Chapter 44
Surviving the dark does not end in lighting a torch
~ Unknown
When I was ripped away from Vidar, I thought it was all over, our hunt, our struggle, everything.
I never imagined I would awaken again, let alone find Vidar before me, bound to the cold floor by the pulsating tendrils of some unseen horror.
The moonlight trickled through the skylight, casting eerie shadows that flickered across the sacrificial stone table.
We had been wrenched back into this chamber by an entity lurking just beyond our sight, and dread clutched at my heart.
The air thickened with malevolence, and I knew, deep down, that escape was slipping further from our grasp.
Cold, wet hands gripped me, forcing me to look at Vidar. Blood soaked the side of his shirt and guilt spread like a disease inside me knowing that I’d been the one to pierce him with my knife.
“Vidar,” I whispered. “I’m… I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, but the silence screamed louder than words.
I had to reach him. I had to pull him from this nightmare.
But the moment I fought back, my captors tightened their grip like a vice.
Pain shot through my scalp as they yanked at my hair, threatening to tear it from my head.
My struggles only tangled me further in their vicious snare, so I stilled myself, reopening my eyes to the unimaginable.
Something lurked behind Vidar.
Two hideous figures emerged from the suffocating shadows, their sharp spears glinting ominously in the dim light.
“No,” I strained. “No!”
“Dahlia,” Vidar finally spoke.
“Don’t touch him!” I pushed to my feet only to be slammed back down onto the ground. “Get away from him!”
“Dahlia, look at me!”
I planted my foot, pushing upward with all my might.
I didn’t care if they broke my arm or ripped out my hair.
I needed to get to Vidar. Twisting, I got a hold of one of the xhoth’s wrists and snapped it backwards.
The other wrapped his big hand around my neck, lifting me off the ground.
I kicked and swung my fists, driving my nails into his thick skin.
My teeth grew from my gums, sharp and aching, thirsting to bite and rend.
When I was thrown to the ground again, hands were on my head, forcing me to look at Vidar once more.
He was tugging against his binds, careless of the blood pooling around him.
He let out a beastly roar, fury driving him to fight his restraints, but I could see it was no use.
Tears stung my eyes, skewing my vision of him, and it enraged me. It enraged me that I was not strong enough to move. To stop it. To save him. I was a monster—his monster—yet I was helpless.
“Vidar, fight!” I cried out, immobilized under the weight of my captors. My heart thundered painfully, my voice ripping my throat apart as I screamed. “Vidar, please!”
The xhoth moved closer to either side of him, raising their crude spears.
Their teethy smiles widened, their throats bobbing with excitement as if they were readying for a meal.
Vidar continued to fight his binds, his eyes fixed on me as if the beasts with spears did not concern him, but it was no use.
None of it was. The more we fought to get to each other, the more force was used to keep us apart.
“Dahlia,” he finally said, his tone too calm for the situation at hand.
“No,” I said, sensing the acceptance in his voice. “No, Vidar. Please.”
I thrashed wildly against the hands that held me down, pouring every ounce of strength into kicking and battling them off.
“Dahlia, look at me!”
“No, Vidar, I need you! Not now. Please. Don’t give up now. You have to keep fighting.”
“Stop! Look at me, love. Just look at me.”
I sobbed, opening my eyes to see him slumping over himself, out of breath, most of his blood on the floor around him.
“I love you,” he said, breathless.
“Don’t. This isn’t real. This is a dream. It has to be.”
“No more dreams. We both know it. We came here to end it and you can still do that. I know you can.”
“Not without you. Please,” I wept, my whole body shaking with panic.
“This will ruin you. Use it. Your rage is your greatest strength.”
“I can’t.”
The spears rose up over Vidar’s back.
“I will look for you in every lifetime. In every body,” he said. “I will love you in all of them, until the last star burns out in the sky.” I stopped struggling for a breath to look him in his eyes and see his lips slant into a weak smile. “I will see you in your dreams.”
He fixed his jaw, taking a deep breath, his hands balling into tight fists.
The realization that I had no time hit me like a cannonball to my chest.
“No! I love you,” I rushed. “Vidar, I love you!”
“I know you do."
The spears struck with brutal force, piercing him cleanly, their tips embedding into the stone floor before him.
In an instant, he was gone, his execution too swift to comprehend.
His once-mighty form crumpled, his head bowed low, obscuring his features from my view.
Vidar Woelfson, the hunter, now lay before me, pinned by the twin spears, frozen in his time of death.
The chamber was enveloped in silence, his familiar heartbeat now a distant echo.
The essence of him slipped away, as though he had never been, leaving an emptiness I couldn't shake.
And I was destroyed. Utterly and completely destroyed like my soul had gone with him into the afterlife. My heart still beat, but it was not alive. It did not sing. And inside, there was a chasm that Vidar once occupied.
It was hollow.
The sons faded into the obsidian void that had swallowed the walls, their rhythmic breaths like laughter whispering across the air in their wake.
Fury. Hate. It was not enough to describe what I was feeling.
Madness was not when Akareth haunted my dreams and twisted my thoughts.
Madness was what I felt when I saw Vidar murdered before my eyes, bound and helpless and stripped of all that made him a terror.
He’d been killed by cowards. Madness was the numbness threatening to eat away at my spirit when I realized there was nothing left for me to fight for.
I had come to Theloch to die.
My breath came and went in sobs that made my head spin.
The hands released me, but no longer did I have anything to drive me to my feet.
I pushed up on my elbows, hooking my fingers in the rough grooves in the stone and dragging myself toward Vidar, my body a burdensome sack of flesh now that he was gone.
I paused, my hand extended toward him, when something slithered across my bare leg.
Slowly, I turned my head to see a black, thick tentacle pulsing around my ankle before it receded into the shadows.
Another to my left coiled back from the light and another on my right slid toward the wall, veiled by darkness.
The chamber went silent save for my tormented cries, and even those no longer echoed against the confines.
Someone—something—was now occupying the space that wasn’t there before.
Glowing eyes looked on from the watery mote like an audience awaiting a show, and then slowly turned to peer into the seemingly empty darkness in front of me, watching something I could not yet see.
My skin tightened around me like salted hide that had been left in the heat. I wanted to tear out of it.
I watched the darkness bend and ripple and move independently of the walls like a creature all its own, pulling in toward a center like smoke through a vent.
Fear whispered to me only to find that I had no room left for it to grow roots.
The shadows coiled and bent and settled until they were not shadows at all, but a thin, silky cloak of fabric, tattered on the ends and dragging in the shallow puddles of water that littered the floor.
I stared as those black tentacles slithered back from all around me, drawing into the base of the cloak like snakes into their burrows.
As soon as they were gone, the cloak undulated, separating from the gloom, an entity all its own, born from the abyss.
A pale foot, long and bony and tipped with untrimmed nails, slipped out from the fabric as the figure stepped forward into the column of moonlight.
Before me stood the uncanny visage of a man.
Or something trying to resemble a man. The cloak drooped on him like water curved over stones.
Long, thin arms sloped from sharp shoulders.
Hands, equally stretched and reedy and pale as mist, teased the ends of the wide sleeves, his fingers moving like each one was a creature that had a mind of its own.
I dared to lift my eyes a little more and found myself staring into…
nothing. There was a face with a mouth, a nose, and sharp features, but like his hands, the entity did not seem to know how to use it.
The expression was blank as if it had been molded from clay and left to exist only one way.
He peered into me with eyes that were not just black.
They were pure, suffocating absence. Absence of life.
Of emotion. Of anything that would tell me he had a soul or a heartbeat for that matter.
And I knew, in my gut and in what was left of the soul Vidar had left behind, that I was looking at the father himself. I was looking at Akareth.