Chapter Text
He doesn’t know how long he’s been in the Ossuary. Days, he thinks. A shark—the one with the blighted fin, black tendrils starting to creep up its gills now—swims by for the (he checks the tally on the walls, etched there with rusty red streaks) eight-hundred-and-fourth time. No, it must have been months at least; the shark had been injured in the same attack that had led to his own capture, a lifetime ago. But not yet years, for the shark still lives, and for now so does Lucanis. He knows that it won’t be long for either of them, and he prays to whoever may be listening that the end is swift, that he has earned the clean death he has always tried to grant his marks.
The shark peers balefully at him through the wards that keep the sea out and the prisoners in, giving the boundary a wide berth; it had learned somewhere around the thirtieth time that brushing against the wards meant pain, magic discharging with a sharp crack. It must have taken Lucanis hurling himself against the barriers thousands of times to learn this same lesson; unlike the shark, he is human, and for better or for worse he clings to hope—a small, many-feathered thing that refuses to die.
There is another thing with feathers that lives within him, and it is called Spite.
Spite knows that to touch the wards hurts Lucanis, hurts Spite, even. And yet every time Lucanis comes back into himself, disoriented from the possession yet oddly rested from the much-needed slumber, it is clear to him from the fresh burns littering his body that Spite has continued to try to breach the enchantments—out of…spite, he’d guess. Uselessly, hopelessly, Spite has persisted, and Lucanis wonders if that’s not the truest definition of the demon’s name.
He’d thought before this that only mages could become abominations. He’d been worried that the experiments might twist Spite into something darker. Malice, perhaps, or hatred, some kind of demon that would gladly tear his humanity to shreds from the inside out. This has not, so far, come to pass, and he is vaguely grateful that it is “only” a spite demon that now shares his body, one whose nature is merely to seethe and defy.
If Lucanis is honest with himself (he tries not to be—it makes his head spin and his eyes itch, though that last bit is perhaps just the instability of the Fade), none of this is entirely new to him. This underwater prison is not so different from the gilded cage he’s been kept in all his life. Spite is nothing he hasn’t felt before. The pretenses have simply been stripped away.
And so he sits, staring out into the dim-blue murk of the Ossuary’s depths, waiting. There is nothing else to do. Not while his hands are bound in shackles that weigh as much as he does and etched in runes he can’t begin to decipher. Not while Spite slumbers, a faint, venomous heat curled around his ribs like a smoldering coal. The darkness has crept into his mind as thickly as the sea presses against the walls of his prison, and some days he wonders if it’s only Spite that’s keeping his heart beating, a steady pulse that refuses to surrender even to despair. Or perhaps Spite and despair are the same, tangled together in his soul.
There are whispers, sometimes, beneath the grind of his own mind and the ward-hum of the walls. Words that slither, half-formed and unsettling, scraping across his thoughts with voices that aren’t his own. Lucanis doesn’t know if they belong to the Ossuary, or to the ancient sea pressing against the glass, or to something even older, lurking in the dark beyond. They never coalesce into anything solid, but they leave his skin prickling with a chill that runs deep, as though whatever lies out there knows his name, his crimes, his every fear.
On occasion, the bones piled along the floor shift, bleached skeletons stirring like dead leaves in a phantom breeze. Some nights he sees them standing, half-fleshed, in the corners of his vision—figures he’s killed, ghosts that linger, nameless soldiers with hollow eyes watching him from the edges of his sight. They don’t say anything, though he feels them beckon, drawing him toward the edge, toward surrender. And he is tempted, sometimes, just to let go. To let the bones pull him under, sink into the endless dark and let it swallow him whole.
But Spite would never allow it. Spite curls tighter, spiny tendrils tightening around his heart like thorns. Lucanis can almost hear its laughter, dry as dead leaves, an echo of his own voice but twisted and dark, reminding him that he still has one task left: survival. It’s a commandment Spite repeats often, whether Lucanis is listening or not, a constant whisper at the back of his mind.
You live because it defies them. You live because it offends them.
He reaches for the wall and marks another tally in blood.