31. COMM #2
He found himself back at the library, demanding an audience with Var Naxal. An alarmed disciple directed him to the Gate chamber. Jacen practically sprinted there, through the fields and the warren of tunnels, until he reached the black door and shoved it open.
Neri sat cross-legged below the Gate, opposite Eneva.
Both had their eyes closed, several Disciples sitting in a semicircle around them as Ysira and Seth watched from a more comfortable distance.
Jacen sensed the extradimensional energy coalescing by the Gate.
He sensed Naxal, overwhelming every other presence in the temple.
As Jacen approached, Neri looked up in alarm. The Gatekeeper did not so much as open her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to perform an assessment,” Jacen said. “I want to see this demon for myself.”
At first glance, Neri appeared the same as he always had, dressed in a simple black tunic with a dagger at his belt.
His skin was dark from sun exposure, his short hair neatly trimmed and combed.
He was palpably weary, with a new hollowness to his cheeks that made him look a bit older, but he bore no outward signs of demonic possession.
Except for his eyes. It wasn’t just the color that had changed—those eyes might as well have aged a hundred years.
“Extradimensional communion is not so simple with Naxal,” Eneva warned. “Even for a Sixth Tier telepath.”
Jacen ignored her. “Show me,” he said to Neri. “Please. I can help.”
Neri looked to Eneva as though asking permission. “He offered to help me back in Zivora before any of this. I trust him.”
Neri’s voice was as unchanged as his body, young and uncertain, at odds with the sheer gravity of his mind. Yet suddenly, Jacen understood the Gatekeeper and her Disciples’ impulse to bow.
Eneva grudgingly stood and stepped aside. She gestured at the pool full of telkaan roots. “You will require assistance.”
“I’ll manage.” Jacen knelt opposite Neri. The boy squared his shoulders. “Go ahead.”
Jacen took a breath, closed his eyes, and reached out. Neri lowered his mental barriers, revealing the thing that lived inside him.
The Source’s energy thrummed through both their minds, amplified by the Gate. How could Jacen have ever believed this was some sort of taint or evidence of evil? It seemed so obvious now. This was life itself, a bright spark inside them all. And in Neri . . .
It was like putting a finger on the pulse of the universe. At the core of Neri’s consciousness, the center around which a galaxy orbited, Jacen beheld a dark star of inescapable gravity. A tangled, pulsing knot of impossible complexity, built from the memories of hundreds.
Jacen had encountered demons who’d possessed multiple hosts—never more than a handful.
The creatures retained only traces of their memories and personalities.
Even Elyas’s demon had been easy to assess: a tenant of three different hosts scattered across centuries, preserved in fragments and kept firmly at bay by the skill of a trained telepath.
The only remotely comparable entity Jacen had encountered was the demon—the god—inside that corpse.
Naxal was even more ancient and far more alien. Where the archdemon had been an entity of singular will, any subsequent presences subsumed by the first, Naxal’s thousand voices ebbed and flowed—some demanding to be heard, some barely there, in and out like an ocean tide.
An ocean?
The comparison leapt unbidden into Jacen’s mind. He had never seen an ocean. Yet he could picture it: fathomless depths of blue water, waves crashing against a rocky shore. Jacen may not have seen it, but someone inside Neri’s head had.
Without meaning to, Jacen recoiled. He struggled to tell his own thoughts from the demon’s—where he ended and they began. They were many, but they were also one, woven together by the web that was Naxal.
Neri was breathing fast, staring wide-eyed at Jacen with something strangely like pleading.
“See?” Eneva scoffed.
“I can’t understand them,” said Neri. “I only see what they want me to see. I can . . . skim power from the surface. I don’t know how to go deeper. Not on purpose.”
“Do you want to go deeper?” Jacen asked gently.
Neri wouldn’t answer. He tried to set his jaw, but it wobbled. “Maybe that’s enough,” Seth cut in. He ignored Ysira’s restraining hand.
“No,” said Neri. “I have to. If I can’t control this, who else will? Am I supposed to just pass it off to someone who’d be burned alive?” His next words were a whisper, to Jacen alone. “Please show me.”
Neri was asking. He was terrified, but he was asking.
And who was Jacen—a failure, an addict, the offspring and accomplice of monsters—to hesitate along this path, however difficult? His heart beat faster. He looked at the dark, still water, then at Eneva.
“All right. I’m ready.”
The Gatekeeper lifted her chin, appraising him. Then she seized him by the collar and shoved him facedown into the pool. Jacen struggled on reflex, water flooding his unprepared airway. Telkaan root was a hallucinogen, exponentially more powerful than cactus fruit, and it hit him like a meteor.
Eneva wrenched him out of the water, and it seemed to take hours.
He could have counted every drop that sprang from his skin and hair as he fell back and collided with the stone.
He had forgotten how to breathe, and for a brief eternity, he was frozen inside that single moment of terror.
Somewhere far away, muffled voices shouted.
A spider crawled across the floor, inches from his face, and it sang to him.
The ceiling trembled. The extradimensional energy clustered around the Gate writhed, twisted, and spread across the chamber in a thousand creeping tentacles. Jacen could see how it must have reached him all the way down at the harbor.
A shadow moved over him, blocking the light. Eneva. She pressed two fingers to his forehead, tilting his head back.
Everything went dark.
As one might use a stepping stone to cross a river, the drug made it easy to catapult his mind across Neri’s—to Naxal. For this, Jacen now understood, was the work of a prophet. To venture inside a mind unbound by space and time, and—
To—
See.
At first, Jacen could not comprehend it. There was too much color, too much sound. Stars danced. Celestial bodies collided. Distantly, he sensed Neri’s panic.
Don’t try to focus on details, Jacen told him. Keep your distance; see the whole. Find the beginning.