Strange Magics 2: Blighted Abyss- a M/M/F fantasy romance

Prologue: Blood

**Trigger warnings in this story include past child abuse, past child sexual abuse, past slavery, past childhood abuse trauma including the lost of speech and disfiguration. Mentions of drug addiction, suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation, dark magic stuff... Just all around it's like my other stories so proceed with caution if you have any triggers and feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions or concerns about any triggers you may have. I'm happy to give spoilers if you're concerned about a trigger! :) **

Blood has a smell when it's fresh, for those who have the senses to know it. Copperish, metallic, almost warm, it wraps around and presses into the nostrils like a tentacle seeking entrance to a person's very core. Mixed with the smell of viscera, death, pain, and terror, the smell of blood sets off something primal in most humans. A fight or flight instinct that is instinctual, subconscious, and mind-numbing to those who are its victims.

The only body the spirit witch didn't see was Ash's. She was the only one missing, her body not among those of his family that lay in heaps around him, left like a tableau of death and agony. A gift for him to find from a woman he had thought he had the upper hand over. But no, his sister, his beautiful Ash, wasn't among the bodies. Though he knew that didn't mean she was still alive. The queen had promised him the end of his family, in exchange for his defiance and his denial of her, and she had held through on her promise. She had ended the lives of his mother, his father, and each of his siblings, from sixteen-year-old Ash, to thirteen-year-old Eerik, to two-year-old Kaaite. And she had done more than have them killed— she'd had her men leave them where they had been slaughtered, their bodies bloated, half-eaten by scavengers, and covered in days of rot. By the time the witch had been able to free himself from the queen's prisons, slit her throat, and kill half of her guards in his escape, his family had been left in the heat of the sun and harsh nature for nearly a week.

Ash's body had probably been carried off by coyotes, for all he knew.

He made his way through the wreckage of his childhood home, his chest tightening with more than anger, more than grief, more than all of the rage he was able to muster from the cruelty and unfairness of the act from a woman he had once considered if not a friend, then at the very least an ally.

"No one tells me no," the queen had hissed, her dark, slate-gray hair, the color strangely offset by her youth, falling around her face as the witch stepped back from her. Horrified, he realized just how far his own hubris and lack of care had pushed the woman. He had known he could press her into falling for him, had hoped it would bring him favor and power, though he had also known he would never feel even a hint of attraction to her. It wasn't her sex— he was as attracted to women as he was to men— it was her very soul that put him off. From the time his magic first became apparent to him, he had known the Fates had deigned to grant him a soulmate. Possibly two, though that detail was still blurry at best. He had only to wait, and he would find them someday, man or woman, one or two or more, he knew not. Only that they were there, right on the periphery of his soul, on the edges of his magic, pushing him forward and marking his every move towards them.

He had known, even though he had never planned to go through with loving or even fucking the queen, that he could make her fall for him.

What he hadn't accounted for, for all his power, despite the magic that coursed through his veins, was how far a woman scorned, especially a woman so spoiled and unused to denial, would go to punish the man who had denied her.

The sight of Kaaite's favorite doll, a replica of her older sister Ash made by a skilled porcelain doll-maker in Rose Hill, the capital of Skov'eik, had bile rising up the witch's throat as he straightened his spine against the pain coursing through his chest, his throat, his head, every bit of him. The emotional and spiritual pain that threatened to drop him down to the muddy earth. It had rained the night before, as he had slogged his way through the rivers and deep puddles, making his way back to his home in a desperate hope that the insane queen hadn't done what she had sworn to do as she had him tied to the stone wall of her dungeon and torn into him within an inch of his life with steel and whip and scourge.