Free Web NovelChapter 677: Bring Him Back
The throne room was drowning in darkness.
The pale light from the tall windows fell across the floor in long, thin strips, the moonlight making its way inside and then simply giving up, unable to reach the far end of the chamber or illuminate anything it touched with more than the suggestion of shape.
The ceiling stretched flat and vast above, supported by twelve massive pillars of blackened stone, six on each side, their surfaces carved with elaborate reliefs depicting figures of every kind, men and beasts and beings that belonged to races from across the known world, each one rendered with the precision of something that had been placed there to be remembered rather than merely decorated.
Before each pillar sat a throne, each one built for a specific occupant whose nature it communicated without explanation.
Some were scaled for humans or elves, their proportions comfortable and familiar, their materials refined. Others rose far above that scale, built for giants, or one even constructed entirely from blackened bone with skulls forming the armrests.
At the chamber’s far end, dominating everything that preceded it, stood the dark throne.
High-backed, its surface carved with ornate patterns that seemed to shift when observed from the edges of the vision, its material an onyx-dark metallic stone that absorbed the available light and returned nothing, lit instead by its own aura of darkness, a presence so particular and so complete that it could not be missed regardless of how thoroughly the room around it had already claimed attention.
Violet runes pulsed to life along the floor before the throne, their glow cutting through the darkness with the sharp, cold light. The brilliance of them peaked and then faded, the darkness flowing back in to reclaim the space they had briefly occupied.
Two figures remained where the light had been.
One sat on the throne. One standing at its side.
To the right of the throne, a third figure was already present, his silver hair framing a face of refined, precise features, small horns of silver and black crystal rising from his brow, his eyes carrying the particular quality of black pupils set against depths that contained stars.
The figure on the throne looked at him.
The face that looked was not a face in any conventional sense. Where features should have been, there was only darkness, not the darkness of shadow or absence of light but something more deliberate, something that appeared to be made of squirming dark, shifting and reshaping in the slow, continuous way of something that had not settled into a fixed form and did not intend to.
No eyes. No nose. No flesh. No face. Only the darkness, moving.
"Hello, Varon."
The voice that came from it was a muddled rasp, layered beneath itself, the sound of something speaking through damage or distance or both. freewebnovel.cσ๓
And yet beneath the rasp, and despite the complete absence of any feature that could have communicated it, there was something that felt like a smile in the voice. Something that meant what it said.
"Good to see you."
Varon’s eyes went to their limits. His face went flat, mouth hanging open, the expression of a mind that had received information it was still working out how to process, the gap between what he was seeing and what his understanding of the world allowed visible in every line of him.
Before he could complete the processing, the darkness around Alex’s right hand moved.
It swirled inward and then outward, and from it he drew a blade, long and broad, narrowing to its point with the clean geometry of something that had been made with complete understanding of its purpose.
He brought the tip down to the dark floor and put his weight on it, the blade sinking slightly into the surface, serving as a support rather than a weapon.
What followed was neither clean nor brief.
His left hand turned to bone, the flesh receding from it with the unhurried inevitability of something being recalled rather than destroyed. His right hand went the other direction, darkening and swelling with the specific wrongness of tissue that had been dead long enough to forget what living felt like.
The left side of his ribcage moved, flesh and armor torn by squirming worms, black and lightless. His right foot ceased to be a foot in any physical sense and became instead a twisted shadow of the shape a foot occupied, present as a concept rather than a fact.
His left knee bent at an angle it was not designed to bend, bone tearing througha nd growing like a gnarled tree, his flesh twisting as well.
All of it simultaneously.
All of it cycling, flesh to mutilation to flesh in a continuous, repeating pattern that grew more intense with each pass rather than less, each cycle lasting slightly longer than the one before it.
A growl tore through the featureless darkness of his face, and for a moment the darkness parted, splitting into something that was almost a snarl, the sound that came through it belonging to something in a degree of pain that could not be suppressed.
"BBLLERAAAAA"
The darkness sealed again immediately, closing back over the opening the way a wound closed when something external pressed it shut, the sound drowning back into whatever the darkness contained.
The cycling of his body continued without pause, the various parts of him moving through their terrible rotations with the mechanical, relentless quality of a process that had started and did not know how to stop.
Varon drew a breath that was not steady and turned to his left.
Venedikt stood at Alex’s left side, his expression carrying the particular quality of someone who had already spent time with this sight and had not found a way to make peace with it, the grief in it present and controlled and not fully controllable.
"Why are the laws doing this?" Varon’s voice was quiet, the words stripped of everything except the question itself, his eyes fixed on Alex without moving. "Why is the darkness trying to erase the Domain Ruler?"
Venedikt drew breath to answer.
A voice reached him first.
It came from the foot of the stairs leading up to the throne, soft and authoritative and moving through its words with the careful, deliberate pace of someone having difficulty selecting them, as though the concepts involved were resisting the language being used to describe them.
"The darkness is angry." A pause. "Happy?"
The woman who had spoken stood at the base of the stairs, draped in an icy white dress, the fitted top giving way to a flowing blue skirt below, a white coat worn over it.
Her hands were enclosed in white gloves that were currently soaked through with blood and viscera of a darkened, wrongly-colored quality that did not belong to any ordinary being.
"Elmara." Varon’s voice did not rise. The urgency and the contained rage in it communicated themselves without volume. "I can see that. Stop it."
"Damned fool." Elmara did not look at him. Her eyes remained on Alex, moving across the cycling changes with the focused, almost clinical attention of someone cataloguing rather than reacting, the worry present in them but pushed to the edges by something that could only be called curiosity. "You think I haven’t tried? You are the strongest the Domain has to offer. Did any of your efforts to suppress them do anything?"
Varon exhaled slowly. The sound of someone pressing their patience back into shape.
"I have never seen the laws behave this way," he said, the words arriving with the particular quality of something being reasoned aloud rather than stated with confidence.
"They are the fundamental principles of existence. It is known that they favor certain beings over others." He paused. "But I have never seen them torment someone. I have never seen them appear to take pleasure in it."
The last words trailed off as though their own logic had given him pause.
"Domain Guardian." Venedikt’s voice cut through cleanly, calm and composed, finding the register of someone who had prepared an explanation and was delivering it without the luxury of time to ease into it. "I can explain what you are seeing."
"Boy." Lady Elmara’s tone was not unkind so much as entirely without patience for imprecision. Her eyes still had not left Alex, around whom a constellation of white, silver, and red runes had already begun to bloom, only to dissolve back into nothing the moment they fully formed, absorbed, and undone before they could take hold. "Be specific or be silent."
"My brother allows himself to be possessed by an Ancient," Venedikt said it without preamble. "Beings who are loved by their given laws more completely than any other category of existence. When the Ancient inhabited him, the laws of darkness followed willingly, and now that it has departed, those same laws are expressing their displeasure."
He held the explanation steady against the weight of what it described.
"They are torturing him to compel the Ancient’s return. They will persist for several days. The standard duration is three. The longest I have personally witnessed was eleven, but that instance arose from a specific combination of circumstances that is unlikely to repeat."
He said it with the even delivery of someone who had learned that the only way to carry information this heavy was to carry it without wavering.
"He will endure it. My brother has survived considerably worse." A faint smile crossed his face, there and gone.
"How many times has he used this skill?" Lady Elmara said, her voice carrying a different quality now, something beneath the clinical detachment that had not been there before.
"Twenty-four," Venedikt said. "Counting today."
He released a breath after the number, slow and deliberate, the sound of someone for whom the number itself carried a weight that even saying it aloud transferred some fraction of onto the room.
"Do not worry. He will pull through." The words arrived with quiet certainty.
He straightened. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
"Now. If you are both willing, I need the clan rulers gathered here. All of them. What I have to tell them about the current situation, what is at stake for this Domain and for the world, for them and for us, is not something that should wait."
The two Domain Guardians held Venedikt in their gaze for a long moment, their expressions carrying the particular quality of people who had been asked to redirect their attention from something that was making that redirection very difficult to perform.
Their eyes moved back to Alex.
The cycling had grown more intense while they had been talking. Entire sections of his body were being unmade and remade in sequence, the process no longer limiting itself to individual parts but moving across him in sweeping patterns.
The laws did not appear to be in any mood to slow down.
They did not appear to be in any mood to stop.
