Chapter 8 #2
Ron looked up at his monster, his arm shielding his eyes like the monster was constructed of blinding light instead of writhing shadow, and the monster roared back down at him.
The dying rays of the sun speared across the vast sky behind them both, haloing the dark beast as it hovered higher, flapping wings of peridot green and flushed, crimson hunger.
It opened wide maws, revealing black fangs swirling with inky shadow, eyes dug into a skull like holes bored into the night sky, those pits swirling with marigold glee and sickly victory, the colour of lurid citron.
Stringy liquid shadow stretched and snapped between those horrible black teeth and little swirls of charcoal puffed out as another echoing roar rattled Eiko’s bones. The monster moved quickly, diving down, wings spread, dark teeth snapping wide and then …
Don’t look, Hymn pleaded, as Eiko’s blindness flooded the horrifying vision like a blanket. Ron screamed as the wet sound of pierced flesh and … munching … assaulted Eiko’s ears. The screaming abruptly stopped, but the disgusting sounds of crunching bones and speared flesh continued.
Eiko tried to regain control of her vision from Hymn.
Now that she had felt him cover the colours with a blanket, she tried to feel around the edges, to sense a way to lift it.
She had expected a lid of some kind, but after some experimentation, there was no tangible curtain to lift or covering to pull away.
Hymn? She eventually asked, as the manifested monster seemed to grow tired of his human snack, the beat of black wings creating a gust that threatened to send her stumbling as he raised up and up … and dropped Ron’s body back into the line of recruits with a terrible, textured thud.
Okay, Hymn relented, I’m sorry. He filled her world with colour again.
Eiko paid attention this time, noticing how the different hues slipped into her vision in little warning flashes and wisps before the vision exploded. It wasn’t that Hymn had covered her vision; it was more like the colour was a living thing that required coaxing.
Dark wings slashed the sky again, stirring the sea breeze to whip at their clothing.
Deep dark holes swivelled in her direction as blood dripped from shadowed black fangs to splatter against the rock below.
It sniffed, like it was smelling the power she had activated, and then … it was diving for her.
There was a body in front of her before she could even think about reacting, and she found her face an inch away from a broad, muscle-corded back, that supernatural scent of empty, dark death filling her nostrils as a monster exploded between the man and the diving monster.
It was enormous. It sucked all remaining oxygen straight from her lungs and filled the sky before them, blocking out every last tendril of light.
It stopped her heart entirely, and for the first time since she boarded the Kingsweep, she felt that she actually might hyperventilate and die from sheer panic.
The two shadows—one large, the other enormous—clashed and tumbled, producing a sound like thunder and making Eiko’s heart skip a panicked beat.
They crashed to the ground, shuddering the stone beneath her feet, and she looked down to see it was already spidered with cracks and chasms, split apart and breaking, but held together with reinforced steel bolted deep into the earth.
This very thing had happened before.
Recruits had stood here, facing the ocean, trying to bring out their monsters.
Bone-tired, unmade, unnamed, knock-kneed, traumatised, and exhausted … some of them had proved that, at their weakest, they weren’t strong enough to maintain control over the beasts they had invited into their bodies.
And they had been consumed by those very beasts before the soldiers surrounding them could even contemplate banishing them from their sacred ranks.
They were gone in the blink of an eye.
Chasin’s monster screamed a sound so loud and violent, it had Eiko instinctively covering her ears.
When it tossed the limp body of its foe back to the clifftop, Ron’s felled monster exploded into whispering, hissing shadows.
Chasin uncovered a glitterstone, washing them in light, making those little worms of darkness panic and try to swim through the air to get away, but they fizzled and burned much too quickly to escape, falling to the clifftop in a glittering storm of ash.
The ground was already awash with the ochre tint of death, mixed with remnants of bleeding red pain that ran like rivulets through the cracks in the stone.
Chasin was wearing the colour of … What was that?
A brittle, scorched saffron flushed at the nape of his neck, curling up into the dark strokes of his hair.
His skin was dusky and unbroken. She had expected the thick scars that Hymn had described, but just as she tried to focus, to glean further details …
and just as he began to turn … her vision flickered and failed.
Faulty fucking power, she griped.
“Recruit.” The voice was unfamiliar, a breath from the top of her head, so husky and broken it pulled her face into a flinch before she could wrangle control of her features.
Recruit. It was as though the word had been dragged through a sea of blades, slicing into fractal sounds that bled and drifted away from each other, cleaving all meaning except for the terror inspired by its sound.
He’s pointing you back into line, Hymn whispered.
She stepped back shakily, not daring to make a sound.
Holy shit. Chasin had spoken. He could speak.
He speaks to Alessandra, Hymn said. I’ve seen him whisper to her. Nobody else.
Eiko chewed on that information, turning the image of looming, broad shoulders over and over in her mind. The hint of dark hair was mostly obscured in her memory by that brittle colour that seemed to hint at annoyance at having to save her life.
Her, specifically.
It seemed her new commander had decided to quite literally despise her on sight.
Possibly because she had Silenced a baby monster instead of one of the bevy of terrifying psychopaths on offer.
Possibly because she was an embarrassment to his entire organisation.
Possibly for no good reason at all—maybe he picked a recruit to despise with every fibre of his being every year since taking up his post. Maybe it was just a hobby of his, or a compulsion.
Maybe it had nothing to do with her at all.
Yeah, let’s go with that.
He couldn’t know she had saved his life all those years ago. She hadn’t spoken to him in the cave, and by the time she had reached his body, he had already succumbed to unconsciousness.
She so desperately wanted the colours back, but in the strangest way, she was glad to be wrapped in darkness again.
It was her normal, and it required less effort than seeing everything in vivid, competing detail.
Cocooned in her own head, she could feel her friends much better than when she could see them.
She could hear the rattle in Ren’s throat that was beginning to concern her, and she didn’t need the wash of dark-swirled ruby to tell her that he and his monster were almost at the point of tearing each other apart.
She couldn’t hear anything from her brother, but that told her a lot.
He was always quiet when he was concentrating, and for him not to even shift on his sore feet or try to ease his aching muscles meant that he was concentrating especially hard.
Rion’s breathing was laboured, so her monster was likely trying to debilitate her with pain again, and—
Suddenly, tension coiled through the air again.
It was such a strange and horrible sensation, like the night was being forced to tighten and redistribute space as another monster appeared.
A chill crept across Eiko’s skin, gooseflesh raising as a low, terrifying growl skittered in a rush of scalding breath across their faces.
This beast had wings, like the last. She could hear the almost silent whoosh of them and the scrape of their claws against the rocky cliff.
“Well done, recruit.” It was Ilara who spoke, the section leader for Half-Moon banner. “You may now take the oath and retire.”
How do they know the monster isn’t going to attack? Eiko asked Hymn.
Breaking a Silencing is immensely painful for both the human and the monster, he told her. Maelon would be in indescribable pain. It would be obvious, even if the monster didn’t attack immediately—but also, most monsters will attack without hesitation.
So it was Maelon.
“Repeat after me,” Ilara ordered, and there was a hint of something in her tone. Something like approval. “I was born in fear. I will rise in silence. My name is nothing until the banners call me.”
Maelon repeated the words, but the usual smoothness was absent from his voice. It was now frayed at the edges. It wasn’t just exhaustion affecting him either. His friend had just been eaten right in front of him.
He left without a word of goodbye, and the rest of them continued to stand there.
The wind howled after Maelon, like it was desperate not to be left behind …
or maybe that was just Eiko. The ocean threw itself at the cliff over and over again as though it hadn’t learned the first thousand times that the stone wasn’t going to move and the city wasn’t going to fall.
Time began to blur.
Her calves shook. They weren’t little tremors against the snap and bite of the wind; they were continuous muscle spasms, so constant that it looked like she was shaking.
Her lower back went next. And then her shoulders cramped until her arms felt like they were going to peel away from their sockets.
When the air grew thin and sharp again, she stilled in shock, gritting her teeth against the pain of suddenly locking up her body tight. Something big unfurled in front of them, the beat of its wings pressing against her skin.