BROTHERS

Welcome, mages, to the Vandere Auction House’s premier event! In just a moment, you’ll have a chance to bid on the opportunity to claim prime magikal components to do with as you wish,” a magikally amplified voice announces as the sound of clock gears starts up behind me. 

What?! They can’t be serious?! A Maiden-stalker drake! I cannot possibly face something like that!

I turn back toward the cell door in a panic. But the moment I even consider running, I smack into a hard wall of force. 

I have to get out of—!

The solid wall of air begins to push me toward the open arena. 

No! Not like this, please! Anythingbut this! I can’t die like—!

My gaze darts frantically toward the rapidly approaching light. Toward the cheers baying for Navina’s—for my blood. I claw desperately at the solid air pushing me onward toward
my unspeakable fate. But it’s utterly futile. Because, despite all my efforts, I still end up on my hands and knees on the dirt of the arena.

I raise my head in breathless panic as that magikally amplified voice tolls my doom, “Let the auction begin!”

* * *

It is a monstrous thing—the Maiden-stalker. A horror made of obsidian scales with a malachite sheen. Sleek and terrible as a blade slicing across your throat. With massive lyre-shaped horns like a crown of wicked basalt. As terrifying as the shadows that cling to the depths of your mind, even after you wake from the most vivid of nightmares. And I am entirely at its mercy, for which it has none. 

I’ve no weapon. No wand. No clever plan of escape. Just a desperate desire not to die in the most horrific of ways. And the drake’s already running me ragged. 

I’m like a stag bolting through the forest with the hounds at his heels. Yipping and snarling and baying for the sweet taste of his flesh.

I’m going to falter. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And the terror is nearly paralyzing. But I refuse to just lie down and offer myself up to it. 

The drake’s barbed tail slashes the cavernous earth before me, and I dive, rolling out of the way by the slimmest of margins. But I do not escape unscathed, two of my fingers catching and bending back farther than they ever should.

“Fuck!” I hiss through gritted teeth as I cradle my injured hand to my chest, pushing off the dirt with my other.

I can’t stop. Can’t lose focus for even a moment or I’m—

Dead…

The drake isn’t— It isn’t where it should be.

I start to turn my head in near hysterical panic, a heartbeat before I’m blindsided. 

How did it…get…behind me?

I’m knocked to my belly so fast my ears ring from the impact. The dirt rising up in a plume before me. 

“Ahh!” I cry out, in tear-choked terror as the Maiden-stalker shreds the clothes from my back. Peeling them away like a rind of ripe fruit. 

I was foolish. So utterly foolish to think I had any hope of escape. Because I forgot the most important thing about this creature—its name. It is a stalker of prey. And tonight that prey is me. 

Help. Somebody help. Please, someone. Anyone. Save me.

I reach out for my three elder brothers as the Maiden-stalker presses its clawed foreleg against my spine just above my heart. Its substantial weight grinding me into the rocky dirt of the arena. 

As I feel the first blinding crackle and snap of my bones, the barbed tail of the drake penetrates my flesh just below my shoulder blades. I cry out as the poisonous magik surges into my body. Racing through veins like liquid fire. So much worse than I ever could have feared in my worst nightmares. 

My vision starts to double and blur, the colors shifting all wrong, and I tip my gaze toward the gaping crowds. Toward my brothers, still watching this horror unfold.

“Dari, save me, please…” I sob as I push my fingers through the blood-soaked dirt toward him. Reaching for my elder brother, just like I did that day on the train platform when I was four. 

But just like that day, he does nothing. None of them do.

So the last thing I see before I succumb to the terrible darkness and pain of the drake’s brutality is the looks of horror and disgust on my brothers’ faces as they turn to leave.

And as the last embers of my heart go cold, all I can wonder is…Why brothers? Why abandon me…again?

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Chapter 18 – Brothers: Part Two, ExSpelled © 2025 by Kat Vancill

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