"Back off, panther," Danielle hissed at her, covering her girlfriend.
"Brother, you better keep your hands tight around your girl," River groaned. "That one has a terrible habit, and she's all but going for Hel."
He shrugged it off, "She can try. Hel is mine."
Agatta rolled her eyes, "And she's trying to break your bond. Who knows? Maybe I'll have a chance after she's done with you!"
I stiffened up, glaring at her, knowing that her words would be a total trigger to him. I don't want that to happen. I hate how vulnerable, and hurt he gets. It makes me want to cry. He needs reassurance? I'll give it.
"It has nothing to do with that. All of my decisions about this, has nothing to do with me wanting or not to be with Oliver. Don't let that fool you," I pointed at his ring. "I'm together with him, for as long as it lasts. Breaking the bond is a protection matter I'm trying to take for him, from what happens to everyone who gets entangled with me. I don't want him to go through that. Been there, done that, have no desire of going through it again."
Her eyes darkened, "What do you mean?"
Shall I be clearer?
"Death, of course. Those who get near me tend to die. Me having a mate? That will only put a bigger target on his back! And that's what I don't want. If I need to break out mating bond for him to be safe from this waving death flag, than fine. I'll do it even if it breaks me. I don't care about being broken, you can just look at my body and you will know that. After you go through that level of pain for too long, you get used to it, it becomes all you know, and it doesn't hurt anymore."
"It's like eating spicy food. At first it burns like hell. Nevertheless, the more you eat, the spicier it has to get for it to burn again. Those are the stages of twenty centuries. It got worse when I stopped crying and screaming and pleading and begging after the first one thousand years, around the time my hair turned silver," I held my curls up. "Meredith loved to hear me scream for my life," I grinned as viciously as I can, which is actually easy given that I am a serpent.
"She would do all sorts of things. Killing people was what managed to make me plead again, so, she began to do it monthly," I looked at my hands, seeing the blood on them, disgusted. "Wake up. Take the potion. Drink liters of alcohol to try numbing the control I had over my mind. Make me kill. Tie me up by my arms, waist, and wrists. Break my bones. Slash my skin. That's when she didn't make me shift, then she would torture me on my real form."
I partially shifted, letting my hand be covered in soft scales.
"I was entirely of black scales once, a long, long time ago, but I spent such a long time in the emerald coffin, that my body happened to absorb some of it, and it caused a mutation that made emerald scales appear on me every here and there. She had special shackles for my serpentine body. There are still soft scars of it under my scales, I can feel it, but the scales cover it."
"She would also skin me alive, not just in my normal body, which was fine, but in my serpent one, after she took my scales away. Saying that it was fine to do it, because snakes shed the skin. But I am not a bloody snake, and this is different for my kind. We heal and regenerate, but we don't shed, no winged-serpents does. She also collected my poison and used to break my fangs constantly."
All the vampires of the Circle flinched, which is expected, given how taking the fags of a vampire can be deadly for them.
"As I said, she did all kinds of thing. She was creative, for sure. I used to be both scared shitless and possessively angry at her. She did do a job on my mom worthy of the worst kind of horror movie, and that kind of thing is hard to forget when you are a little child. My mom was the strongest person I knew, seeing that happen to her, destroyed me. She has already promised me she would do the very same to anyone I came to care about, and my mate will definitely be on the top of the list."
"If she gets him, she'll get me again. She thinks I'm under her now, as I played the submissive, and give her narcissistic nature, she believed in me. Terrible decision," I scoffed. "She killed Naël because he had the vision of her fall, and she's terrified. There was a black winged serpent in it, as that is me." Sigh, "She killed him for it, on the very crypt I was locked on years later. That's why I was able to get in touch with him. He told me to get to mom's lair, gather all the money, the clothes, and the weapons. He told me to find Abellona, which got me the magical tattoos. He told me to come to the Academy in the north pole, which got me in here."
"What did he… what did he say exactly?" Ivar asked.
Sitting down on the clean ground, I looked at my hands.
"He had a vision that she would lose the favor of the Triple Goddess and her reign would come to an end as she would befall by the hands of the one that controls the very energy of the universe. In his vision, she would be stripped of what made her a dragon, as well as of her powers, and then her soul would be poisoned and cursed to never reincarnate and she would be murdered."
"That gave me the hope I needed to gather my shite and hold onto my dear life. Hope that I would leave that place and find this person with the overwhelming power I've never heard off, get them on my side and help them kill her. Which was hopeful, as he said I would play a part in it, and that this 'savior', would gather the most powerful people with the strongest special abilities of the new generations of supernatural races to get to the end where they kill her."
"Naël told me not to lose my will to fight, not to lose hope, and assured me that I would leave the crypt in the future, but that before that happened, I should take advantage of all the training I would get (which confused the shite out of me, since it was more than a thousand years before Cosmos came into the picture). He wished me the best of luck, and told me to find Abellona Thygesen after I left my lair, and to go to the Academy in the North Pole afterwards." I let out a long sigh.
"We talked for a year, but then he never said a word again. I missed the contact in the centuries that followed, but I held onto every word he told me, believing that he knew the best. I repeated everything to myself over and over again during the time Meredith wasn't around. Afraid to forget any detail. Patiently waiting for the day I would be released of the damned suffocating emerald coffin. While a part of me repeated everything, over and over again. The other part of my brain kept counting the minutes, hours, days until her next visit. Tracking how long I had been suffering. Aging mentally, but still frozen in a 7-year-old body thanks to the stasis."
Chuckling bitterly, I passed my hand on my hair, "That got me here. When I met mom's spirit, I had no idea what I could actually do with that power, since I hid it from both Meredith and Cosmos. And when she got all corporeal, it scared the shite out of me, and I broke, because I had no idea I would ever be able to… touch her again," with my now dirty hands. "To feel her, and I did, it felt bloody fucking real. She told me so much stuff I had no idea off."
"You were in… Everest, before you came here?" Rio asked.
"Yes!" I said matter-of-factly. "Again, that's where our lair is."
Irene gasped, "You casually go up the biggest mountain on earth?"
I blinked, "Oh? No. Cosmos dearest, opened a portal right above the mountain and threw me there, since he only passed around there while flying, that's as far as he went, thus, as far as he could help me. I fell for about ten minutes," I chucked, "then I got my shite together and went to the lair. Again, I lived there, Irene. It was my home. The only home I've ever had."
"Awesome," Igor and Dimitry grinned.
"I never knew the grandiosity of that place for people. To me it was always mom's ancestral family territory," I licked my fangs. "Now I know why that was. She did come from a bond between a dragon and a black winged-serpent after all."
It took them a second to understand.
"You mean that your… place, the one of your race, is in Everest?" Noah asked, a hand in Elsa's waist.
"Can I tell them?" My mate asked me.
I gulped, "Oli, are you sure this is a good idea?"
Sigh, "I know you're still kind of against it, but I think it is."
After some second, I let out a sigh, "Fine, I'll go with you on this. But they won't be coming with us. And if any of them leak to anyone, even family, what is said here. I'll murder them for real."
"Thank you, babe," he turned to the others. "You've all heard her, don't ask for me to calm her fury if you mess up. Now, Noah, her territory it is not in Everest," Oliver corrected. "It's above the skies over the Everest mountain. ESC stands for Emerald Sky City for a reason. The Royal Capital of the Winged Serpents Kingdom, Hel's Court," he came to me and got me up from the ground, than passed a hand on my arse to clean any dust, and surrounded my waist with his arm. "We may all be Princes and Princesses, but Hel is a Queen," he dropped. "Literally a Queen. The ring in her finger is the Royal ring of her great-something grandfather."
"King Umbra Rune Miralanthor. Black winged serpents are royalty and the strongest out of all seven types. Yellow, red, blue, green, purple, and white winged serpents, all were like the Grand Dukes and Duchess of our Courts. They answered to the wielder of the Crown of Chaos with the most respect, and only the ones who can channel the energy of chaos itself could wear the crown. That stands solely for black winged serpents," then he pointed to my covered back. "Hel is one."