Darkborn (Shattering of the Nocturnai Book 4)

by Carrie Summers

  My Need was boundless.

  Fortune was a tornado around me, every possibility a whirlwind inside the massive, wheeling gyre. I dipped my hand in and felt each of my paths rush through my flesh. Not only the futures but the pasts, too. Flashes of lives I might have lived. Glimpses where I inhabited the aether. Visions of restoring Ashkalan with Raav at my side. Things that could have been. Futures I would never know.

  Somehow, I sensed that if I could capture one of those whirling alternatives, I could sidestep this life, make myself anew. I wouldn’t need to have died. But by leaving, I’d be abandoning this incarnation of my world to the Hunger. Everyone and everything would be annihilated, subsumed by the ravenous ache beyond that gash.

  For an instant, I still considered it. In my new existence, I wouldn’t remember where I’d come from. Who I’d sacrificed to remake my life. But I couldn’t do it.

  Only my Need could choose the right path now.

  Closing my eyes, I gave myself to fate.

  Light flashed behind my eyes.

  I smelled kivi blossoms.

  Not far away, waves crashed on gravel, hissing as they rolled back to the sea.

  When I opened my eyes, the sky was an upside down bowl lined with stars, filled with billowing ash and shimmering aurora. A sharp stone jabbed my shoulder blade. Gravel pressed into the backs of my arms. The ground beneath me was warmer than the damp air above. Each of my senses felt many times stronger than I remembered. Or rather, each smell on the air and tick of cooling stone and shimmer of heavenly aurora felt more vivid than ever before. More alive.

  I shifted, wincing as the sharp rock under my shoulder blade scratched the thin flesh covering my bone. Grunting, I struggled to a seated position. I pulled my feet closer, then blinked. Why was I wearing ratty sandals?

  My eyes traveled up my body. Ill-fitting trousers. A tunic with mismatched buttons. Patches were sewn over holes on the knees and elbows of my ragged attire.

  I was wearing the clothes my mind stubbornly supplied for my astral projection within the aether. My duskweaving… had it… Was I back in the physical world?

  I lifted my hand in front of my face and examined both sides. My scars were gone. Curling all my fingers but one, so that only my index finger remained extended, I pressed it against my thigh.

  My finger sank through flesh as if my leg weren’t there at all.

  I sprang to my feet, stomping to reassure myself that the ground beneath me was solid.

  “Ow!” I cried when a dagger of hardened lava sliced my instep. Blood flowed from the wound, black in the night. But when I tried to wrap my hand around my foot, my fingers just passed straight through it.

  I raised my foot and stepped forward, and the ground beneath me sped by. Brush scraped my legs as I traveled a hundred paces in a single step. The scratches stung. Threads pulled free from my trousers, leaving them even more tattered than before.

  Abruptly, I felt an irresistible desire to run. I couldn’t have remained still if the air before me were filled with crystal knives. Which wasn’t far from the truth with brush and boulders standing in my way. As my strides sped over the landscape and gashes and cuts multiplied on my legs, all I could do was veer for the beach where fewer obstacles blocked my way.

  I didn’t know my destination until I arrived. By the time I reached the ships, each of my shins was a shredded mess.

  I forgot the pain as the first screams reached my ears.

  Another step brought me to the arc of gravel cradling the shallow anchorage. The Hollow One stood upon the surface of the sea, an aching, screeching pit filled with nothing but greed and evil. The crew of both our ships—and the Ulstat vessels, too—were desperately trying to raise their sails and extend their oars.

  As I arrived, the monster tore one of Caffari’s smugglers from the crow’s nest. Midair, the thief’s body frayed and disappeared. My scream pealed across the water as I threw down my mental walls. I grabbed for her nightstrand, seizing hold just as the Hollow One dug raking claws into her spirit.

  We fought for control of her soul.

  I wasn’t going to win. It would only tear her apart.

  The aurora, I screamed at her. It’s your only hope.

  I felt her assent an instant before a flash lit the water and sent rippling waves of phosphorescence across the small bay. She’d managed to choose dissolution before the beast consumed her. Deprived of its prize, the Hollow One shrieked and turned on me.

  Immediately, I felt it sucking at me. Tentacles whipped out from the mass of darkness and tried to catch hold. I smelled rot and oil and fear as they passed through my body. The inside of my mouth tasted like rust. Bone-deep dread ached where each of the beast’s arms crossed my flesh.

  But it couldn’t take hold. My perception of gravel beneath my feet and air on my skin was an illusion supplied by my duskweaving. I wasn’t a creature of this world. Physical but ethereal, alive but dead, I was something Other.

  The Hollow One screeched in rage, the vibrations tearing wavelets from the water’s surface.

  And from across the island, another monster answered. The second birth had completed.

  The beast moved closer to me, clawing at my mind where it had failed to rend my flesh. Immediately, I threw my walls into place. They monster tore them aside as if they were paper. As if to punish me for interfering, it whipped a tendril of darkness across the forward deck on Zyri’s Promise. At the end of the tendril, a razor-tipped spike sliced through upper planks of the hull before whipping back and severing a sailor’s arm. The man screamed in horror, and the rush of fear only gave the Hollow One strength.

  The monster grabbed the sailor and with a thousand teeth, tore his body apart. Again, I reached into the aether. But I was too late. The monster didn’t stop to toy with the man’s spirit. Before I could latch hold of his soul, the Hunger swallowed him. When I peered into the Hollow One’s eyes, transient things that appeared and disappeared within the roiling mass above the bay, I saw the black truth. Somewhere on the other side of the gash between worlds, the Hunger got stronger and deeper with the addition of the man’s soul.

  “What do I do now?” I asked aloud. I didn’t know who I expected to answer, only that I had no notion how to move forward. My Need had put me here. In the back of my awareness, I still felt the power thrumming from the vast tapestry I’d created from the Vanished nightstrands. My duskweaving wasn’t finished, yet I’d already put myself at the whim of chance. Before, that was all I’d needed to do for the duskweaving to complete its work.

  “Lilik?”

  Raav’s voice rang across the bay as he and a small group of people stumbled from the brush at the edge of the beach. They must have just returned from Mieshk’s fortress. I noticed Raav was limping. Had he been the one injured in the attack?

  A thousand thoughts tumbled through my head, but each was silenced when the Hollow One turned its baleful glare on Raav. Another tentacle erupted from the black mass and reached for my beloved.

  “No!” I yelled as, in one long stride, I crossed the beach and put myself between Raav and the Hollow One.

  Cries of shock peppered the air, both from Raav’s group and the decks of the ships. A distant part of my awareness, maybe a vestigial link with Paono, sensed confusion and even fear from the sparks of the living.

  Fear of me, I realized.

  Let them be afraid. Because I was about to become something that should be feared. I understood now what my Need demanded. I also understood that I wouldn’t have had the courage for this act without seeing Raav threatened.

  For every sacrifice, there is someone burdened with the guilt of benefiting from it. Raav would carry that weight forever. But he wouldn’t be consumed by the Hunger. I took comfort in that.

  As the Hollow One’s grasping tentacle bore down on the group behind me, I opened my mind to the creature’s terrifying grasp. Blackness sank into my thoughts, spreading like ink dropped into water. As it took hold of my spirit, I tasted the all-co
nsuming greed, the bottomless hunger, the foul weight of its desire.

  Evil filled me, polluting every crevice of my soul as I swallowed the Hollow One.

  Behind me, someone retched. I didn’t turn. Not yet. The writhing mass atop the water slowly faded as the fragment of the Hunger flowed into me. Finally, with a snap, the Hollow One vanished.

  I was the Hollow One.

  Brimming with the twined power of the Hunger’s raw, covetous craving and my surging duskweaving, I turned to face the young man I’d once loved. He cowered on the gravel before me, retching again.

  I stepped closer. It would be so easy to devour him. The others, too. I wanted their flesh. But even more, I wanted their souls. Already I could taste how they’d feel when joined with the pit inside my soul. Satisfying for a moment, but ultimately powering my insatiable need for more.

  Another step. The others scrambled back, eyes mad with terror. But not Raav. On hands and knees, he trembled before me.

  When I spoke, my voice rasped like a blade over a whetstone. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Afraid to look at me?”

  I wanted his fear. It would make me stronger.

  He shook his head, eyes on the gravel. “I know it’s not you,” he said.

  “But it is. I’m the girl you kissed on the beach just outside our lagoon. I’m the girl you saved in the refinery in Ilaraok. And I’m also the Hunger.”

  Raav’s trembling had stilled. His chest expanded as he inhaled, and finally, he sat back on his heels and looked up at me.

  Suddenly curious about what he saw, I glanced down at myself. But I was gone. Where my body had been, there was only void. I was an empty, girl-shaped shell. Still, Raav fixed his gaze where my eyes would have been.

  “You’re in there, Lilik,” he said quietly. “I know it because otherwise, you would have killed me by now.”

  Was I? I shook my head. I was the Hunger, come to eat this world.

  Raav climbed to his feet. Looking down on me, he stepped closer. He reached out a hand. When he laid it on my shoulder, I felt the pain it caused him. My substance tore at his flesh. He winced but forced himself to smile.

  To smile at me.

  Somewhere, shrouded in evil and slowly being eaten by the darkness within me, a tiny piece of my soul smiled back.

  I raised my arms anyway. Giant wings of shadow unfurled behind me, stretching wide. Raav’s cheek twitched, and I could see his pulse racing, throbbing in his neck. But he didn’t back away.

  “Fight it, Lilik.” As he spoke, Raav doubled over his belly. Behind him, the others grunted, moaned, curled fetally. In a distant past, I remembered a similar experience, the sudden pain that had felt as if my heart and lungs were being torn free. But the recollection fled as the anguish on Raav’s face made me crave him all the more. I wanted his flesh and soul. I reached for it, my wing coming around to wrap him.

  Across the island, something shrieked. My brother, the newborn Hollow One, crying in pain. In the following instant, a dagger stabbed my back, icy and full of love. A tearing sensation followed, and I was immediately distanced from the source of my power.

  Something was wrong with the gate. With a swipe of my wing that sent Raav and the others flying, I whirled.

  I heard bones break as they landed. I didn’t care. I had to help my brother and the Hunger that was mother to us all.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE SOUND OF his bones breaking echoed in my mind. Raav’s words scratched at the dark prison holding—no, not holding, infusing—my soul.

  I was my own prison.

  Fight it, he’d said.

  The land whipped past me as I half-ran, half-flew on wings of hate. Ashkalan loomed ahead and within it, the doorway bridging my worlds. My brother screamed again, the sound of his shriek raising waves from the sea and sending rocks tumbling from the mountaintop. Again, I felt the distance between my mother and me grow wider even as I sped for the breach.

  I crested the rim of the city, perched there with talons of shadow and teeth ready to shred any who would stop me.

  Beneath me, on the central steps that climbed from Ashkalan’s harbor to the city’s topmost tier, a cage held my brother prisoner. Formed of shimmering blue light, the bars crisscrossed haphazardly. A net as much as a cage. But inescapable all the same.

  I was rage embodied. Howling, I leaped high over the city, then arrowed straight for Ashkalan’s heart. When I crashed down, stone shattered. The cage stood before me, and I reached for it, ready to tear my brother free.

  The shot went straight through my core. An arrow as icy and kind as the dagger that had stabbed me before. It knocked me back. I fell, smashing a wing that dissolved beneath me. Frantic, I scanned the city walls for a glimpse of my attacker.

  My heart knew who I’d see long before my hate-filled eyes landed on Paono.

  Like a being filled with starlight, silvery threads arrowing away and binding him to the sparks that I knew were powering this loathsome assault, he stared down at me with a mix of terror and love. He stood on the terrace above me, near one of the runes that had opened the way for my power.

  “Lilik,” he breathed. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  Fight it, Lilik, Raav had said.

  I scrambled to my feet, both wings gone now. An image of the Hollow One flashed through my tainted thoughts. I saw again the tentacles that had emerged from its shapeless mass. Eyes that looked out from all angles. I glanced again at my body. My human-shaped void. It was no shapeless mass, no writhing embodiment of Hunger.

  Evil suffused me. But I was still Lilik Boket, too.

  “Help me,” I rasped, turning my void-filled eyes to Paono.

  He nodded, and the silvery threads that shot away from him brightened as more energy surged along the links. This time, his love was not a dagger or an arrow, but a sensation like the gentle brush of his hand against my tainted cheek.

  Paono’s magic reached through my flesh. His phantasmal fingers teased at the stain that had saturated my spirit.

  From within the gash between worlds, the Hunger surged, filling my soul, throwing off Paono’s touch. I scrambled forward. Claws erupted from my hands and feet. Digging them into the stone of the terrace wall, I scuttled straight up to the next level.

  Paono cried out in fear when I leaped for him, claws extended, teeth snapping from within the myriad mouths that had opened in my soul.

  Fight it Lilik. The sound of Raav’s bones breaking.

  I hesitated, the sick snapping sounds echoing through my memories. Paono was so fragile. All humans were. One swipe, and there would be more snaps.

  Fight it Lilik.

  With a scream, I forced away the Hunger, sent it fleeing for the corners of my spirit. My claws became mist then faded to nothing. The rage which boiled through my veins washed out onto the floor beneath me. All the hatred that had made my body solid dissipated, and I passed through Paono like the ghost of a gutterborn waif.

  For an instant, our minds touched. I saw through his memories what he’d been doing. Paono had used a dawnweaving to surprise and trap the other Hollow One before it could suck his power inside.

  And I saw our potential. A way to close the rift.

  Paono’s shirt was off. He’d been trying to use it to scrub away the rune. His efforts had weakened the gate, but he could never seal the breach. Mieshk had infused nightstrands into the symbols. She’d nightforged the rune. In all of Vanished history, no one had ever figured out how to forcibly free a soul once it was bound to an object.

  Except that wasn’t entirely true. I understood now; someone had sealed the breach before, and most likely, they’d broken a nightforging to accomplish it. Afterward, that person had hidden their knowledge, locked it away in a secret lagoon on a glowing mural. At first, only a single figure had been depicted in the painting. There’d been a time when events might have worked out differently. It might have been enough for me to shield the strands from Mieshk. But now, two figures stood before Ioene. Mieshk had open
ed the rift, only Paono’s and my joint magic could close it.

  My duskweaving together with Paono’s dawnweaving, my Need superimposed on his Want, and together we could close the gate.

  The Hunger fluttered at the edges of my vision like a stain that threatened to spill across my sight if I lost focus on holding it back. Shadows worked in my heart. Rage was a pinprick away from consuming me. But Paono’s presence strengthened my resolve. We couldn’t touch, or rather, whenever I tried to touch him, I passed right through him. But I felt his warmth all the same.

  Okay, he said into my mind. I’m ready. Between the layers of taint that still blanketed my spirit yet lacked the strength to control me, I still felt the energy of my duskweaving. I Needed to close the gate. Paono Wanted to heal the breach. Somehow, we must intertwine our magics.

  Peldin? I asked, not really expecting an answer. Then again, I hadn’t really expected to be shoved back into the physical world either.

  Oh, so now you want my help, he said.

  I rolled my eyes as I spoke into the aether. Yes, Peldin, I would like your help. Please consider gracing me with your wisdom.

  He chuckled. I would’ve thought my mural would be enough.

  What? That was you? I struggled to grasp this new information.

  It was me, he said, serious now. Well, not just me, and not just my Need. There were many gifted with soul magic in my time. We worked together at the end. Many of our insights into how to seal the rift came from Mavek, in fact. It’s a shame she succumbed to the fire’s pull.

  Go back to the mural. You’re saying you knew all along that Paono and I would end up like this? I said.

  Of course not, he returned. You understand that I’m a channeler, right?

  I gathered. You could have mentioned it before, though. Might have made my life a little easier.

  He chuckled. Indeed. And I’m sorry. My reasons were… complicated. In any case, you have experience with duskweaving now. You know as well as I that we don’t control our Need, no matter how we might wish we did. When I painted that mural, I had no idea of its purpose. Only that my Need demanded it. By then, there were so few of us left. Alive, I mean. Otherwise, I might have told my tale to a scribe. But you can write it down now, right? People ought to know who saved the world last time.