Vessel, Book I: The Advent
Page 64
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You've probably never heard the sound of literal death speaking, so let me tell you what it's like:
It's a medley, actually, a few different sounds thrown into one. There's a high shrill to it, like a baby crying. Not the crying of a baby who's hungry at night, but the unrelenting, colicky, piercing shriek of a baby that's just been thrown out of a car and abandoned on an icy road.
There's also this whispery undertone to it. A scraping, rattling, airy noise that's almost like a whisper, but far too loud to be classified as one.
And then there's the booming bass, the element that holds it all together and makes it speech. It's solid and sustained and impossibly loud, like a planet belching without end. And it's deep, incredibly deep. It makes James Earl Jones sound like a little school girl.
The result, I can humbly guarantee you, will make you piss yourself.
My vision wheeled until I found Ghi. He turned to face that voice in one instantaneous, instinctual motion, a motion that was equally as chilling to me as the nearness of death, of Dahrkren himself.
Ghi moved like a mechanism. That is the only way to describe it. It is a strangely powerful and upsetting thing to see―somebody you know, moving like that. His body snapped upward, as if programmed to do so, and attuned itself to this sudden, singular threat. It was as though each nerve and muscle and bone in his body had only ever existed in this moment. This moment, and no other.
They spoke truth.
Ghi had never heard this voice with his own ears, nor seen this figure through his own eyes. But he had heard and seen it just the same, because the light had heard and seen it. He understood fully what was standing there, speaking to him, and in reaction his body and mind flooded with a powerful and white-hot hate, a bristling intolerance, and a desire unlike anything he had ever experienced in either of his lives, both the one he could remember and the one he could not: the irrefutable desire to destroy.
The hate and the desire overwhelmed all fear, erased any trace of it in his gleaming, golden eyes. This moment was all that mattered, the only thing there ever was. This moment was what he had been made for. And it had come too soon.
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