The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 15: Chapter 14 — Short Rest

Read chapter 15 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Chapter 14 — Short Rest The sun came up. Yara didn't care what time it was. The Gem counted hours differently now—by hunger, not by light. She walked through the ruins. The Scion moved beside her. The Horror limped behind, still learning how to use its wrong-jointed legs. The three of them made no sound. The scar on her palm pulsed. Once. Twice. Matching the beat in her chest that wasn't entirely hers anymore. She could feel heartbeats nearby. Alive people. The Gem noticed them the way a dog notices rabbits. She'd come looking for supplies. Medicine. Something to justify being out here. That wasn't why she was walking anymore. She found three scavengers under a broken awning, trying to start a fire with damp tinder. They looked up when her shadow crossed them. Saw the Scion. Saw what she'd become. One reached for a knife. The Scion moved. The man went down under its weight. Bones cracked. He stopped moving. The second one ran. The Horror caught him. There were sounds. Then there weren't. The third dropped his knife and raised his hands. "Please—I didn't—we were just trying to stay warm—" Yara lifted her palm. The green light gathered there, warm and ready. She didn't feel anything. No anger. No guilt. Just the hunger, and the knowledge that this would make it stop for a little while. The blast caught him in the chest. He fell. The Gem drank. Heat flooded through her—not her heat, the warmth stolen from three lives that had been breathing moments ago. It filled the hollow in her ribs. Made her legs steady. Pushed back the exhaustion that had been crushing her since the temple. She stood there, looking at the bodies. Three men who'd been trying to start a fire. She should feel something. Horror, maybe. Regret. She felt relief. That was worse than feeling nothing. The Scion nosed at one of the corpses, checking if there was anything left to take. There wasn't. The Gem had been thorough. The bodies looked like the ones by the temple—drained, sunken, used up. "We need more," she said. Her voice sounded flat in her own ears. Matter-of-fact. The Horror chittered agreement. She turned and kept walking. Looking for the next ones. The next heartbeats. The next feeding. This is what she was now. This is what the choice had made her. She'd stopped trying to find the right targets. Stopped looking for people who deserved it. The Gem didn't care about deserving, and she was too tired to pretend she did either. Just survival. Just feeding. Just one foot in front of the other until the hunger came back and she had to do it again. Monster. The word sat in her head, simple and true. She didn't argue with it anymore. Yara found a spot on a broken shop awning and stayed there. Let the Scion and the Horror do the work. At first she'd tried to control it. Aimed carefully. Tried to make the deaths quick. That lasted maybe an hour. Then she realized she was wasting energy moving when she could just point and fire. The Scion killed anything that came close. Claws. Teeth. Weight. Fast and thorough. The Horror was messier—biting things, dragging them, sometimes playing with them before finishing. She stopped trying to correct it. What was the point? They found goblins in the alleys. Dogs gone feral, feeding on corpses. A few wargs that had scattered from the army. Street scavengers hiding in cellars. The Scion crushed them. The Horror tore them apart. Yara blasted anyone who ran. The Gem drank it all the same. That was the part that stuck. Goblin or human, child or adult, soldier or scavenger—the Gem didn't care. It just wanted the life in them. Wanted it burning so it could drink the heat. She'd thought there'd be a difference. That taking a monster would feel different than taking a person. It didn't. They all fed the same. All made the hollow in her chest recede for a few hours. So she stopped making distinctions. Movement meant food. Heartbeat meant fuel. That was the math now. She moved through the city in a pattern. Find a good vantage point. Wait