“Ru—”

The room exploded. I screamed in fury as the magick pummeled through me, taking and taking and taking. More demons died, and the magick swelled.

Yes! Yes! More!

I let the magick guide my steps, descending deeper into the mountain as I went down. Down one spiraling staircase after another and through pitch black corridors. I felt an odd tugging in my chest, a purpose that wouldn’t be ignored. I stopped, realizing where I was.

The witches.

They screamed before me, even as the demons crouched over them stilled in confusion, then fear. The witches’ pain and fear was a tangible force in the air, tangy with terror and sweetened with their sobs. A flick of my wrist ignited every demon, and I gathered their deaths and pain to my breast as I would a child.

Children.

The witches kept screaming, unable to process what was happening. I closed my eyes, searching for more of the terrible, white power. I found it and disappeared.

I was deep underground, though it could more accurately be called a cavern, completely dark except for the white light in the center of the room, emanating from a deep hole in the ground. A feeling of such wrongness crept forth from it, that’s when I looked around at the rest of the room, my face going deathly pale.

Bassinets lined the cave walls, creating a semi-circle around the massive hole. I rushed to the first one I saw, surprised to find a wide-eyed baby staring back at me. I drew back, flinching at the prominent bones, the large, vacant eyes, and the thin skin stretched like paper. The baby looked like a living skeleton. My hands shaking, I reached for him.

“I knew you’d come here.”

I twisted around, Severn behind me as he held a pregnant witch by her throat. Her skin was dark, but her eyes gleamed with awareness and hate. I snatched the witch’s suffering, her pain, and added it to the growing pressure inside my chest. I hurled it at Severn like a spear. He hissed and dodged, crouching by the woman’s neck. It took him only a moment to reach over and slit her neck.

Black rage funneled forth from me, burning out the white magick in my veins as it roared to break free. Severn used the same knife and stabbed down in the witch’s abdomen; her mouth frozen in a rictus of agony as she drowned in her own blood. He reached down into her body and pulled the child out, a skinny-looking creature with dark skin and red eyes. His child.

The witch’s eyes found mine, and she mouthed her final words.

Kill it.

She died, and Severn laughed as he soaked in her death, gathering the magick to him for a final blow against me. I snarled and pushed back, feeling a swell of darkness within me that begged for justice, for vengeance. Severn dangled the child from one leg in front of me, daring me. The witch’s last words echoed in my head, and I hesitated. Severn laughed, dangling the baby from his ankles. The child screamed her defiance to the world, her face red and still covered in fluid from her mother’s murder. Severn laughed at her, holding her up level to his face.