Blood curdled from the sea guard’s lips and a wound upon his side as he gripped Maanta tightly in his goliath fist. Bloody tears swept above the man’s eyelids and filtered off into the darkness of the room’s waters.
“I felt Evanshade’s eyes scavenging inside my mind as Nicholea told him all about our people and our world. Evanshade’s mind caged me in mine.” The guard’s eyes convulsed. “There were four of us there, enough guards to protect our Zhar and his family, enough to kill them. My fist lifted first, moving as if controlled by something beyond me, and clenched upon Nicholea’s throat. I could feel the base of his skull poke against my hand as it cracked like a shell in my fist, and yet his eyes still moved and he still managed to gurgle out to his family ‘swim.’
“Orachus, another guard, thrust a rod of iron in the Zharista’s spine and bent her backwards with his fists, cracking her in two. Orpan and Falink, the other two guards, broke off the children’s limbs before Nicholea as he wriggled for freedom in my grasp.
“My soul died as I watched my own hand forcing Nicholea to watch the death of his family. And then my left hand rose, clasping my sword, and swept through his neck, slicing it and beheading him with such force that the iron lodged through my armor and into my side. The decapitated body slumped as the head spun in the waters. I could feel Evanshade letting my mind free of his control, but somehow my body remained immobile to my command.
“The boy, Venge, then prodded us with a poison tipped spear, his eyes flickering as he did so. My mind slipped to darkness and the last thing I heard was Venge grinding his sharp, fanged teeth together to create a shrill noise like bone on a shale wall. They left us for dead, off possibly to pillage Cardonea Tower or Meridia itself, but I awoke.
“I formed the light of the chamber’s giant malta shell to draw someone here, to tell them this.”
“What?” Maanta asked, horrified.
“She never came to greet them and no-one mentioned her name so the foreign ones do not know.” The guard swung his hand toward a hole in the wall. “Out that window and off into another one close by, Meridia’s new Zharista, Anna, lives.”
The guard’s fist loosed Maanta and his body went limp, as if he had completed destiny and now could rest in the afterlife. As Maanta swept toward the window he looked back at the dead guard whose body had been used to mutilate his own Zhar. There in the murky, red darkness the bodies of eight others clung to the room’s corners as the limbs of the children floated past, limply in the current.