Chapter 17 Into the Wound #2
Reading. "The deterioration has accelerated.
These roots should be carrying significant emotional energy, but they're nearly depleted.
The Garden is redirecting everything it has to the wound, and it's still not enough.
" "How much time?" Sera asked. Oren hesitated, and the hesitation was more telling than any answer he could have given.
"By my previous calculations, decades. Perhaps a century if the root network could be reinforced.
But the acceleration I'm observing—" He paused, and his faded gold eyes met hers with the direct, unflinching honesty that had made him the first member of the Court to treat her as a person.
"Years, Sera. Perhaps fewer than five." The number landed in Sera's chest like a stone.
Five years. Five years before the wound widened beyond the root network's ability to contain it, before the Veil ruptured, before the catastrophic emotional flooding that would destroy the coherence of every being in both realms. Five years, and the only being who could heal the wound was descending into the Descent for the first time, her training three days old, her powers raw and untested, and the political machinery of an entire realm arrayed either for her or against her.
She kept walking. *** The first zone of Hollowed activity announced itself not with sight or sound but with a shift in the quality of the air itself, a sudden, sharp drop in the already-depleted emotional content of the atmosphere, as though something ahead was draining the resonance from everything it touched.
Sera felt it through the Bond as a cold spot, a void in the emotional landscape that pulled at her awareness the way a deep well pulls at a stone dropped near its edge, and she understood, with the instinctive certainty of her shadow-touched blood, that they were approaching beings for whom the concept of emotional connection had ceased to exist. Malakor raised his hand, and the group stopped.
Through the Bond, Sera felt him reaching outward with his Warden's Authority, a probe of emotional intention that extended through the root structures and into the darkness ahead, and she felt the Authority encounter the Hollowed.
The sensation was indescribable. Not because it was beyond language but because it was the absence of everything language was designed to convey.
The Warden's Authority touched the Hollowed, and what it found was not hostility or hunger or even the empty, predatory need that Sera had encountered during the Descent breach.
What it found was nothing. An absolute, featureless void where emotional resonance should have been, a gap in the fabric of emotional reality that was so complete that it produced a kind of anti-resonance, a negative space so profound that it made the surrounding emotional atmosphere feel thicker by comparison, the way the darkness around a star makes the star appear brighter.
"Four signatures," Malakor said quietly.
"Early-stage coherence loss. They're not organized, but they'll respond to our emotional signatures as food sources.
Cassian, stay behind Sera. Oren, maintain the Reading probe.
Sera—" He turned to face her, and his amber eyes held the particular intensity of a man issuing orders he was not certain would be obeyed.
"Stay close. Do not engage. If they approach, I will handle them.
" "Your Authority will drive them back temporarily, but they'll return once you release the pressure," Oren said, his voice carrying the clipped efficiency of a scholar who had studied the Hollowed for millennia and understood their behavior with the detached precision of a naturalist observing predatory animals.
"The wound is their source. As long as we're moving toward it, we're moving toward them.
The deeper we go, the more numerous and more degraded they'll become.
" "Then we go quickly," Malakor said, and he turned and moved into the darkness, and Sera followed, and the four of them descended through the first zone of Hollowed activity with the tense, focused efficiency of a military unit moving through hostile territory.
They encountered the Hollowed at the zone's boundary, where the root structures thinned and the tunnel opened into a vast, cathedral-like space of compressed shadow and absolute darkness.
The four beings emerged from the darkness like shapes coalescing from fog, their forms flickering and unstable, their edges dissolving and reforming in a continuous, unsettling rhythm that made them appear less like beings and more like suggestions of beings, ideas of creatures that had not quite committed to existence.
Their bioluminescence was the muddy, intermittent grey that Sera remembered from the Descent breach, a sickly, pulsing light that revealed not individual color but a uniform, corrupted resonance, and their eyes—if the two spots of slightly brighter grey that served as their eyes could be called that—were fixed on the descending party with a hunger that was not aggressive but absorptive, the gaze of beings who wanted not to attack but to consume, to drain the emotional content from the four intruders the way a sponge drains water from a surface.
Sera felt them reach for the Bond. The sensation was unlike anything she had experienced in either realm: a pulling, tugging pressure at the edges of her emotional awareness, as though invisible hands were trying to pry loose the connection between her and Malakor, not through force but through the simple, devastating gravity of their emptiness.
The Hollowed did not attack the Bond directly.
They simply existed near it, and their existence created a vacuum that the Bond's emotional energy naturally wanted to fill, a gradient that pulled at the warm, vital resonance of the connection the way a drain pulls at water.
The fear that shot through Sera was immediate and visceral, and she felt Malakor respond to it through the Bond, his consciousness surging toward her with protective intensity, and she felt, in the same instant, the Hollowed respond to his surge, their empty forms flickering with what might have been anticipation, because an emotional surge through the Bond was emotional energy in motion, and motion created gradients, and gradients were what the Hollowed fed on.
"Sera." Malakor's voice was iron. "Steady.
" She steadied herself, not by suppressing the fear but by doing what Cassian had taught her, what three days of training had drilled into her exhausted body: she felt the fear, acknowledged it, and then shifted her emotional focus to the Bond's core, the steady, warm pulse of Malakor's love that lay beneath the fear like bedrock beneath soil.