Leybound Chapter Forty-Nine | One Eye

“Shh, lad, it's okay,” Riot said, gripping the young soldier's hand and feeling the strength leave it as he died.

“You should not have brought him here Riot, though he died well,” Price said. 

Riot waited for the rage but it didn’t come. Instead he felt a cold certainty, perhaps that was better. “You’ll die hard.”

“I hope so. I have a new blade, Riot; what do you think? A gift from Myam-tal. I thought that they might take everything from me, but now you see that I am made whole and you are broken. Natalia didn’t take much convincing to betray you either; she brought you right to me.” 

"No, Price, she brought me to you,” Riot hissed.

Their swords met, and Riot felt his own blade's weakness immediately. Price's sword was at least a yard long. In Price’s hands, it should have been devastating, but he laboured the blade, clearly more used to the lighter sabres carried by the officers. 

Riot pressed his advantage, feinting and trying to slip inside Price’s guard as the leybound grunted with the effort of moving the heavy blade. But no matter what Riot did, he couldn’t break through Price's defense. 

But the warning screamed in his head, and he remembered the body of the brute in the damp farmhouse basement, and how Price had driven a rusted sword halfway through his body. With a cry of triumph, Price flicked the blade up as if it were as light as a rapier and scored a deep slash down riots face that cut down to his cheekbone.

Riot staggered backward, the pain searing through his face. 

“I wanted to mutilate you, Riot, as you mutilated me. I thought to burn out your eyes all along the long road through the hills.” 

Price walked calmly forward. He looked at home in this mansion. Riot only had his cheap blade, and it wouldn’t take much more damage before it shattered. Riot retreated, taking careful steps backward while Price advanced, walking as calmly as if he were taking a stroll in the gardens. 

“Quinn told me all about you. The last man. I think she genuinely likes you, you know. But you can never be sure; the Wikkan traits rub off easily. Perhaps she bonded you to her on purpose so that she could manipulate you? You do have something of a faithful hound about you.” 

Riot's heel bumped up against the body of Norton, and he bent and felt around for the boy's dropped blade, all the while keeping his eyes on Price. 

“I’m really getting sick of hearing you talk, Price.” 

Riot closed the distance quickly and set to work with the two swords, twisting, blocking, and jabbing with them. He unleashed an overhand blow that shattered one of the swords on Price's blade. Half a foot of jagged metal remained attached to the hilt, and he raked it along Price's leg, blood welling out through the ripped fabric. Price didn’t even flinch, twisting his sword and hooking Riots out of his hand, sending it clattering to the floor. 

Price stepped back with a great bark of laughter. “I see how you survived when others could not. Is it true you killed Alric Rook?”

Riot faltered then. The laughter was gone from Price's face; there was only a cold determination. Much like Quinn when he pressed her about her past. Something that bordered on obsession. 

“What was he, your long-lost father or something?” 

Price let the leypower flood his forearms, the dirty light dripping from his fingers, leaving black streaks. “Alric Rook did this to me.” 

Price brought his hands together and crushed the leypower, and Riot ran out of the room, hurtling through the doorway as it was struck and splintered wood exploded behind him. He pounded down one of the long corridors, unhooked an ancient halberd from the wall, and continued running, bursting out onto a vast terrace with sweeping views of the city, the tower looming over everything. 

Riot readied himself as Price emerged from the mansion, his hands bursting with ley power. The charge flew through the air and buried itself in Riot's flank, and he roared and blocked out the pain, charging forward with the halberd. 

Price drew his sword and tried to block it, but Riot held three yards of halberd and he lunged forward, burying the blade into Price’s thigh.

Riot twisted the blade free of the flesh and hammered the long blade of the halberd down on Prices sword arm, slicing to the bone so that his sword fell from his grasp. 

Riot took a shaking step, and his strength failed him, and he fell to one knee. Hot blood dripped from the wound in his gut, hitting the floor in a pitter-patter of droplets. Blood pooled in his mouth, and his face felt like it was on fire. 

He heard the scrape as Price recovered his sword and the unsteady footsteps as he limped forward. “You killed Alric Rook for me, and you fought well, Riot, so I’m not going to kill you. We are alike, you and I, and I want you to see the world as I see it. Now stay still; if you move, I cannot promise I will only take one eye.” 

Riot could feel his vision swimming as the blood tricked down his face and through the fingers of the hand that he held clamped to his gut. He mumbled, the words bleeding together.

“What did you say?” Price asked, leaning in.

“I’m nothing like you,” Riot rasped, grabbing hold of the front of Price’s uniform.

The greasy barrier that Sumner Nixton had placed over the hedron scar on Riots hand resisted his will for a moment before it was wiped away. The ley power in Riot’s body surged out of the hedron scar and blasted Price backwards, and he fell with a sickening crunch onto the hard floor ten feet away. 

But for Riot, the pain continued as the ley power that had built up in his body poured out and his hand began to blacken and burn. 

Pounding footsteps echoed in his consciousness, and hands wrapped around his, and a new thin barrier slid into place. 

“I won’t let you die just yet, Sergeant Riot,” Moran said. 

“Moran, Quinn has the hedron. She’s going to destroy the tower.” Riot knew he said the words, but they sounded like they came from far away. 

“I know, sergeant. Any moment now, I should imagine.”

The tower had stood for millennia, made of arts mastered and lost long before living memory. It had stood as a symbol of power and strength, and then after the great deception of Sumner Nixton, as a place of fear and torment. 

The explosion blew out the tower base and the fortress like structure around it, flattening the nearby abandoned houses. The tower groaned, swaying to and fro, before with a great rending and grinding of stone, it collapsed, sending a shudder through the city.