He will know me
And he will wish for death instead
~ Reighley Sanders
Darkness so thick I could feel it under my skin surrounded me in an endless abyss of silence and horror.
It had gone on for days. The torture. His voice speaking to me, burrowing into my thoughts like a rat eating through a corpse.
Though I tried to hide, there was nowhere I could go that he could not find me and all would begin again.
I wasn’t sure if it was a game or if I was being punished, but I could feel the fragments of my existence being pulled apart, and the talons of his presence sinking deeper.
I sat in a cave somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, knees hugged to my chest, but it did nothing to help the cold that had settled in my veins. A small circle of dim light surrounded me, rich with colors, and I knew it was all I had. All the life left in that graveyard.
My teeth chattered as I stared at the hues dancing in the sand around my feet.
Little ribbons of blue and violet like water reflecting from the surface of a pool.
Above me, his great ocean loomed, a world of its own waiting to swallow me again.
Where I’d retreated, he had not yet found me, and I prayed it would be a while before he did.
“Hiding, are we?” a soft voice said.
I looked up to find Lyla standing with her shoulders slumped, loose, dirty rags covering her. But fabric was not all that dressed her. Blood coated her skin, dripping into the rocks where she stood. Dark circles tugged at her eyes and her hair looked just as ratty and unkempt as ever.
“What else am I to do?” I said, my voice like sand.
“He knows where you are, you know.”
I shuddered at the thought, but some part of me knew it. “Why doesn’t he come for me?”
“It’s his game. To make you think you’ve escaped. Hope stolen is worse than the absence of it in the first place.”
“How would you know that unless you hoped once?”
“I have hoped. I hoped mother would come for me. I hoped he would release me. I hoped the sons would not use me like their little whore. I hoped,” she said through a clenched jaw.
“I hoped and I hoped and I hoped.” Taking a breath, she relaxed her features, shrugging her shoulders. “Until I didn’t anymore.”
I stiffened as Lyla took a step toward me, the blood dripping down her arms and legs as if she’d bathed in it.
“Why are you like this?”
“They’re tearing me to pieces trying to get me to tell them how to free you of this.
Your pirate and that other one with the red hair.
They want me to stay awake, but they’re ignorant to the fact that even the briefest of slumbers will give me more than enough time with you.
” She raised her hand in front of her, wriggling her fingers. “Hmm. I’ve got all five in this place.”
“What are you talking about? They’re dead. All of them.”
Her eyes shifted toward me, reflecting what tiny amount of light I had like glass marbles. “Oh, you’re not used to this, are you? They’re not dead. Not yet. You’re dreaming. Or did you forget?”
The words didn’t make sense. I blinked, trying to understand them, but it was ridiculous.
“N—No. I woke up. Days ago. And then I was brought here.”
“Here? To the bottom of the sea?” She half-smiled as if the idea amused her. “No fins. We’re not even speaking as we would underwater. You know that.”
“I…”
Slowly, I looked at the way the water around us undulated like melting mirrors. The way the light changed and shifted like it could not make up its mind on how to act. It seemed right… but so wrong. The longer I thought about it, the more none of it made sense.
“I wonder what they’ll take next,” Lyla giggled. “They’re in something of a panic because of you.”
“They’re alive then?”
“For now. Silly girl. How many times have they died here? Did you not think that odd?”
I buried my fingers in my hair and hung my head, feeling my mind split apart like a melon the more I tried to make sense of it.
“This can’t be happening,” I whispered.
“He’s rather ruthless, your hunter. Even if it is for nothing.”
“Why not tell them what they want to know?”
“They can take all the pieces they desire and it won’t change this. This isn’t my dream. It’s not even yours. You’re his now.”
“So I am to be like this forever?”
“Until you agree to go to him. Your mind is one thing, but the great father is a greedy god. He wants your body, too, I assure you.”
“I will never go to him.”
She raised her brows, looking around at the empty darkness around us. “Then you’ll be here.”
Anger bubbled inside, familiar and suffocating.
“Is this what it was like for you? Down there?”
“This is but a taste, sister.” She glimpsed the dancing colors on the ground in front of me. “At least you know what colors look like. I didn’t for a very long time. I imagine they give you some solace.”
I shifted, rolling onto my feet to stand. “Lyla, why help him?”
“You keep asking that as if I have a choice,” she smiled. “None of us have a choice. He is Akareth. The father of all. Our creator—”
“Lies,” I hissed. “A false god. A dishonest monster and a sadistic fiend. He made an entire race believe he was more, but all Kroans have ever done is suffer and we’ve spread that suffering to others. Akareth is not my god.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
“And you’re lying to yourself. Why are you here, talking to me? Your job is done, is it not? You gave him a way to get to me. So why are you here?”
Her mouth opened as if to answer, but she didn’t.
“You want to be free of him.”
“The only way to be free is to die,” she snapped.
“Then why haven’t you died? You’re no coward. You could so easily end it for yourself and we both know it. Why haven’t you?”
Again, she looked as if she wanted to speak, but it took a few beats for her to get the words out.
“Because I have not lived, of course,” she said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
I stepped toward her, reaching out to take her shoulders. She almost shied from me, glancing at my hands like they had insulted her.
“Then live. Help me. Help us. If he is a thing, he can be destroyed, and this hell will be gone.”
“He can’t be destroyed.”
I blinked at the way her brows furrowed at her own words.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” I whispered. “What do you know? You know something.”
Slapping my hands away, she said, “I don’t know anything. All I know is this,” she gestured to the stifling darkness.
“This,” a deep, rumbling voice thundered around us. “Is all there is.”
I reached for Lyla again only for her to disintegrate in my hands.
She turned to black smoke that seeped through my fingers and drifted away on a nonexistent breeze.
I looked up to see the ocean flood with red light around me.
The water came crashing in like a tidal wave, burying me in its cold weight.
I was ripped from side to side while water filled my lungs.
But it was a dream. Nothing was real. I opened my eyes and was surrounded by a black, endless ocean where only faint light glowed from a great distance like tiny beacons or candles flickering in the abyss.
“I am all there is,” the voice spoke.
I snapped my head from side to side, searching, though I’d never found a source before.
He was simply there, everywhere and nowhere at once.
Then, far off in the dim, glowing haze, a shadow stirred.
At first, it was nothing. A fragment adrift, a scrap of wandering light.
But as it drifted nearer, I saw the gentle pulse of fins, trembling like wings, carrying it toward me through the quiet vastness.
A gray fish, eyes red as drops of blood, hovered in front of me, watching me with an empty gaze.
“So like your mother,” he said, his voice echoing off absent walls. “Her defiance. Her rage. And what a masterpiece I molded from the broken pieces of her. Deadly.” I wanted to deny him, but I could not feel my tongue in my mouth anymore to speak.
I was silenced, a prisoner within his grasp, bound by the weight of his will.
Around me, the red-eyed fish began to circle, its glassy gaze a mirror of my own despair.
With every turn, a shadow bled from its scales; a mist that coiled and thickened, thread by thread, until the creature transformed.
And there before me drifted a great, spectral shark, gliding slow and solemn through the dark waters of my confinement.
“So beautiful,” he chuckled. “I shall enjoy breaking you. Lyla? She was so disappointing. She did not even fight.”
She was a baby.
I thought the words, yet they withered before they could leave my lips. The rage he inspired writhed within me, a serpent of fire coiling deep in my belly. I clenched my hands until my knuckles blanched, longing for the bite of nails against skin, for the proof of pain, but the sting never came.
The shark continued to circle me, its mouth full of endless rows of teeth.
“I know you have questions, but there is one answer to all,” he continued.
“I hunger for disorder. For the exquisite savor of blood diffused in darkened waters, and the sweet delirium that seeps into the dreams of mortal sleepers. A world undone is a symphony divine, far more rapturous than any realm in harmony. And you, frail Kroans, are but playthings in the hands of chaos, pliant, yearning, desperate for meaning in the void. You will come to me, Dahlia. You cannot help but do so. For when the tide of your will at last breaks, I shall take what remains—your body, cold and yielding—for your mind has long since been devoured.”