Chapter 53: I Became Human?

"So what is the antidote?" he demanded, grabbing Wight’s gray shoulder—or rather, sinking his hand through his skeletal ash frame until his knuckles hit cold air. "There’s an antidote, right? A counter-toxin? A tincture of belladonna and salted iron? Tell me what cures a Veil-Siphon infestation before I tear this room apart stone by stone!"

Wight slowly turned his skull toward him. His hollow sockets flickered with twin pinpricks of icy white light, looking unimpressed by his unraveling sanity.

"You have already ingested the antidote, Raice," the entity rasped.

He froze.

A violent flare of hope surged through his battered ribcage. "I did? When? Was it the anti-venom root I crushed into my arm?"

"No," Wight said, leaning back. "The text is quite explicit. The Veil-Siphon toxin subsides only when the host satisfies the specific subconscious desire that sparked the fever. You touched her. You tasted her skin. You satisfied the craving."

The room went so quiet you could have heard a cobweb tear.

He stood there with his mouth slightly open, and his brain completely stalling out for the fourth time in ten minutes.

"I... what?" he squeaked.

"You satisfied the desire! That means the kissing was the medicine, master! You were just taking your daily prescribed dose of lowborn lips!" Maeve shrieked, doing three backflips through the air before landing upside down in front of his nose.

"It wasn’t medicine!" he screamed, his face burning so hot he thought his hair was going to catch fire. "I was poisoned!"

"Which was cured by gropery!" Cedric chimed in, adjusting his ruff with a solemn nod. "Truly, modern alchemy never ceases to amaze me. In my day, a prince simply died of a gangrenous wound like a gentleman. Now you lot go around fondling first-years in corridors under strict medical advice!"

"Shut up! Both of you, shut up!"

He shoved his hands into his hair, pulling at the roots as he paced a frantic circle around the washbasin. This was impossible. It was a conspiracy. The book was wrong, the dead were lying, and the universe was colluding to turn him into a pathetic, hormone-crazed lunatic.

No. He was a prince of the Fae Court. He was the son of High-Rector Maddox. He had cut down his own possessed roommate in cold blood without flinching, and he was not going to let a markless, dragonless, arrogant little lowborn destroy his mental fortitude with a localized succubus spell.

"I’m taking action," he growled as he straightened his spine. "I’m not sitting here like a helpless victim while she weaponizes her dark Borrowed magic against me."

Maeve raised a tiny ghostly finger, floating down to eye level. "Master, did you miss the part where Wight literally just read that there was no dark magic on her part? It was your own deeply buried, starving, pathetic inner desires–"

He ignored Maeve, refusing to give her the satisfaction of having her continuous revenge on him by taunting him.

He stripped off his white shirt that still smelled of her, ripping the linen over his head and throwing it onto the stone floor. The reflection in the dark windowpane was not pretty. His ribs were still black and purple from where the feral boar had slammed him into the mud, his chest was crisscrossed with old, silver-pocked scars, and the deep gash on his forearm was still oozing a yellowish discharge where the rot-sap had sizzled away his flesh.

Most of the venom was healed thanks to the antidote he took earlier but the wounds were still there.

His mother could have healed all of this with a single gesture of her hand, and he would have been whole in seconds. But no. High-Rector Maddox needed her son bloody. She needed the student body to see him battered and bruised—a living testament to her "unshaken discipline" and "unforgiving standards."

If I had been fully healed, he snarled internally as he strode toward the washroom, my mind wouldn’t have faltered. I wouldn’t have lost control with Elira.

He grabbed the wooden bucket, dumped cold water into the stone tub, and stepped in.

The moment the icy water hit the open bruises on his ribs, a sharp gasp tore from his throat. Pain exploded across his side, making his knees buckle. He gripped the wooden edges of the tub, his knuckles turning white, gritting his teeth until his jaw ached.

He tried to focus on the pain. He tried to anchor himself to the sting of the cold water and the burn of his torn flesh.

Instead, his traitorous, wretched brain immediately brought her back.

The soft, wild scent of lilies and rain flooding his senses. The dizzying, miraculous silence that had fallen over his screaming mind the exact second his skin brushed hers. The texture of her full, heat-flushed lips under his.

The ragged hitch in her throat when his thumb had brushed the curve of her breast through that thin silk dress... and the slick, scorching dampness waiting beneath her lace when his fingers slid between her thighs.

"Fuck!" he yelled, slamming his fist against the side of the tub, splashing freezing water all over the floorboards.

He scrubbed his face violently with both hands, panting as if he had just sprinted ten miles through the perimeter woods. He hated her. He hated the venom. He hated his mother, he hated the Fae Court, and above all else, he hated his own pathetic, betraying body.

It was an illusion. It was a chemical reaction to an ancient beast’s tusk. He was going to find her after classes tomorrow, pull her into a dark corner, and strip away whatever glamour or Borrowed corruption she was hiding before she dragged the entire academy into the abyss.

He dried himself off with a rough towel, completely ignoring the dull, throbbing ache in his bruised side, and threw himself onto his narrow stone bed.

"Are we sleeping?" Maeve asked, floating near the ceiling. "Because I have three more jokes about your leverage technique on the stone ledge–"

"If you speak another word, Maeve, I will find a necromantic urn and seal you inside it for fifty years," he muttered, pulling the heavy wool blanket over his chest.

She giggled, but mercifully drifted out through the window into the night air. Cedric curled up like a translucent cat on the cold hearth, and Wight remained motionless over his.

He closed his eyes, forcing his chest to rise and fall steadily. The pain in his ribs slowly dulled into a heavy throb.

And then, next thing he knew, the air did not smell like his quarters anymore.

It smelled like roasted barley, oak, and wild lilies.

He was standing in a wide, sunlit stone corridor, but it wasn’t the archways of Last Bastion or the white spires of the Fae Court. The stone beneath his boots was rougher, older, built by human hands without a single drop of magic weaving through the mortar.

He looked down at himself.

He wasn’t wearing his royal attire. He was wearing a simple, coarse tunic of dark brown wool, tied at the waist with a frayed leather belt. His hands... The hands he used to Fae magic and channel necromancy were calloused, stained with black ink and wood-ash, but completely free of scars.

No beast marks. No rot-sap burns.

He was human. A simple, low-born palace servant.

What... what the hell was going on?