Minotaur: Prayer: The Bestial Tribe

by Lucas, Naomi

  They shared a lingering look, and she steeled her nerves. She’d never cast a spell where her magic would be used for offence. Her abilities stemmed mostly from survival and defense. Now, she was anchoring her willpower to steal another’s.

  Astegur had been right. She had known it all along. Had known, if she fled, if she had gone with him to the mountains to the west, her mother would never follow them. She didn’t want to follow them, to flee. Her mother had no wants left in her life, except in that moment, many many years ago, when she’d fully become a thrall, she had wanted to die a human.

  A human, but mindless. She was only a thread more than a thrall could ever be. But it was enough to anchor a protection spell around Prayer and disguise Calavia’s humanity. It was enough that her mother still had blood to bleed.

  Calavia did not want to kill her, nor harm her, nor do anything that would take her mother out of her life, but she was beginning to understand that it may not be up to her. That perhaps her mother’s final emotions were the only ones that remained, and the small glimpses of emotion she saw were the ones she wanted to see.

  Her throat closed up as tears threatened to brim her eyes.

  She was beginning to realize that she wasn’t going to trade one life for another, she was choosing life over death.

  Calavia refused to look at her mother as she drew a circle with the wet willow growth, breathing a plea over it, its red chalk marring the stone where her wax used to be. If she looked at her mother, her tears would fall. Tears were not part of the spell. Grief would not help her now.

  She focused on the job at hand.

  First, the circle around her altar, with the widest part in front of it. Eternity, everlasting, and a homage to the moon hidden above her and the sun she had never truly seen. “Bind my will with willow, my magic with intention, and join with the curse we feed.”

  Calavia rose up from her knees and went back to the altar, picking up her weathered dagger sitting atop it. She moved back to her circle and scrapped the wax off her palms with her nails. When nothing but flakes remained on her skin, she sliced into her previous wound, reopening it. “Pure blood guard me, pure blood sustain, until the moment darkness falls forever and only tainted blood remains.” She walked around the circle, squeezing and dripping blood atop the willow.

  Astegur growled hungrily, somewhere out of her focus.

  When she was done, and with a sour taste in her mouth, she wiped her bloody hands into the folds of her dress. She went back to her altar and started the process of removing the last of her wax and placing it in the biggest bowl atop it. She melted the wax with her hands, letting it pull the rest of the blood it needed from her to strengthen it. A green aura rose up from the circle around her.

  The air swirled and thickened.

  She studied the green circle for a moment; it was a miniature version of the circle of protection that surrounded Prayer. She cupped her aching hand and felt her strength waver. How can I match my willpower with my mother’s? Did her will to live outmatch her mother’s will to perish?

  Tears threatened to unleash from her eyes. Calavia squeezed them shut and willed them away. I need to focus. Everything she knew about her abilities were from intuition, and her intuition had yet to be wrong.

  The screams of her mother, and the jeers of the centaurs, filled her ears, telling her otherwise.

  She straightened her back and met Astegur’s gaze from across the room. “Place my mother within the circle.”

  As he moved to do as she asked, she picked up her dagger and one of the bowls at her side. She flattened her aching hand above the vessel and gritted her teeth, adding another slice to her tender flesh to go with the first. She squeezed the new blood into the bowl, growing physically weaker by the second.

  Astegur placed her ravenous mother before her altar and stepped out of the circle, his hands twitching at his sides, as if holding the thrall made him ill.

  “Here,” she said, picking up the bowl as he moved to take his position by the door again.

  He stopped and turned to her, eyeing the shallow bowl of blood in her shaking hand.

  Calavia lifted it. “You said once you could defeat an army of centaurs if you were filled with pure blood.”

  He stomped to her side, right outside her circle, and took the offering. She watched him close his eyes and gulp the bowl’s contents down in one swallow. When he reopened them, they were black pits in his face, glimmering with the green of her magic. He licked his lips as his muscles bulged, and his veins stood out against his skin. Heat came off him in waves.

  Sweat beaded her brow.

  “Calavia,” he growled low and ominous under the cacophony of noise. “You are delicious.”

  He stood at the edge of her barrier like a towering demon on the verge of attacking. His breath and his heat penetrated her defenses, and she tried not to run from the frenzy building in his gaze. Astegur took a half-step toward her, smoke pouring from every one of his orifices. Fear for everything that was about to happen pooled in her gut.

  “Don’t,” she whispered, refusing to look at his giant bull’s cock erect and heavy between his legs.

  He snarled once. Then he took a step back, and then another, and after several chilling seconds, he prowled, bestial, back to the doorway.

  Calavia swallowed her unease, her sudden desire, and returned to her work.

  She moved around her altar, with her dagger in hand, wax and blood dripping down her fingers, and knelt at her mother’s side.

  “I tried to save you. I will always try and save you. You once told me love is the greatest magic of all, and all that love we feel should be given to those we honor and have faith in. I love you. I have faith in you. And above all, I honor you.” Calavia caressed her mother’s cheek. “But I can’t let you die.” Her mother jerked her head back and forth and screamed. “Not without killing myself.” Calavia drew her fingers away and clutched her dagger. “Let me unburden you.” She slid the edge of her blade under the reeds that bound her mother and cut them off, releasing her. “I wish you could understand me,” she ended on a whisper.

  Clawed hands snapped out, slicing at the space before her face. Calavia startled back, out of reach as her mother tore herself out of her remaining bonds. She saw Astegur out of the corner of her eye rush to her side.

  “Don’t,” she ordered, kicking her mother hard in the chest as she attacked her again.

  Astegur stopped.

  “I need to take her magic by force.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Astegur had never had so much freely offered blood in his life.

  His eyes glazed over with potent, intoxicating, euphoria. Calavia’s pure blood burst in rapture over his tongue, down his throat, only to settle in his belly where it swirled with his smoke, igniting it into flames. His pulse quickened, his muscles strained, and every fiber of his being vibrated with power. He wanted to lick Calavia’s wounds until she was clean from it. He wanted to devour her. I will devour her.

  But despite the rush that seized his soul, he could still see and understand what was happening around him with fierce clarity.

  The mists that always lingered around the edges fled, repelled by her humanity in a way he had not seen since his own mother, Amia, had fed her blood to the clan before battle.

  Through the haze of his vision, he watched Calavia release her mother. He moved to help her, but her command to stop him from intervening grounded his hooves to the spot. She kicked the thrall in the chest, sending it backwards, and to his surprise, she pounced on her mother before the thrall could rise off the ground.

  Calavia gripped her mother’s throat and screamed, “Give it to me!”

  Her mother screamed back incoherently and clawed at Calavia’s chest, ripping her garments to shreds. Fresh blood, tainted and pure, filled his nose as the two females fought for dominion like barghests.

  In horrid awe, he watched them, toppling one another, wrestling, wrenching, biting, each had a will of t
heir own. But neither one went for the killing blow. Calavia’s dagger remained at the edge of the circle, abandoned.

  What seemed like hours went by, and he couldn’t take his gaze off of the crazed scene, even after he realized the yells of the centaurs outside had died. They were all listening to the women, even those that could probably barely hear what was going on, were quiet.

  Astegur shook his head and swiped his eyes, just as the war cries outside returned to a crescendo, and the altar room had taken on a thick, mottled green aura.

  “The barriers!” Calavia yelled his way, wakening him further. “They’re falling!”

  Calavia’s mother grabbed Calavia’s hair at that moment and slammed his female’s head hard into the ground, knocking her slight form unconscious.

  Astegur roared just as the familiar thunder of hundreds of hooves pounded through his skull. The mother jumped up and came after him, limbs wild and rabid, but stopped suddenly at the edge of the circle, pressed against it. Her screams ripped his mind in two. He stumbled back, pulling his weapon from his belt, and sent one last glance at Calavia, who was slowly lifting her hand to her forehead, moaning.

  “Go,” she whispered without looking back at him. She began to rise.

  He raised his head in fury and breathed flames into the air. Turning his attention to the exit, he made his way to the front line.

  Astegur pushed through the thralls lingering in the hallway and to the barricade they put up blocking the temple entrance. The thick green aura of Calavia’s magic had beaten him to it, engulfing the smoky air from the bonfires that tainted it. The thundering grew with each step, and behind him, he could hear Calavia and her mother return to the fight.

  He did not have magic of his own. Not like some of his brothers who were born with traces of it from their mother, and he had never been so thankful and so furious for his lack until right then. When Calavia told him of her plan, he’d been dubious, but now—with her blood pumping through him in such a large quantity—he understood her loyalty to her family.

  He and his brothers had doomed their tribe when they left. They were their fiercest warriors, born leaders, honed with strength. They left because of treachery, because of their missing mother, without a backwards glance to the fates of their cousins and friends. But unlike Astegur and his brothers, Calavia refused to leave, refused to give up. It made him wonder, for the first time since he departed the deadlands, if his choice had been the right one.

  Not every bull of their first tribe was teaming with guilt. There had been innocents among them.

  And we left anyway.

  The thunder grew like a wave around him as he stopped before the barricade. It sucked up the air from his lungs and vibrated the ground. The vines along the walls shriveled up in fear to the cracked ceiling overhead. Dust flew up into the air around his hooves. Astegur cleared his head of his thoughts and leaned forward to look through a crack in the blockade.

  Not that far in the distance, right on the edges of the first broken huts and houses, were the centaurs, dozens of them side-by-side, with their weapons drawn, galloping in place where the barrier began to fade.

  Astegur tightened his grip on his axe.

  One burst through and rushed right into the high grasses and deeper water, where their bonfires could not reach, and stumbled forward with a yelp, tripping over the tied reeds within. It got up and fell again.

  Several more broke through immediately after and two quickly fell right into their traps. One made it halfway through the settlement before it, too, stumbled over the net of hidden reeds. It struggled back up and without picking up a gallop again, limped its way toward the temple.

  He had no idea how many more stumbled their way to Prayer’s center out of his sight.

  Astegur leaned back and heated the smoke deep within him, feeling it flame up with Calavia’s blood. He waited.

  He heard more cry out as the traps snared them, as the stakes slashed their skin and poisoned them with vilevine seeds, as more crashed to the ground, caught up in the deeper pools of water throughout Prayer.

  Thuds and pings sparked in his ears, the sound of arrows falling in waves against the temple façade and the haphazard barrier between him and his enemies. But he did not let them pull him out of his stance and break his focus. He had to survive and hold them off long enough to give Calavia a chance to take control of the barrier.

  And then a holler went up, followed by dozens more, and he peered out once again.

  Off to the side, a centaur draped in battlearmor the likes of which Astegur had never seen, made his way to the middle of Prayer with a flaming spear, and in his wake, burned everything in his path with it. The fire made the reeds and stakes around the centaur bubble and spark, removing the wax that coated them.

  Astegur growled and pulled away. He turned to the thralls on either side of him.

  “Blisterbark,” he ordered. “Whatever you can find, bring it to me. Quickly!” They jerked in action at his command.

  “Minotaur! Come out and face me!” a voice boomed.

  He ignored it as the first of the thralls arrived with the bark. He grabbed a clump and stuffed it along the sides of the barrier. As thralls arrived with more he ordered them to spread it across the stone floor and tie it to the vines still hanging along the passageway walls.

  “You fear me, bull spawn? Come show me this legendary strength your kind is supposed to possess!”

  Astegur glanced around and approached the barricade, shaking his head. He placed one hand at the bottom of a stack of crates and looked back at the thralls. “Do not let them through. Not one. Protect your witch,” he said, breathing hot and low before turning back to the crates.

  He shoved them aside just enough for him to step through. Reaching behind him, he pulled his secondary axe out of the strap across his back. He made his way through the debris littering the entrance and stepped out from the shadows of the temple and into the smoky light outside.

  “My name is Astegur Bathyr, slayer of centaurs and hero of the swamps. You have threatened my land, prepare to meet your demise!”

  Chapter Twenty

  Calavia glared at her mother from across the circle, her vision blurring and spinning with blood loss and exhaustion. She grabbed the edge of her altar to steady herself as she braced for another attack. But her mother was facing away from her, staring in the direction Astegur had gone, clawing at the replica of the protection barrier her daughter had erected to keep her trapped.

  Calavia didn’t want to hurt her mother, didn’t want to cause her any harm. In the back of her mind, she knew that her mother wouldn’t feel any pain, but it was still hard for her to accept that and use it to her advantage.

  She inhaled deeply, taking the moment for what it was—a gift.

  She couldn’t think about the sudden clash of weapons ringing through her temple, not without wanting to rush to Astegur’s side and break the spell she so painstakingly erected.

  “Mother?” she whispered, unsure if she would even hear her. But when her mother turned around to face her, Calavia knew she still had some power of persuasion over the thrall. Calavia took a step forward, wavering on her feet, suddenly feeling lightheaded. Then she took another, stopped, and waited. When her mother didn’t rush to attack her, several tears welled in her eyes.

  One more step and they were within reaching distance of each other. Calavia outspread her hands in an act of submission to the woman who birthed her.

  “I don’t want to fight anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. You once told me that you would do anything to keep me safe, anything.” She reached up to wipe her eyes. “I would do anything to keep you safe.” Calavia slowly moved her hands toward her mother and grasped her wrists, turning them to expose the jagged wounds her mother had inflicted upon herself days before. “I wish I knew how…”

  At the moment Calavia felt like the little girl she’d been so many endless years ago, afraid and confused, watching the one person who ca
red about her in her entire life wilt before her eyes. The memories of those days were ones she tried to bury deep, tried not to dwell on, but were always and often in the forefront of her mind despite her efforts.

  She let go of her mother’s wrists and pressed forward, hugging her as tight as she possibly could.

  “You must be strong, Calavia, and careful. The world is a dark place whether there is light or not. Men and beasts will want all that you have and more. They are ravenous for it. Ravenous for you.”

  “You must respect what you have and honor those who have given it to you. I thought magic was a sin, and that our God of light would purify me. Instead, he brutalized me and left me, left the entire village of Prayer for dead. The mist spared us, but like all things on this side of the world, it demands a sacrifice. My sacrifice. Our blood is the source of all powerful magic. Remember that, and one day, it will save your life.”

  “Every monster hungers for it, they want it inside them any way they can get it. They are the products of this cursed world, and they are desperate for what they cannot have...humanity. The amalgamations were denied that basic right. Whether it was our Sun God that had denied them such a gift or the curse, only time will tell. I believe...even Gods get tired.”

  “When I am gone, remember what I have taught you, girl. The walls around us let in creatures of the mist if they do not mean harm. I have learned a lot in the years since Prayer fell that I wished I had known before. Even though many creatures will try to eat you, or worse, breed you here, there is still kindness here, and strength of character. We live here, do we not?”

  Her mother’s words flooded through her head, and Calavia squeezed her eyes shut tight, shaking and holding onto her mother in a way she hadn’t in so long. It felt good and sad. Calavia pressed her face hard into the crook of her mother’s neck. But above all, it felt like a goodbye.

  “I love you,” she cried softly. “I love you so much.” She shook against her mother’s listless, unresponsive form. In the back of her mind, she knew her mother had died many years ago, back when she was still but a young girl struggling to survive in an empty place. But it wasn’t until Astegur arrived that she truly understood that existing wasn’t living. That remaining in stasis, because it was easier, was as good as being dead.