45. DEVOURER #3
“Do not lecture me about what the Emperor wants,” Tharanoth drawled. “I will do as I please, as I have always done, and he will tolerate it. If you disagree, I suggest you take your sniveling back to Ihrafang.”
Ileth hissed. “I should. Zephon and Rakalem are destroyed, Nabatar incapacitated, Turil made a fool of by your illicit offspring . . . This planet is more trouble than it’s worth.”
Tharanoth ignored her. “You would, of course, ensure Naxal’s return to us.”
“Or,” said Jacen, “given you’re in need of new leadership in Zivora, I could position Neri Semira as your figurehead.
” He knew the story he might tell, its words not so different from the ones Ysira had saved his life to say.
“Born of the Harvest, of a mother whose return is living proof of your good intentions . . . put in place by a prophet of your own blood . . . One might even say you chose him.”
“And I suppose you would lead my Church, Father Kheris?” Tharanoth smiled. The stars themselves seemed to shiver. “I don’t think so.”
Tharanoth’s presence crept forward, sweeping over Jacen as Turil encroached from behind. They had Jacen in their clutches. He was deep enough that they could destroy him with very little effort.
But he had them, too.
In the murky depths of the Lord of Hunger’s mind, Jacen glimpsed it at last: a flicker of extradimensional energy, the barest glimmer of a living consciousness not so different from Jacen’s own.
After millennia under the demon’s crushing weight, enslaved to something not remotely human, it was no longer aware of much.
Urien had said these hosts were young when the archdemons took them. Children, raised to see this as an honor. Did they even know what they had lost?
No time to consider that, nor the waking nightmare of such an existence. Jacen could only add it to the list of crimes for which Tharanoth was about to pay.
He navigated the buried consciousness like a map.
He couldn’t target vital functions without Tharanoth noticing—the god would doubtless fight back if his host stopped breathing.
Sight and hearing were also too risky. But while Tharanoth sat there, talking to Jacen, he had no need of his arms and legs.
Just as Jacen had done to the scavenger in Avram Semira’s audience chamber, he paralyzed the Lord of Hunger’s limbs. His hold on Ileth was tenuous. He could only affect her through her connection to Tharanoth. But he held fast and waited.
“You’ve been an interesting diversion,” said Tharanoth, “but we’re finished here.”
Jacen grasped for something else to say, anything that would keep these creatures from destroying him for a few moments longer. “Wait.”
Tharanoth chuckled. “It’s a bit late for that.” Then they heard it.
A deep groan echoed from outside Tharanoth’s consciousness, somewhere in the structure around him.
Jacen held his breath. There was no telling how long they had been there.
With extradimensional communion, it could have been seconds or hours outside.
Was this the sound of those cannons, preparing to fire? Or had Neri finally succeeded?
Gravity shifted—and Jacen had his answer.
Tharanoth opened his eyes, revealing brilliant green irises in seas of inky black. He tried to stand—and realized he could not.
Jacen watched Tharanoth’s face, so strangely like his own, as the chamber tilted. Even the motes of dust, glittering and drifting through the starlight, changed direction. Time slowed and shuddered in its tracks.
At long last, Jacen beheld fear in the eyes of a god.
With sudden, desperate strength, Ileth broke free. Her consciousness dropped away, scuttling into the shadows.
But Tharanoth was trapped. As he realized his fatal mistake, his lip curled. “Perhaps you’re more like me than I realized.”
The Lord of Hunger fought him, but Jacen held on with everything he had. Tharanoth’s body was wrenched sideways, then down, by the inexorable force beyond the station. He was falling, and Jacen with him.
The universe turned inside out, and suddenly everything was red.
Constellations painted sanguine, arrayed into a bright, dense mosaic on the wheeling horizon.
But Jacen kept a stranglehold on Tharanoth’s motor functions until he knew, as though Naxal had whispered it to him, that they’d reached a point of no return.
An impossible gravity, from which light itself could not escape.
Instead of crashing into solid ground they fell faster, faster, caught in eternity’s grasp—into the maw of the demon star.
Tharanoth’s limbs shredded to ribbons. His skull splintered. Jacen caught a glimpse of a many-legged creature, flailing from where it crouched in the mutated husk of a brain it inhabited. At last, he reached deep, grasping the tether that connected Tharanoth to Turil to Seth, and pulled.
He let go.
Jacen dragged Turil’s consciousness with him, catapulting them both back to physical reality through an unfolding cosmic storm.
He had never felt so small. Even Tharanoth was so small, a speck in the face of the omnipotent void. The farther Jacen fell, the faster the destruction around him raged. He lost sight of Tharanoth’s shattering, dying mind in a sea of heat and shadow.