Eventually, after seconds or hours, he pushed himself up and gazed at his surroundings. Already, the clearing cut down the middle by the stream and the rushing falls had begun to melt into the violet haze, as if a veil were being drawn across his eyes. Lifting a hand to his face, he confirmed it was not his eyes but the place he’d entered; his hand was there, solid, unchanged. Wherever he was, he couldn’t very well sit there forever and hope to be found. The Roaming People had left him here, like an old cloak thrown into a closet and forgotten. It remained highly unlikely that anyone else knew he was here, and nothing had changed. He had to find his own way.
When he took his first hesitant step, his stomach lurched, and the world seemed to tilt violently forward. Kherron threw his arms out to brace himself for the fall, but it never came. He merely stood a step from where he’d been, arms rigidly extended, feeling like a fool. Thinking perhaps this phenomenon was a type of sign—something telling him he’d gone the wrong way—he turned to face the opposite direction. Nothing now remained of the clearing but a pale grey outline he could barely discern. Wherever he might have intended to go, there remained no way of deciphering how. So he took another step, and everything shifted and jerked again.
Grunting, he braced for the impact of his body upon the ground, and once more, he remained upright. A wave of nausea crept up into his throat, but it subsided just as quickly. This made it easy to imagine how young children felt when they learned to walk for the first time, but the fact that he relived such a sensation now irritated him to no end. For a moment, he considered forfeiting his decision to press on and merely remain where he was. How could he hope to leave this place if every movement sickened and unbalanced him?
But that was a foolish outlook, pathetically victimizing. After everything he’d already endured, he could not justify wasting it all to avoid vertigo and an upset stomach, regardless of his presence in this unknown place. He was not a child, and he was not defenseless.
With that thought, he realized he still gripped the Sky Metal blade, which brought some semblance of relief. Though he had not yet tapped into the potential of his connection with the world around him—passed on to him by the spirits he still did not understand and the woman in the water—he did still have a deadly blade and a drive to protect himself. That would have to be enough.
Kherron told himself he would not raise his arms with his next step, no matter how he felt he would fall. He failed with the first but succeeded with the second step, and the next, finding the heaving of the endless space around him lessening the more he roamed. And he managed to move with faster, surer footing.
The purple hue touching everything faded, giving way to dark, wavering shades of grey and black and sickly, muddied green. Only when he recognized an outcropping of jagged boulders through the murky haze did he realize he must have traveled somewhere. Strangely, that was the only scenery. A thick mist covered the ground beneath him, hiding his boots from view as if his legs ended above the ankles. But it did not swirl about him with his increasingly confident steps, and he had to look away. He could discern no sky—no clouds, no sun—and the grey light came from everywhere and nowhere. The boulders were the only other existing thing, so he stepped toward them, tightening his grip on the dagger.
When he reached the outcropping, he stepped around the first stones to find still nothing on the other side—no other landmarks, no change in the grey shadows of nonexistence, no other presence. He turned around to check how far he’d come, which was a useless gesture here but a habit formed through his few weeks of travel. But he did find something where he’d just been.
From within the haze of lightlessness rose a tilted wooden deck, siderails splintered and snapped, a few planks protruding crookedly to end in jagged points. A dark shadow crouched there, and Kherron went toward it, finding himself beside the new addition far quicker than he’d anticipated. In mere seconds, he was close enough to reach out and touch the destruction, though he did not. Instead, he stared in mind-numbing realization at the figure upon the tilted deck.
It was Uishen, frozen in time and place, bare feet planted on the deck. His body tilted with the wreckage of what could have been a shipwrecked vessel at the bottom of the ocean, if they’d been in the ocean. Gravity and movement had no effect on the rigidity of the ferryman’s shocked pose, the crossbow hanging loose in his grip. The terrified disbelief etched upon his open mouth and wide eyes, which pierced Kherron’s own gaze, made Kherron swallow the lump of shame rising from his gut.
“Uishen?” He tried to whisper the man’s name, but it echoed around them anyways, making him flinch. Such sound should not have been possible here, and it felt blasphemous before of this strange vision. Of course, the ferryman did not reply. He did not move at all, and when Kherron stepped aside to look for any sign of life or hope, Uishen’s eyes stared unblinkingly at the emptiness before him.
Kherron reached out with a trembling hand to place it on the man’s shoulder, but his palm passed through the image of his friend, coming to stop instead against the very real and very solid edge of the Honalei’s splintered siderail. He felt as if he would be sick, and this time not from the churning heave of the world when he walked. He wished he’d never seen this image, that he might have eventually forgotten the last fleeting glimpse of the ferryman before he’d fallen to his capsized vessel and the raging river—before Kherron had been pulled from the Sylthurst and delivered safely to land. He knew he would never forget what he saw now. He’d done nothing to save the man, had not given any thought to finding him once he’d come face to face with the woman in the river. He hadn’t even asked after Uishen, whether he was alive or dead, whether anything could have been done. And whatever had happened to the ferryman, it would never have been his fate if Kherron hadn’t been on his barge, if he’d never booked passage from Vereling Town and paid the man for such a service. Wherever he went, devastation followed him like a scent—storms of deceit, swarming black clouds, vengeful amarach. This was his doing.
“I’m so sorry,” Kherron said, his voice ringing out until the void of this place sucked it into nothingness. Tears pricked his eyes, but he sniffed and forced them back. As if in response to his words, like an echo of what might have been there, the creaking groan of the Honalei’s deck, all her oddities and moving wheels and turning shafts, shattered the silence. The image before him didn’t move, but somewhere on the Sylthurst in the night, it had, and it had taken Uishen with it.
He couldn’t stay here any longer, couldn’t look at the ferryman’s terror-stricken face, dampened by confusion and the haze of alcohol. So he turned his back and stepped away into the wavering shadows of things that didn’t exist in this place and perhaps had never been.
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO tell how long he’d walked or how far. Step after step, he felt himself move through the nonexistence but somehow remained exactly where he was. No other visions rose from the solid mist at his feet—no rocks, no ships, no valleys or rivers or trees. Uishen’s fear had burned itself in his memory, and he saw the man’s glassy eyes in every trick of the grey nothingness around him. He stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep, shaking breath, unable to combat his deepening shame. The idea rose as if someone had spoken it aloud; perhaps this place was his penance for forsaking those he could have protected in order to hasten the end of his own journey. If that were true, he did not know if it would make this more or less bearable. But if he stopped and allowed himself to wallow in that disgrace, he would also forsake any chance to help the next person on his journey. Or himself.
That seemed an impossible choice, one he might have taken an eternity standing there to make, but he forced himself to press on. He opened his eyes to see nothing again. With his next step, hundreds of glowing lights blinked into existence around him, as if they’d always been there and he’d intruded upon their presence. Giving off a dull, choked light, the tiny orbs circled around him with terrible slowness, no faster than cotton drifting on a low breeze. They looked more
green than gold, muted by this place, but they reminded Kherron distinctly of the fae—the creatures who had given him Dehlyn’s words and healed his wounds before vanishing in an instant.
“Hello?” he called silently, gingerly, as if he’d interrupted some sacred ritual in a place it did not belong. One of the lights shuddered beside his head, and he eyed it warily.
‘Kherron.’ A hundred voices rose as one, weak and tentative, like a sigh of grief. These were the fae—they recognized him—and yet they were entirely not themselves. Perverted by this place of timelessness and vapid, seeping memories, the fae now seemed a mere shadow of what they had been. ‘We never thought to see you here,’ they said, words coming from every direction as they circled him in listless misguidance.
“What is this place?” He forced himself to speak gently, to keep from startling them away. He felt he was dreaming, and that the fae dreamed with him, and any wrong step would wake them both into another nightmare.
‘This is the place before life and after death. Between existence and nothingness,’ the voices called. ‘It has no name, but it was our last chance.’
“To do what?” He felt lost, trying to cling to something sure and true by flailing in questions, but nothing made sense.
‘To survive.’ A few more of the muted golden orbs shuddered around him, jerking in midair as if shaken by an invisible hand. ‘There was a time, once, when the gift we gave you did not come at such a price. But that was so long ago, and everything is costly now. We came here to survive, to endure, until the end of this age. When the Unclaimed releases herself into the world once more, we will return.’
Kherron swallowed, feeling himself sinking into despair. “I... I did this to you.” His legs went numb at the implication; the fae had saved his life, had repaired the wound from Lorraii’s treacherous blade more than mere time alone would have, and they remained in this abyss because of it.
‘We made our choice so you could make yours,’ they replied. He thought their voices grew weaker with every word. ‘This is not the end.’
He thought immediately of Uishen. He’d seen the ferryman’s image in the wreckage, here in the nothingness, but he had not actually seen the man die. If the fae had escaped that fate by coming here, perhaps Uishen could still return to the world. “I saw a man,” he said, finding it more difficult to form the thoughts behind the words he wanted. “Someone I knew, in this place. If you came here before... before dying, could he—”
‘Very few know how to open the doorways,’ the fae interrupted. ‘We came here of our own accord, but most within this realm are brought here by others and will never return.’
He did not know how Uishen’s form came to be in this place—if the Roaming People had left the man here as they’d left Kherron, it was a cruel delivery—but one thing was certain in the fae’s words. “He’s dead.”
‘Yes.’
Kherron’s heart sank to hear it aloud, to know the truth he suspected all along. It did not make his sorrow any lighter, but it did not change what lay before him. “I need to know how to get back,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “Please—”
‘We cannot aid you a second time, Kherron, Blood of the Veil.’ The fae voices carried a shriek of desperation, and nearly all the lights around him trembled, jolting in their slow, hazy path.
The name sent a trickle of recognition through him, though he’d never heard it before. Kherron turned to watch the fae’s tired, terrified hum, expecting them to punish him for the request. A fae light blinked furiously beside his face, and he jerked aside, suddenly thinking that if it touched him, something awful would happen to one or both of them. When he opened his mouth to ask them to repeat the name he thought he’d heard, a piercing wail echoed in the distance.
The sound grew louder as it approached, loosed like an arrow toward them until Kherron thought his ears would burst. Clutching his dagger, he brought that fist and his other hand to his head, but it did nothing to lessen the sound, and the ground he couldn’t feel beneath his feet trembled violently.
From the murky shadows of grey stasis, something stirred. A rush of hot, putrid air blew from some unseen force, this time successfully clearing the fog at Kherron’s feet. When he looked down, he saw nothing below his boots—a dark, endless void, holding him here with impossibility and against all logic. His stomach flipped again, and he thought he would tumble endlessly into the abyss beneath him until another grating shriek made him lift his head.
A solid darkness emerged, lending form to the haze and capturing it in a terrifying vice. The monstrous creature that appeared made Kherron’s heart stop entirely. The thing stood as tall as the highest glass buildings of Hephorai, its glinting black hide as impenetrable as stone. Its features blurred and twisted without end, a gaping smile ringed with rotting fangs below a spiked crown. But the crown was made of the thing’s own horns growing from its skull; something like blood but unnaturally black and not entirely fluid oozed from where the spikes tore through flesh, unendingly rising from its skin yet never growing. While its form seemed vaguely human, just when Kherron thought he counted two arms and two legs, it seemed there were then four or six of each until they disappeared again. It wore nothing to hide its nakedness; the sight of its bare, female breasts above rippling muscle and exposed phallus brought a dizzying terror spinning through Kherron’s veins.
He couldn’t focus on any one place of the horrid creature, catching glimpses of clawed feet and a flickering tail. But his gaze returned over and over to its garish face, the gruesome mouth, and taut, blank blackness where eyes should have been. The demonic beast stepped forward, and the ground rocked violently again, nearly flinging Kherron from his feet. Its keening wail repeated, piercing the air until it faded into a crackling chuckle of despair and pleasure both.
Before Kherron could think to move—before he could think at all—the beast loomed above him, radiating an unconscionable stench Kherron could feel seeping through his clothes and onto his very skin. It was close enough to touch him now, as though he’d somehow lost the time it took for the creature to approach. Just as they’d arrived, the fae blinked out of existence without sound or movement, and Kherron was left utterly alone beneath the black, glistening fist barreling down toward him.
Chapter 17
The violet light tainting everything around him made the blood smeared down Kherron’s arm look black. He sprawled across what he thought of as the ground, feeling the cold hardness beneath him of a substance he would never understand. He’d come to accept that now, as he blinked against the pain lancing from the side of his neck to his hip. His foe had ripped him open nearly head to toe this time, and though he knew by now what would come next, it did not lessen the agony numbing his mind and rendering him immobile.
As the edges of his vision dimmed, the only thing upon which he could now focus were his fingertips, the blackened droplets of his own blood muted and somehow beautiful in this endless place. The beast’s blow had all but severed his arm from his body, and he’d landed as one might lay upon the grass on a sunny day, head nestled in the crook of his own shoulder he could no longer feel. He tried to move his fingers, to make one final effort against his last, struggling breath. But his hand remained as still as stone, and when his lungs fought for the air they would not receive, he wondered how many more deaths he would have to endure.
THE HEAVY PULL OF HIS own body’s weight bound his consciousness once more, and Kherron drew in a long, gasping breath. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes when he opened them, but not for the sensation returning to his body; the pain of mortal wounds had vanished. But the damage to his psyche remained, his memories as in tact and vivid as those of any man experiencing the sacredness of time in its natural progression. Every striking blow pummeled upon his flesh, every tear of muscle and sinew, every burning, dying breath, every agonizing lurch of failure—he remembered it all.
Forty-seven times, Kherron had died at the hands of the grotesque, twisted
, merciless demon within this violet-hued realm. Forty-seven times, he’d fought the thing with nothing but his bare hands and the Sky Metal dagger to defend himself. His first death was the most pitiful, but it had not been the worst. After his devastating conversation with the fae—who had fled to this place beyond existence in order to sustain their own—he’d had little time to consider the monstrous creature who now pursued him endlessly. The beast’s fist had come barreling down upon him, crushing him into an immediate death which otherwise, in any other place, would have been the end of him. Only when he’d returned did the terror of what had happened dawn on him; then, he’d remembered the split seconds of torture when his bones had been ground into each other and crumbled beneath the demon’s fist.
At first, he’d thought he’d lost his mind, his hands fumbling desperately against his own flesh in an attempt to ensure he was, in fact, still alive. Still himself. Then he’d noticed the violet mists of this awful place, which never moved but seemed to create the haunting visions and half-material marks upon this place—the reminiscent images of the clearing he’d left before the Roaming People had abandoned him here; the outcropping of boulders amidst a sea of endless nothingness; the tilted deck of Uishen’s shipwrecked barge, groaning under its own impossible destruction as it supported the spirit of the ferryman himself, who was dead but had been imprisoned in this place, forever out of reach. Kherron was sure now the mist carried its own form of sentience, perhaps of this realm itself, and when he’d reappeared after his first death, he’d seen it swirling outward about his feet, as if he had fallen from a great height and disturbed its unnatural stillness with his landing.
Secret of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 2) Page 21