CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR #2
As I neared, they grew in size, but so too did the darkness. I felt the hesitation in my step before I understood it. If the sky ended here, and those orbs existed in that ending, would the ground continue to summon beneath me?
A prickling of my skin, a dimming of my light.
Fear.
I swallowed the growing thickness in my throat, entirely unsure as I made the decision to press forward.
I didn’t want to. I desperately wanted to turn back, to return to my chaise and continue studying the constellations as they flirted with one another.
But I was needed, and that threatened to be more important than anything I had ever known.
The thought careened me forward. I was so very close.
Any moment now, I would meet these green not-stars and assist them by any means available to me.
Did I have pockets? Maybe I could put them inside, and bring them back to my chaise where they could not-twinkle alongside me, safe from the encroaching, starless void.
Then something in the darkness shifted, a flex or a pulse that was barely perceivable to the naked eye, and I froze unthinkingly.
The power of this place, the sheer intensity that had avoided me where I’d lain, was suddenly all-consuming.
The hair on my neck and arms raised, the breath escaped my lungs, and I was overrun by the acute awareness that whatever hovered nearby, whatever had taken to swallowing the night sky, had become aware of my presence.
Very, very slowly, I lifted my chin, searching the darkness for a shape of some kind.
I saw nothing. The space before me was unfilled, as though the Creator had forgotten to come here entirely.
But then why were those green not-stars in this corner of existence, of all places? Who had brought them here?
Remembering myself, I tried to put the darkness out of my mind, even as I felt it observing me. I lowered my chin, searching and searching, until finally I found what I was looking for.
Not-stars, indeed. Rather, they were eyes.
Two silver-green orbs, housed in a blank face, wet curls pasted to her forehead and neck.
She lay on her back, limbs soaking in the spilled inkwell of this realm, wide eyes unseeingly pinned on the direction I’d come.
Her clothes were strange for this place—a brown vest of unknown material, fitted pants, scuffed boots.
She didn’t belong here, but that didn’t mean she had to suffer the way I knew she was.
I took another step forward, preparing myself to approach her, when those silver-green eyes snapped to me.
Only then did they widen slightly, an undercurrent of unalloyed terror prompting the infinitesimal twitch of her eyebrows.
A spell of stillness, I somehow knew. Whatever sought to keep her here had rendered her little more than a beautiful, terrified statue.
“What do I do?” I asked the disembodied voice, hoping it hadn’t abandoned me during my journey.
You’ve done enough.
I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I took another step forward, sinking my toes into the same black liquid that pulsed in the frightened woman’s direction.
“I know her,” I said suddenly, locking our gazes. “I… I know her.” I searched her features desperately, wishing I could draw closer without nearing the shadow. Her memory hovered in my periphery, a tip-of-the-tongue sensation grating against the haze of my mind.
Those full lips parted, and I imagined it took more strength than I housed in my entire body for her to speak the urgent whisper that sliced through the void, straight into my heart:
“Alyssum,” she said, each syllable strained beneath the weight of its utterance. “Run.”
My palms shot up to my ears as the realm around me fractured, a splintered shattering of glass that deafened me.
I stumbled backwards, my face screwing up against the discomfort stretching my mind as memory after memory awakened within me.
But none as strong as her warm hand in mine, and the scream she’d released into the darkness.
Just like that, I returned to myself.
“Vayen!” My voice echoed around us, too loud and too strong for the stillness that had existed there. But the illusion was coming apart at the seams.
I launched forward, hand outstretched, determined to reach her and take her from this place. All it took was one shuddering movement of the darkness to stop me in my tracks, frozen against the unexplainable knowing of being in the presence of something impossibly old and indescribably dangerous.
It was looking at me. I still couldn’t make out its form, but whatever attention had been focused on Vayen now shifted my way, and she seemed just as aware of that as I was.
There was a sudden, powerful warmth, and her eyes began to glow.
The greens were replaced with platinum, summoning a well of light, piercing through the darkness threatening us both and making visible the being that—I now knew—hovered directly over her body.
The details were muted as his darkness swallowed Vayen’s light, but even with only half-glimpses I knew my nightmares would forevermore be haunted by what I saw.
The right side of him was a man—very near unassuming with smooth, milky skin and a glowing blue eye framed by long lashes.
His curved lips were twisted into a half-smile of white teeth, angled towards a high cheekbone and flowing black hair.
There was a menacing undercurrent to his expression, but I wouldn’t have minded if it wasn’t for what made up the rest of him.
Shadows made corporeal clung to the other half of his body like rotten flesh, writhing and pulsing just as the Threshold had.
Popping veins of black threaded through the mutated portion of his face.
Shadows surged across his left side in coils of muscle and claw, culminating in a thick, monstrous arm that held the rest of his body midair with its unnatural strength.
I could see the ridges where bone should have existed, but that side of him continued to shift and undulate, as if the creature hadn’t quite decided what form it wanted to take.
He was a grotesque transformation, a man overtaken by a mutation far more sinister, and yet it was that bright blue eye that frightened me most. It seemed…
content, as though he was not only at peace with the monster that consumed him, but pleased by it.
Even as light poured out of Vayen’s body, his focus remained on me, the sharp teeth of his demon-half coming into view as he reared back onto a veined, muscular tail I hadn’t noticed before.
In that moment, a scream ripped from Vayen’s chest, echoing into the vastness this monster had consumed, but he paid her no mind.
Instead, his mouth peeled apart, one side layered with needle teeth and the other disconcertingly human.
His jaw seemed to unhinge with a gargled, guttural noise, cushioned by innumerable screams. Vayen had merely joined the chorus.
Had he… had he eaten all of those people who sounded from within him?
Move, I thought. Run. Vayen can’t save you from this. Nothing can save you from this.
I took one step back, unable to look away as his mouth grew in size.
I was certain my blood had been replaced with terror, for how else could it course so freely through me?
A simple truth, one I could not confront, had uncorked the stopper on my fear: I could not outrun this creature.
No one could. The unfathomable sound spilling from his mouth drowned out the thunderous pounding of my heart, and I submitted to my undoing.
The demon hauled himself forward with nothing more than the impossible power of that bulky tail, his mutated hand with its meaty, clawed, too-many fingers outstretching in my direction at a speed that I could hardly fathom.
He aimed directly for my face, which his altered hand would have no problem seizing me by, and I prepared for the end.
But just as his palm reached me, it collided with an invisible barrier.
The realm around me slowed.
I watched helplessly as his massive, mutated palm slammed over and over into the barrier that kept him from me, Vayen’s light drenching his pulsating, monstrous shadow-skin in a platinum glow.
And I was falling.
Falling backwards, my footing abandoned in the wake of his repeated, enraged impact with the barrier.
It was his face I locked eyes with, so close to disappearing beneath that enlarged, still-growing mouth, snarling against the barrier that protected me.
My entire body stiffened as I prepared to hit the ground.
But the same ground that had carried me here, to Vayen, was suddenly nowhere to be found.
And I fell down, down, down, straight into the stars, leaving her and that shadow monster behind, with only her name echoing in the void as I screamed it into oblivion.