Chapter 12 - Snapped

Kai's lips burned as if they'd been touched by acid. 

Something in him that had already been drawn tight -as tight as it would go- snapped. The black pool rippled and rippled and rippled and then it started boiling like a pool of heated tar. Black bubbles surfaced and popped noisily. 

This rage that was coming over him was different. It had no name by which to describe its intensity; hot and burning like solar flare. It was all-consuming, wiping out every other emotion in its way until he was a seething mass of hatred and anger. Insult after insult, humiliation after humiliation he'd endured from his detestable captor. No more. 

No more!

He wiped his mouth with the back of a surprisingly steady hand, then lowered it to reveal his face contorted into an expression of absolute disgust. 

Slowly, he rose from the ground, never taking his eyes off Marius, who stared back at him with a face wiped of any emotions. No smug satisfaction or mocking stare. 

If Kai wasn't so riled, he would have noticed something rarely seen: the King of Nostraza was dazed. 

Kai was the first to break eye contact, though it was not because he'd lost his gut. On the contrary. His eyes flew to the runes drawn on the metal bars. He cast a nonverbal command Erasmus had taught him. Their purple glow turned to ominous red. 

The air inside the cell sizzled and crackled. 

A sound almost like the humming of a great machine filled the dungeon. 

Marius's hair started to stand on edge, rising visibly. 

And then he was electrified. 

Kai's glowing green eyes reflected the crackling light produced by millions and millions of voltage coursing through the Black King's body. 

He relished the sight. He savored it. 

Marius clenched his teeth together until the muscles in his jaw nearly popped. His iron mask finally -finally!- cracked to reveal a glimpse of his suffering. Kai wanted for it to slip off completely; so he could see true pain, see the great king vulnerable and exposed as he'd once been exposed in front of a crowd of leering, disdainful mermen and mermaids. 

He wanted to hear him scream. 

So he amped the voltage. The runes now glowed crimson. The air in the entire dungeon became charged. 

Goosebumps erupted across Kai's skin and the tiny hairs scattered across his body stood alert. 

Only he knew what was coming. 

A dark aura descended upon the half-blood prince. His face darkened like the stormy clouds that appeared over the Black Sea in the rainy season; dreadful, ominous, rumbling, alarming. 

His own mother wouldn't have recognized him at that moment. 

"Kneel." Kai said in a voice so low, others would have strained their ears to hear. 

But Marius, despite his current ordeal, heard the insolent command just fine. 

He blocked the horrific pain of being electrified and concentrated on keeping his muscles from giving in. A lesser merman would have been lying unconscious on the ground right now. 

"Kneel." Kai repeated forcefully, imbuing the command with his own sinister magic, and it was like a hundred men had spoken at once, voices overlaying and echoing in the dungeon. 

Once, Kai had been reluctant -unwilling even- to learn what powerful and often dark knowledge the Spirit willingly and repeatedly offered at first, but as the days stretched into weeks, and then months, he became restless. Day in, night out, he worried over Hakan being kept captive in Nostraza. The thought of them harming his dearest friend in the worst ways imaginable nearly drove him mad. His friend was, like the people of the Black Sea, proud and often rigid. He could only bear so much before he was broken. 

What if that tentacle monster...

So he'd taken what the Spirit of the Sea had given, good and... questionable. 

This was the questionable part. 

The Voice. 

When the Spirit had demonstrated it upon a sea creature, commanding a dolphin to dance for him, Kai was beyond amazed. Much to his surprise, commanding sea creatures had come naturally to him. That and the sea life seemed almost happy to obey him. But humans and mermen had proved and continued to prove to be the true challenge, with their fickleness and individualism and their natural tendency to disobey at every turn. 

It was difficult and arduous on his mind. Nothing had taxed him, body and soul, quite as much. It was nosebleed after nosebleed the first month, and then it was the endless shaking the next. Until finally he'd commanded a servant of Erasmus to close the door. But a servant was paid to obey, so he wasn't sure if it was his magic that did it. So he went looking for Elliam, Erasmus's apprentice. 

Like the dolphin, he made him dance. 

He'd finally mastered the valuable power. To command anyone he wanted and force them to do his bidding against their will was a rather sadistic power, and it seemed cruel and ruthless to him at first, but he realized the need for it. If he couldn't beat Marius in the battlefield, he'd break his mind and bend it to his will. 

Yet he was never truly sure if it would work on someone of Marius's caliber. 

Marius regarded Kai through murderous eyes as he realized the command he'd just dared to give him wasn't simply a spoken word. It was the Voice. Forbidden and forgotten sorcery. 

How dare he. How dare he. How dare he command the King of Nostraza!

A mere half-breed sought to bring him to his knees? Preposterous. The absurdity of the whole situation nearly made him laugh. But his outrage overpowered his sense of humor. 

He resisted. Even as electricity burned through his veins like fire, setting ablaze every nerve ending, he resisted the abrupt manufactured need to buckle his knees and lower them to the ground with all his might. 

It proved to be a monumental feat. 

"Kneel!" The walls shook, rubble and dust raining from the old, cracked ceiling. 

Marius would never kneel.