Darklight 6: Darkbirth

by Forrest, Bella

  Dorian faced Gate Maker's estate, which was still engulfed in the pulsating red cloud, then turned on his heel. "Well, I remember seeing the very front of the building as it appeared out of the mist, so if we take a straight line from that perspective, we might be heading in the right direction.” He paused, focusing intently. “I can feel Gate Maker’s aura a little, so if we don’t find where we came in, we can try to use that to get back to him. Worst-case scenario, we try and get something useful out of this weird little guy following us around.” He lowered his voice. “I know the blue orb said the proxy was to help us, but it’s almost definitely a spy. I’d rather try and get some information on my own before I ask. Who knows if what it will tell us is true?”

  The proxy made no comment or reaction; he merely watched.

  This was our best choice. It was all we could do other than stay where we were in the middle of nowhere. We walked until Gate Maker's estate faded behind us in the distance. Occasionally, I turned to make sure that we were still following a relatively straight line. The proxy easily kept pace with us, but his strange silence unnerved me. Guess their idea of a welcome gift for visitors is a stalker.

  "We’re too far for me to sense Gate Maker anymore. In fact, I can't sense anything at all," Dorian said after some time. "If something is waiting out there to fight us, we'll have no warning."

  I sighed in frustration. "There's nothing we can do about that. We just have to keep our guard up." It was exhausting to constantly be on high alert, but we'd grown good at that during the last few months, with all the threats we’d faced.

  "The lack of a horizon is the worst," I thought aloud.

  He grunted in agreement. “I’d take a lap around the sanitarium’s labyrinth over this any day.”

  Dorian glanced toward the proxy. There were no environmental markers to help us besides the small, strange golem. No animals, no birds… The still air made me long for a sharp wind to strike my face just to feel something. Doomed to trudge into eternity?

  "This feels like one of those bad horror films you humans make," Dorian mused wearily. "It's like a conspiracy or a bad dream. I've never heard of another plane—no vampire scholars have ever made mention of it. There have never been stories of another plane, not in folklore or history or military records. How can it have been here all this time, yet we knew nothing about it?"

  I thought back to my life before I met Dorian, before that fateful day when he scooped me up on my mission. I thought I’d known everything there was to know about the stranger side of the world, when in reality I’d known practically nothing. I’d had to accept that vampires were not extinct, that there was an entire plane of existence I didn’t know about, that the barrier between those two worlds was torn and rapidly growing worse. I’d had to fight impossible creatures, from soul-scourgers to shrieking decays, and had spent time in a torture prison an entire world away from my home. I shook my head. I could understand the struggle Dorian was having, but at this point, I was ready to accept that pretty much anything was possible.

  Dorian continued musing. "If there really was another barrier, shouldn't vampires know about it? We were built for this, apparently. It’s our purpose. So why wouldn’t we know about this other barrier? And these creatures we've encountered—these arbiters—they don't have light or dark energy inside them at all. Nothing."

  I straightened at this tidbit. "You can't sense anything?"

  Dorian glared into the distance. "Barely anything. They have something like an aura that I can sense to a certain degree, which tells me that they're sentient beings, but I can’t sense anything else." His eyes darted to the proxy suspiciously. "That thing doesn't have an aura at all. He has no trace of light or darkness. How can that be?"

  "Maybe that's what Gate Maker meant when he said he didn't have a soul," I pondered aloud. "He meant it literally, I guess."

  Dorian grumbled. "I don't want to think about that right now. It's too much to wrap my head around."

  Part of me knew how he felt. How lost had I been after Dorian revealed an entirely new world to me? I squeezed his hand, wanting to communicate every ounce of affection I had for him. He probably wouldn't want to talk about it. His preferred method was to hide his emotions behind his typical composure. I'd let him… for now.

  We walked into the unknown landscape with our hands clasped tight. Toward what, I wasn't sure, but at least we had each other.

  * * *

  It was impossible to know how long we walked—it could have been hours, or it could have been as short as twenty minutes. My sense of time was utterly useless, and my watch had stopped working as soon as we entered the Higher Plane. We must have traveled somewhat, given that Gate Maker's estate was nowhere in sight, but we were just in nothingness. Everywhere around us was the same misty gray. For all I knew, we could have walked past the point where we entered the plane half a dozen times already. The red sky was gone, but now I almost missed its fury above us. Occasionally, an electric green-yellow light sparked, but the mist always swallowed it hungrily.

  I rubbed my eye with my free hand. Surely it hadn't taken so long to get to Gate Maker's home from where we’d first arrived. Perhaps we’d drifted off our straight path by accident? It would have been easy enough to do with no marker to help keep course. I desperately longed for anything, a building or even crumbling walls like Gate Maker's sad estate.

  I considered saying something to Dorian, just to break the silence and raise our spirits, but my eye caught on something ahead. I squinted. Was I hallucinating it? No, there was definitely a murky shadow in the distance. I slowed my pace, giving Dorian’s hand a careful tug to stop him too.

  “Better to be cautious,” I commented, nodding toward the vague shape in the distance. “We don’t know who or what this place belongs to.”

  Dorian's grip tightened on my hand as we continued onward. As the form began to take shape, Dorian let out a disbelieving groan.

  "You've got to be kidding me."

  We slowed to a halt as the decaying turrets came into sight, the design and layout familiar, complete with desiccated palm trees. The only difference was that the space above the estate was no longer stained red. But it was the same place we had set out from. It had to be, unless there were two identical crumbling estates in the Higher Plane. Considering the level of aesthetic design the arbiters we’d met went to, I highly doubted that. I glanced at Dorian, who gave a confirming nod and added, "His aura is in there. It's at the edge of my range." He hissed in frustration. My shoulders slumped with defeat.

  "We walked straight ahead. I’m sure of it,” I insisted and let go of Dorian to run my agitated hands through my hair. “Did we somehow get turned around in the fog?”

  “I don’t know. All there—"

  I couldn’t wait for Dorian to finish. Something snapped inside me, and a blend of panic, fear, and anger sent me bolting off at a full sprint away from the rotting remains of Gate Maker’s estate. Dorian sucked in a sharp breath and followed me, easily catching up. I ran at full speed, pushing myself to my limit. I knew I should be panting from exertion, but my breathing remained even. It was as if my body resisted normal reactions… I didn't even feel taxed.

  Above us, streaks of battery-acid yellow flashed. They grew denser into clouds, fighting against the dark gray that flooded the air above us and the occasional bruise of blue. I pumped my arms, remembering my runs through the Highlands. Here, I felt like I was running on a treadmill. It was as if I wasn't moving, not really. My breath was slightly strained, but my muscles were as fresh as ever. I could do this for hours if I wanted to. I continued fleeing with Dorian running beside me. Time must have been passing, but I didn’t know how much. I just kept pounding my feet against the stupid silvery ground away from Gate Maker's estate. Let him have his fury, his sand, and the crumbling remains of his home. I wanted to escape.

  "Lyra."

  I stumbled to a halt and took a deep breath, though I didn’t need it. Dorian came to a stop beside me, and
I searched for some semblance of sanity in all this in his concerned face. Everything began to spin, and I dropped to the floor, but the contact caused no real pain. Dorian knelt, and I let him scoop me into his arms, curling myself against his chest, grateful to have something fill my vision for a moment.

  "I have no idea where we are," I blurted.

  He bit back a dark laugh, but then his eyes sharpened. "Your ribs. How are they?"

  "My ribs?" I blinked in confusion. Then it hit me. They'd been injured several times over the last few months, most recently at the battle in the Hive during my fight with the decaying Sempre, yet I felt no pain. Cogs whirred to life inside my mind, making connections. "I haven't felt pain since we came to the Higher Plane. My body doesn't really feel anything. Not the curse, not my ribs, not fatigue… I don't even feel hungry or thirsty." I leaned against his shoulder. He rubbed my back in a soothing circular movement. The anger inside me, the one that had been simmering low and boiling hot at various moments beneath the surface, faded to nothing. What was happening to me?

  Dorian stopped stroking my hair as I looked up at him questioningly.

  "What?" he asked.

  "When is the last time you peed?"

  He let out a bark of laughter. "What?"

  I ignored the warmth on my cheeks. "I'm serious, Dorian. I haven't been to the bathroom since before the battle, and we flew for five hours after that. We must have been here for hours, maybe even days, but I feel no hunger or thirst. It's like everything in my body has just stopped, gone into some kind of hibernation. What about you? Your injuries? Are you hungry?”

  His brow knitted. "You're right. Nothing really hurts." He pressed his hands to a few points across his body, where I assumed he’d taken blows during the battle at the training camp. "I haven't felt the need to feed, either. I fed during the battle, but I also expended a lot of energy. I know that I have wounds, but they don't hurt. I just feel sort of numb."

  An eerie chill passed between us, and I shivered as the truth of our situation sank in. Our bodily functions had stopped working. What the actual hell is happening here? It seemed that this place was changing fundamental aspects of ourselves, and we were helpless to stop it.

  Above us, the sky darkened once more for no apparent reason. Why did the air keep changing around us? Dorian and I sat next to one another on the ground, his arm wrapped tightly around my shoulders. I leaned my head against his chest. What were we going to do?

  "I thought we were so close to fixing things down in the Immortal Plane," I confessed, and tried to keep my voice from shaking. I hated admitting defeat, but the truth was that we were completely helpless here. "It felt like everything was falling into place. We could help Gate Maker, get him to seal the tear, and then we’d finally be on our way to stopping the destruction. We’d be able to start moving on from all the confusion and suffering. Everything would be fixed."

  Dorian sighed. "I share your disappointment. Leaving our allies and friends to continue fighting without us in that battle was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do." He scowled. "I keep running through the same questions in my mind. Did all the refugees from the Hive make it safely through the stone circles and into the Mortal Plane? Has the Bureau found them yet and gotten them to safety? Did the Coalition win the fight at the training camp? I know the tide was turning in our favor, but Lady Izelde was still alive and fighting when we left."

  My stomach clenched with dread at the mention of her name. "We saw Lord Orrin fall, but what happened after that? Bravi and the other warriors know what they’re doing, but I hope they had enough of an advantage when we left to finish the job. I keep thinking about Scotland and Moab, too. How are they holding up against the revenants?"

  "I hope the humans and the Hive artifacts made it through the tear safely," Dorian said. He ran his hand along my arm with a comforting pressure. "And I hope Kane gets the treatment he needs if… when he makes it back."

  I smiled. "He's got Roxy with him, so she'll fight like hell to keep him safe. God help anyone who tries to lay a finger on him without her say-so." I paused, a flash of shame filling me as I recalled my outburst a few days before when I caught them kissing. “I wish we hadn’t parted on such poor terms. Especially Kane and me. What if…”

  I didn’t finish the thought, but the words hung in the air above us.

  What if we never make it back?

  We lapsed into silence, the two of us still cuddled together in the wide-open, empty landscape. Dorian shifted, and I stared at his profile, appreciating its sharp lines.

  "There's got to be a way out,” he said. “It doesn't matter what it is or what it will take, because we can and will figure it out." His glacial eyes, filled with determination, stared into mine. "There must be a way."

  But beneath his conviction, a shadow of doubt flickered across his features like shadows. It curled into the edges of his face, dripping into the hollows of his collarbones and eye sockets. How much of his determination was a show of reassurance for us both? I wanted to believe in his strength, in my own perseverance, and in our combined capabilities, but there was little keeping me afloat right now except hope. In a world with nothing familiar, it was all we could cling to.

  “There has to be something we can do,” Dorian muttered and shook his head. “Isn’t there? There’s always been an option for us.” His throat tightened as if his words had dried up right alongside our options.

  Dorian was trying his best, but I could see that beneath his dogged determination he was struggling. His struggle against his own emotions—it was the same thing I’d gone through when I first came to the Immortal Plane. Everything he knew was being challenged in a way that not even the revelations of the last few months in the Mortal and Immortal Planes could compare to. He was faced with beings that apparently had no souls, existing in a separate plane exempt from the carefully cultivated ecosystem of light and darkness that he had believed in his entire life. I wrapped my arms around him. He leaned into my touch, and I tucked my head beneath his chin. He'd helped me so much throughout our journey as everything I knew was challenged; it was time I did the same for him.

  "I'm not ready to give up," I whispered fiercely. I let the mist swallow up my words as we sat together for a few moments. “We just need to ask the right people the right questions.”

  Abruptly, something solid appeared in my line of vision, and I blinked in surprise to see that the proxy had moved closer to us. He stood just beyond Dorian, facing me with his electric-blue eyes. His blank face never flinched, even under my appraising gaze.

  I recalled Xiu’s mandate to the proxy when she created him. “I think it’s time we ask the proxy for some help,” I said to Dorian, cautiously leaning a little closer to the proxy. “Xiu told him to provide us with information if we desire it, as long as it didn’t endanger himself or the arbiters. I know there’s the risk he could deliberately mislead us, and we wouldn’t know, but right now even inaccurate answers are better than none.”

  “It’s worth a try, I suppose,” he replied, also giving the construct a skeptical look. “He hasn’t exactly been chatty so far, though.”

  I moved from sitting up into a crouch, not wanting to loom over the proxy, but also so I could easily scramble back if it had some kind of adverse reaction.

  "Where are we?" I cautiously asked.

  "In one of the three planes of existence," the proxy replied immediately, his tone flat and mechanical. "This plane is known by those who reside here as the Higher Plane."

  Dorian's brows shot upward. "Why does the mist keep doing that?" he demanded, pointing to the stormy sky above us.

  "The landscape responds to your emotions, which are currently quite volatile. The fabric of this plane is shaped by the minds of those who walk within it."

  I jerked my head up to the sky. "Whoa. That's us?" I couldn't help feeling slightly awed.

  "And you’re just now telling us this, even though you’ve been following us for hours? Why didn't you say
something before?" Dorian said in an annoyed growl.

  The proxy tilted his head an inch. "You did not ask me directly. I do not offer information unless specifically addressed."

  Chapter Four

  "So you have some humor," I noted lightly.

  The proxy regarded me with his wide eyes and an utterly blank expression. Jokes weren’t going to land well with this thing.

  "I did not intend to make a joke, but I do possess the faculties to produce words." He glanced at Dorian. "I require prompting. It is in my nature.”

  Essentially, we needed to ask direct questions to get answers.

  This newest specification appeared to take Dorian to the edge of his patience. He looked like he wanted to dropkick the construct into the literal void, all while saying some foul things about the nature of the Higher Plane, so I stepped in first.

  "Where are we in the Higher Plane, exactly?" I made sure to address him clearly and directly.

  "Locations are relative here,” he replied. “You are standing there. That is where you are. Would you like mathematical computations regarding the relation between your cellular structures and the matter surrounding you to attempt to achieve a more precise location?"

  “If you did that, would it help us find a way to leave this plane?” Dorian asked through clenched teeth.

  “No, it would not.”

  "Then no," Dorian snapped. "Save your math. Can you tell us anything?"

  I leaned in toward him. “Dorian, he’s like a robot.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s like the computers we use in the Mortal Plane,” I insisted. He calmed, but there was still a flicker of frustration across his face. The proxy stared at us, clearly waiting for us to finish our exchange.