Chapter 31 Drums of the Deep
Drums of the Deep
Was it worth it, Auryn’reh Solah?
Waiting…
Do not rush to give an answer. You are in the Sight.
Here, time is endless, and only you pay the price of using this forbidden power on a whim.
He pays nothing. Not by watching. He hurts, but it is nothing compared to what you’ve given for a glimpse into the future.
You know this, and you will not let it go to waste.
So, take the reins. You have witnessed one future, and now you have seen how you will perish in it. Lost in the snow. Alone. Freezing even as you whisper to ghosts and call his name. But that is not a suitable end for the Numen of Ennea. It is sickening to witness.
Stop waiting.
Stop hesitating.
Go and find your other future—the one where you still wait, but the waiting is without hope.
Only longing. Only helplessness. Unless you can find a way to change it.
You can. You are the Numen. The Veilweave bows to your will.
The Gardens once breathed through your lungs. The Nine sing within your core.
Touch the earth. Like that. You kneel, though such a thing is blasphemy.
Kneel and press your fingers to the crisp white snow.
The ground beneath your feet twists and vanishes into nothing, and you fall, endlessly, into the pitch-black pit below.
Your Silari has abandoned you. Your loneliness has consumed you.
Years of emptiness have scraped you into nothing but a shell.
You scream and scream as you fall. The wind whips your hair into your face, batters your body with racking pain. But that isn’t why you shriek until your voice is hoarse and spent. Even as you slam into the ground, even as your lungs burn and your bones shudder—you still call for him.
You know what this is. The agony of losing your Bonded—the being meant to be your aegis, your conduit. Without him, you are broken. But the skies have watched you, Auryn’reh Solah. You are even more broken when you covet him.
Do not shut your eyes to the truth. That is not the Numen way. You know of what I speak. From the moment he ripped you from Ennea’s womb without a care for your body or your spirit, he declared his disregard for his duty as your other half.
No. Do not speak to the skies of memory. Do not excuse his negligence. He may not remember who he is, but his soul belongs to you. He is a tool, and a tool is meant to be wielded. You will see. When you step into the city and the silence and the Endless Dark, you will see everything.
Hush.
Listen.
It is quiet. So quiet now. Silence distilled into poison. And then…
The silence shatters.
Wind screams.
From the depths of Elendria comes a primal rhythm, a perversion of what once was sacred.
Listen now.
Can you hear the drums?
Beating. Beating. Beating.
Like a living heart.
A slow, thunderous cadence echoing in your bones. Each thump a war cry, the thundering igniting walls around you that appear from the darkness like a creature long forgotten. Crystal and rock veined with pulsing silver mana. An abomination—beautiful and cold and sickening in its perfection.
Beating. Beating. Beating.
Each impact explodes in emerald light, as though the crystal walls crave the sound. They are starved for it after millennia of silence. Look with your Manasight; witness the magic bursting through the silver veins, spreading outwards to shape an image in the nothingness around you.
A city made of crystal, stone, and marble.
Lattices, rings, and chiseled buildings.
A spire spearing upwards into a colossal cavern, so tall you cannot see the top.
Lights shimmer and glint in endless glass windows.
Crystalline structures jut upwards, their shapes carved into the image of a looming deity.
The Destroyer.
His perversion.
Not your Bonded, but the one that would call himself his brother.
You will see, Auryn’reh Solah. You will witness.
Look there, above you. The ceiling of the cavern is red, bleeding into black. Beneath it, a vast spherical cloak of golden magic wraps around the city like a shield. Cracks spider-web across it, leaking light that no longer warms—only sears.
The drums are beating. Beating. Beating.
Emerald light coalesces beneath your feet. Walk the path, Numen. Follow it.
One by one, you take the steps towards your doom, halting right at the edge of a narrow bridge fashioned of onyx and stone.
The bridge spans more than a mile, the only way to enter the city across a gaping chasm.
The Maw, it is called. But you would not remember, not broken with love and mortal wants.
Stumbling to the cliff’s edge, you look down. Nausea blooms in your belly. You taste bile, and clutch at the bridge in terror. A voice comes, whispering right against your ear. Dark. Rumbling. Like a beast just learning human speech.
Welcome…welcome home…
You shudder, twisting around. But only more darkness greets you. No going back. Only forward. Across the bridge. Across the chasm. So, you walk. Step by step, craning your neck to look upwards into the faces of the effigies lining the bridge.
Empty. Hollow. Their eyes frozen while their mouths open in snarls and shrieks.
Beyond the bridge, a horn blares—deep, throaty, shaking the entire cavern.
Something pierces the glowing shield over the city.
Two shafts stab downwards from the ceiling right into the heart of the metropolis.
Gears turn somewhere deep within. Enormous mirrors shift.
Then light.
So bright it blinds.
Overwhelming, stealing your breath.
The shafts bring daylight from the Surface to this world which knows only shadow.
You walk. Enthralled. Hypnotized.
All around you, the drums still pound.
Beating. Beating. Beating.
The horns blare again.
You gasp as the effigies and the bridge beneath you collapse, twisting.
The world around you breaks again. Something pushes you with the force of a hammer at your back, and when you open your eyes, you are kneeling on a black marble floor before dozens of robed figures.
Their fingers pointed to you, shouting and accusing.
“Sokar,” one of them hisses.
“Impostor,” another declares.
“Shapeless. Colorless. Useless ornament!”
“Heretic. Witch! Blasphemer!”
They raise their hands. Chains of crystal light slither through the air, wrapping around your wrists, your throat, your ribs. You gasp. Choke. Can’t breathe. Can’t move.
Look at what you’ve chosen—a voice growls.
Not the robed figures. From behind her. From the pulpit, where a stone altar looms—slick with blood, veiled in smoke. A figure steps forward through the fog.
Tall. Towering. Familiar.
Your breath catches. You scramble to your feet. And the way you run to him. The shame of the relief on your face. As if just seeing him will break the chains of your fate. As if jumping into his embrace will cure you of your many deformations.
“Kailorien,” you whisper.
But it is not the Resh’Agar. Nor is it your Bonded. Look closely, fallen star. The figure bears his shape. His stance. Even the tilt of his head. But his eyes burn red—molten, merciless. His mana is tainted. Coiled with madness.
“Emberling,” he says, voice like cracking bone. “So, this is the righteous fire that would chain the Resh’Agar.”
Your heart stutters. Your skin burns. But you know him. All too well.
The Vargrún.
The wolf of the shattered world. The thing left behind after the breaking of the Skyglass. The darkness that was captured, tamed, enslaved—then sealed into your Bonded. See how the air bends around him. Aether snarls in his wake. Every breath of his presence devours mana, love, hope.
He is lust behind the war. Blood behind the blade.
“You are small, Auryn’reh Solah,” he smiles. “Too small to hold our chains. Go back to the ice, little ember. Go back to Skyglass. He awakened you…but it was a mistake.”
Stop it.
Stop shaking.
Clasp your hands together. Breathe.
Do not let that word echo in your heart again.
Mistake.
Mistake.
You grit your teeth so hard they might crack. You are not a mistake—not small, not shapeless. Even now, on quaking legs, you stand. The mark of Numen. You endure. Through time and death and rebirth—you endure.
I…
I endure.
My nails dig into my palms, and I look at the Resh’Agar’s Master Rune—as the Vargrún—without flinching.
“So…” I say, “it would seem we both have a monster just behind our eyes.”
Vargrún smiles. A cruel, jagged thing. He steps close. Grips my arms so hard I have to stifle a gasp. Pain flares, too real to be a dream.
“You tamper with forces beyond your ken,” he says.
I raise my chin. “Only beyond memory. But not beyond my will.”
Sound presses in, deafening now.
The drums—Beating. Beating. Beating.
The horn roars in a mourning dirge.
My veins sing in tune, the Nine Rivers cresting in my soul. Vargrún’s smile widens, showing gleaming fangs.
“You will see, emberling. And you will regret.”
He crushes his lips to mine. A bruising, brutal kiss—meant to punish, to scar. But I don’t fight it. Because beneath the violence—beneath the rage—I feel him.
The Resh’Agar.
My Kailorien.
The Bond trembles, and I reach—not with hands, but with memory. With hope. With love.
Kail. This isn’t who you are. Come back.
The kiss softens. The pain ebbs. The light around me cracks and bends.
When I open my eyes, the red is gone. His gaze is blue. Dazed. Devastated. Real.
Mine.
“You can’t choose this,” he breathes hard. Desperate. “You can’t.” His voice shakes now—not from rage, but fear.
“I do,” I tell him. “I already have.”
His hands tremble against my face. “You don’t understand—what they will do to you, what I will do to you—”
“I know. I saw. I saw everything. I saw the pain. The blood. The betrayal. I saw Estar. I saw Vargrún. I saw myself break.”
“Then why—”
“Because I would rather burn beside you…than wither in a tomb without you.”
His azure eyes fill with agony. With sorrow. With grief.
“You must choose, too, Kailorien,” I warn him. “Tell me. What do you choose?”
The words burst from him—raw, unguarded, full of ache. “Come with me. Please.”
“You’ll leave me,” I remind him. Knowing. Somehow knowing everything. “You’ll abandon me for duty. Cage me in safety and comfort until I nearly lose myself.”
He shakes his head. Fierce. Denying. He presses his forehead to mine.
“Come with me. I’ll find a way. I swear it.”
A pause. A breath. I look not at him, but into him. Because whatever the Numen might do in this moment matters not. I do not see my Silari. Or the Resh’Agar. Only my Kailorien and the piece of my soul he already carries.
“I won’t forgive you right away,” I whisper. “Perhaps not for a long while. But I will. I promise I will.”
The tether that had always pulsed between us breaks open at my vow. Not a flicker. Or a flame. A maelstrom.
The Bond.
Heat and light and breath surge between us—two halves slamming into place like the seal of creation itself has snapped shut. Thought disintegrates. Walls vanish. Our bodies fall away like illusions, and in their place rises something blinding.
I feel him.
The tension in his spine, the scrape of air in his lungs, the ache he carries in his chest every time he thinks of me alone.
His fury. His longing. His hunger, veiled so carefully behind duty.
I drown in his scent, the sound of his heartbeat, the memory of every time he reached for me and stopped short.
And he, in turn, feels all of me.
The frostbite in my bones from years of isolation. The incandescent tenderness I carry for him—fierce, protective, ancient. My longing isn’t soft. It is starved. Every flicker of desire I had tried to suppress now rages through me like fire through dry grass.
It is unbearable.
Perfect.
And when the world rights itself again—when vision returns and breath comes ragged and real—we are still clutching each other. Shaking. Clinging like castaways who had seen the face of the storm—and survived it.
Kailorien’s voice breaks against my ear. “What…was that…”
I can only speak two words, stunned and breathless.
“Our Bond.”