Read A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) for Free Online Page B

throat-tearing rasps of air. She was scratching at her head as if to pull her brain from it.
    Grief and the hideous agony became intermingled, one soul-destroying entity. Long years ago she had steeled herself to an emotionless, ice-cold existence, for if she felt or showed one flicker of emotion it opened her mind to the ghastly presence of the Serpent. It would come crawling through the steel wall into her brain, tormenting her, mocking her, letting her feel the eternal grey horror of its being.
    Medrian was the Serpent’s human host.
    That an immortal being so complete in power and so alien should place its mind to exist alongside that of a frail human was unthinkable. It could have only one result: torment, madness and eventual destruction for that unfortunate human. So had all its previous hosts ended, although the Worm had kept their physical husks alive into old age. Yet Medrian had in childhood found a way to resist it. She had cut her mind off from it. She had concealed all her thoughts in ice, frozen all her feelings so that eventually the Worm could not touch her. If ever her coldness warmed for an instant, it would lash back at her with tenfold fury. Its evil grey mockery flooded her now, like thick-flowing acid she was helpless to wash from her body. It clung like spiders’ webs around her face, in her head – a suffocating nightmare of madness.
    No! This is what I have always fought against!
    No, Medrian, said the Worm, you have let me in and you are going to be sorry you kept me out. I loathe you as much as you loathe me.
    No! I will feel my grief – let me feel my grief, I’ve never been allowed to feel anything till now. I won’t be denied.
    I will not be denied either, my Medrian, said the Worm.
    She writhed in her struggle against it, squirming in the blood of dead warriors as she fought to release her misery without suffering the Serpent’s torment. She failed. M’gulfn was laughing at her pain. Even as she poured out her despair it seemed to ring with hollow mirth, as if death itself were dancing with skeletal glee at its own existence.
    When her mother had hugged her as a child, she’d had to hold herself stiff and unresponsive, lest the Serpent throw her down in a fit of agony. Eventually her mother had ceased hugging her.
    Medrian gulped air into her lungs and held it there. She took her arms from her head and stretched them out as if they were stiff with tetany. She raised her head, looked across the pale battleground and thought of coldness. Frozen steel and white ice came to encapsulate her mind until it was a polar wilderness.
    It took a long time. The Worm was reluctant to release its hold; it retreated with agonizing slowness, clutching at her brain with desperate tentacles. It was whispering, You can’t do this to me, I must see your thoughts and make you suffer, suffer.
    But at last it was over. Her violent emotions were under control and M’gulfn felt no worse than a reptile coiled in her brain, pressing persistently against the wall she had built between its mind and her own.
    She relaxed her taut muscles, falling forward like a rag doll. Her first long breath emerged as a groan of absolute despair.
    She pressed the heels of her hands into the earth, enduring the grit in her raw wounds like a penance. Never, she told herself with determined finality. Never again.
    She rose and looked about, making sure no one had seen her frantic struggles on the ground. The long plain of grass was still deserted. A warm wind from the Empire blew ash before it, lamenting towards the distant villages that now lay at Ashurek’s mercy.
    She could not bury the dead. She would not follow the Gorethrians and ambush them one by one until they killed all the old and young in retribution. She would not try to find her family.
    She must leave Alaak behind.
    She must stop the hatred in another way.
    Wearily, she began to trudge the leagues to the shore, there to find a boat and sail the straits to the