Milf harem of Serpen Chapter 27: Something you can’t stop

Chapter 27: Sothing you can’t stop

While they were all fighting, Jake was screaming.

He had not ant to start screaming. He had been managing — barely, by the thinnest margin of the word’s aning, but managing—until the cauldron’s pulse changed.

It had been slow at first.

The rhythmic contraction and expansion of the light, the deep orange warmth of it moving through the tendrils that held him, was sothing that was almost comfortable, almost the quality of heat on a cold morning, almost sothing he could have endured.

Then the pulse accelerated.

And the pain arrived.

He felt he was being devoured, continuously feeling the energy drain from his body.

It ca from his chest — not from his injured ribs, not from the cut on his palm, but from sowhere beneath both of those, sowhere that had no anatomical na because it was not an anatomical location.

It was a deep and central part of him. He could feel it pulling at him, sothing far more ancient than him.

Pulling.

He felt it as an extraction.

There was no better word. Sothing was being drawn out of him — not blood, not breath, not anything the body lost in ordinary violence — sothing older and stranger and more fundantal, and the losing of it was a pain that had no comparison in two lives’ worth of experience because nothing in either life had ever tried to take sothing that was this deeply his.

The veins appeared gradually.

He noticed them on his left arm first — dark, deep purple against his skin, spreading from his shoulder downward like frost spreading across glass, branching and dividing with the sa organic geotry. It wasn’t blood or bruises.

Sothing thicker, sothing that moved with a visible slowness through the vessels, as though whatever was happening to him had changed the nature of what ran through him.

From his chest — from the center of the pulling — a substance fell.

Thick and dark, the color of shadow given body, it descended from him in slow, heavy drops into the bowl below, and where it touched the glowing surface, it vanished, absorbed, and was consud by the cauldron’s patterns with a hunger that had no visible expression but was present in the way the light brightened slightly with each drop.

His essence.

That was what ca to his mind seeing the dark thick form of liquid.

He understood it without being told, with the bone-deep certainty of soone who had just been introduced to the thing they were losing by the experience of losing it.

The system was not responding.

He scread and scread again.

Maudlina heard it, the woman who ca with Ankerita. She was Ankerita’s older sister.

She heard it across the noise of the fight — across the clash of the iron-suited n pressing the eastern formation, across the specific percussive sounds of her own engagent with Bearfang, across Ankerita’s blade work and Eskar’s crossbow, and across the vast disorganized violence of two forces eting at a road-rest in a valley that had not asked to host any of this.

She heard it because she had been listening for it.

Her eyes went to the cauldron — to Jake suspended above it, to the dark veins spreading across his arms and throat, to the thick dark substance falling from his chest into the bowl — and sothing in her face shifted.

Not panic. Not fear. Sothing more contained than both, the expression of a woman who had known sothing was going to happen and had arrived too late to prevent the beginning of it and was now calculating how to prevent the rest.

"Bearfang!!" she shouts out loud.

"If that boy dies in the cauldron, you will have started sothing that nobody in this valley will survive, including your people."

His rhythm didn’t break.

But his eyes moved — involuntarily, the trained fighter’s reflex overridden for just a fraction of a second by sothing that lived underneath training.

They went to Jake. To the dark substance falling into the bowl.

To the cauldron’s pulse, which had accelerated again.

"That’s not my concern," he said.

But he said it one beat slower than he should have.

"It will be," Ankerita said.

The deep blue around her hands gathered — not a wave this ti, not outward, but inward, concentrating, compressing into a point at her palm that went from blue to sothing approaching white at its center, and the air around it stopped doing what air normally did.