hollow. “But my generosity does have a price. I assure you…you can afford it.”
“I merely need your permission. For you to relax under my will and command. You needn’t worry about anything else. And after what needs to be done is done? You will be free with no memory of this.”
The courier lifted his chin, lips drawn back from pointed teeth. Tristan grinned. Like a mouse posturing, he thought.
“And if I refuse?” The courier said.
“Then you will have exhausted my generosity and I will slit your throat,” Tristan replied, leaning in close. So that the man could see the pleasure that fatal act would give him.
The courier had little choice. So when the icy, shadowy magic seeped into his brain, he didn’t resist. All the world melted away except for one desire.
Tristan emptied the courier’s mail bags and gathered the bloody branches and stuffed them inside. “It is remarkably difficult to get into Dracone Castle,” he said to Ahnariel as he tied the bags closed. “Any trace of us would mean immediate and painful death. But this man,” he gestured to the courier who stared ahead vacantly, “Voron Nightpath, has been bringing the mail to the Castle for many years. Why…the Dracones trust him so much that he’s allowed inside.”
“Won’t the Castle sense the…pieces of Mother?” Ahnariel asked, tone thin and reedy.
Tristan shook his head. “He is blind to her. She silences his magic. Even just these small ‘pieces’ of her.”
“Thst is how you mean to do it,” she breathed.
He inclined his head. “Yes. As I did it before. During the Scourge invasion. I had a different delivery method…but the result will be the same.”
“So…we strike after the courier delivers the branches?” Her tone was cool, logical. He even thought he heard a touch of admiration for his cleverness. But he saw no warmth in her gaze.
“It would be foolish to strike without drawing them out and taking a measure of them. Now,” Tristan said, wiping his hands in his thighs, “strip out of your pretty dress unless you wish to see it ruined. You will change your form and bear our courier closer to his destination. Then..you will draw them out.”
Ahnariel turned her back on him and he averted his gaze and listened to the rustle of fabric as she disrobed. He didn’t watch her go to the high balcony and jump. He only could bear to feel the coolness of the shadow of the massive dragon as it took to the sky.
