Overview

Master Varis weaves his web more and more, wrapping it around Darren and watching with satisfaction as Darren struggles and tries to free himself.

Darren - weakened by the yearlong fight against the Poisons Master - knows that he is almost out of strenght; that the poison that flows in his blood is slowly destroying his will, mind, and heart. He knows that the Poisons Master is always waiting for him in the darkness... to trap him again; to whisper into his ear; to press his hard body against him; to touch him...

Will this madness ever stop? Darren slowly begins to realize that there is no escape from him...

They called him the Black Crow - a shadowed harbinger of death.**

“Remember it once and for all,” - the Poisons Master almost snarled as he said it. “I have the right to do anything I want to you. I have the right to harass you, as you have vividly put it, if I find your behavior reprehensible and unacceptable. You can’t hide from me anywhere. I can even go to your bedroom and harass you there as much as I want! I have the right to know where you are at any time! And why are you not where you should be! I have the right to everything related to you! I’ve engraved this law on your body and I never want to hear from you again that I cannot do something!”

Darren wanted to attack Varis and tear his throat out for everything he’d done to him, for everything he’d told him… and at the same time he wanted to fall to his knees in front of this man, apologizing to him and begging him to leave him alone, even for a little while. For a week. For a few days. For one day. To tell him that if Varis didn’t do this, Darren would go mad because of him.

• He could hear the voices fading in and out... but they all seemed to be coming from a very distant place, from a completely different world. The world where his peers experienced only normal everyday dilemmas. The world where none of them had to cope with an intricately woven spider web; they did not try to get out of it only to become entangled in it even more... and there was no predator waiting for them in the middle of that web...
  No. They were safe. Nobody tried to... devour their souls.