Knuckles Turning Black Novels & Stories

The bruises faded, and the broken bones realigned. And just like that, his body was whole again. I smiled. Koen’s relief lasted no more than a second before I grabbed his wrist. His eyes widened as I gripped his hand, forcing his fingers to spread apart. “Let’s see how well you heal without a healer,” I mused. And then I snapped his pinky backward. The sickening crunch of bone filled the air. Koen screamed, his body jolting violently as pain wracked through him. I barely gave him time to process it before I took the next finger and ripped it away from his palm, the flesh tearing as another scream tore from his throat.

As I mentally twirled myself, the darkness wrapped around my wrists, ready to attack. - Get yourself under control! If I thought that you could not bear such a load, then I would not apply this method to you. There is another way, but you probably wouldn’t like it,” the mentor blurted out, watching my hands. The veins were already completely blackened, the last time this happened, my face turned into a terrible horror. In confirmation of this, Kane, shifting his gaze to him, recoiled. Surprise and fear flickered in his eyes.

Not catastrophically bad—he'd had worse, though the occasions that qualified were not ones he particularly wanted to think about—but bad in the specific way of something that was going to get worse before it got better and was going to require explanation regardless of how it ultimately resolved. The knuckles of his third and fourth fingers had swollen to a degree that made them look like they belonged to someone else. The skin over them was tight and starting to purple, and the range of motion in those two fingers specifically was limited in ways that communicated clearly that they needed ice, rest, and possibly a conversation with someone who knew more about bones than Dante did. What they

"Check your chest. Now." My hand flew to my sternum before I was even fully awake. I sucked in a breath. It rattled like a bag of dry gravel. The brand—the jagged 'X'—didn't just glow anymore. The skin around it had turned a sick, necrotic purple. Black veins branched out from the center, crawling toward my collarbone like ink dropped in water. It pulsed. A low, wet throb that made my vision swim with static.

Knox is on the floor. Shirtless, soaked in sweat, and something about his body is WRONG in a way that my brain tries to reject before my eyes finish processing it. The muscles under his skin are moving – MOVING, shifting and rippling like something underneath is trying to rearrange itself, and his hands are pressed flat against the hardwood and his fingers are tipped with something that isn’t fingernails. They’re longer and curved and dark and they’ve gouged lines into the floor like trenches, and the word my brain supplies is CLAWS even though that word doesn’t belong in a sentence about a human being.

Deep amber-gold, catching the weak winter light the way embers catch a breeze. My hands were the worst. Fingers shortening and thickening, knuckles popping in rapid succession like someone snapping a bundle of dry sticks. The sound was obscene this close to my own ears. Nails blackened, curved, broke through the beds with a sting that was almost surgical in its precision then kept curving. Pads swelled beneath them. Palms that had been human seconds ago were now something entirely other, and the skin between my fingers stung tight as it fused and split and refused to decide which shape it belonged to.

That final foot would never land. The hand gripping the sword began to shake. At first, just a faint tremor in the knuckles. Then his entire hand convulsed violently, like an old man too frail to hold a teacup steady. He stared down at his own hand, his pupils shrinking to needlepoints. Black veins erupted beneath his skin, starting from his fingertips. They didn't surface from the outside. They leaked upward from within his blood vessels, every dark line spreading along the pathways of his veins.

He stopped when he felt his knuckles hurt badly. "WHY?" He screamed loudly, making the servants who stood near him flinching. He looked at his fist to see blood dripping from it. He stared at his bloody hand blankly, before pulling his hand away from the wall, leaving blood on his hand along with his knuckles. He let out a shaking sigh, and headed to his bedroom.

What the hell is wrong with me? "You're lucky your nose isn't broken," the nurse says with a raised brow as he dabs the blood off my face gently. I don't reply and wait until I'm handed an ice pack for my jaw and one for my left eye which is throbbing with pain. "Your knuckles will be bruised for a week or so and you'll be stuck with a black eye but no breaks so I see that as a win," the nurse tells me before sending me back to class when the bell rings.

"He is dead now, he already got enough punishment with the blows you gave him every day in the past week. He is no longer breathing in this world, Syl. Let it go. Let's not ruin our peace anymore by thinking of him." He grabbed my hand, leaning close to my touch. A smile tugged at my lips. But it soon faded away at the dark spots littering across his knuckles. Due to the lack of light, I couldn't see it properly. But I knew what it was. "Your knuckles…" "It's nothing." Voice hard.