“Hunter? Hunter?” She sounded closer each time she said his name. “Can you hear me?”
Her hands, no longer bound, touched his arm. She gently shook him, wooing him from the dark corridors of sleep much as a mother might its baby.
“Nephenia.” He murmured her name.
“Hunter. I thought you were gone. Wake up.”
He opened his eyes. He saw no light. He was immediately overcome by the feeling that he was lost in a vast and inescapable darkness, a chasm beneath Archaeus. He reached out and grazed Nephenia’s forearm, stunned at her warmth compared to the chilliness of the void.
“Wrail…” His first thought turned to anger.
“Gone,” she answered. “He shouted after we fell, but I couldn’t make out what he said. The echoes and the fall…they made a mess of everything in my head.”
He pulled his palm down his face, wanting to drag the pain away. If he knew any consolation, it is solely that Nephenia is alive. He could not see her, nor did he dare take hold of her and feel her for injuries, but he heard the strength behind her voice and knew she would survive at least as long as he.
“Why?” She severed the silence between them, the warmth in her voice dwindling. “Why did you do it?”
His head swam. He did not know what she meant.
“Why did you surrender us?” She snared the chain between his wrists. “Answer me.”
“I—”
“You should’ve fought them.” Her fury increased. “What did I care if they killed me? What did we have to lose? You should’ve slain as many as you could. We both could’ve died honorably.”
“You are right,” he admitted.
“I know I am.”
“I am sorry.”
“You should be.”
Her tempestuous tenor took him by surprise. Unable to see her face, he fell silent.
“Death would be freedom compared to this,” she said at length. “Were I a warrior, had I a sword, we wouldn’t be prisoners. We’d be dead. And that’d be just fine.”
He accepted her scorn.
In the cold quiet afterward, he assessed his many injuries.
Hands burnt. No water here. No way to soothe them.
Ribs broken. Bones like kindling. Left flank.
Will hurt to move. Will hurt to breath.
Of all his pains, the worst was the thought-numbing throb in his skull. The longer he sat, the greater the waves of nausea that assailed him. He was thankful only that it was quiet and that his stomach was empty, else I would retch myself inside-out.
“Nephi,” he creaked.
“Yes,” she answered calmly.
“You are unhurt.”
“I’ve a knot on my head and my bottom’s bruised. The hole Wrail threw us in twisted and turned. It wasn’t a straight fall. I’ll live, leastways until we starve.”
“He means to keep us here. For a very long time,” he said. “This much feels certain.”
“Why?”
“No death down here, he says. Perhaps it is true, perhaps not. Either way, there is no escape.”
Nephenia shuddered. “I was prepared for the worst. But not this.”
And the worst we shall have.
A quiet hour dragged by, then another. He recovered his senses slowly. Once the daggerlike pain in his skull dulled to an endurable ache, he decided to explore. He staggered through the darkness, learning his surroundings by touch alone. Nephenia trailed him, and together he and she discerned the nature of their new home.
Fifty paces in diameter, he knew after wandering the Null Chamber’s breadth. Rounded outer wall, smooth as the floors in the catacombs above. A perfect circle. Flawless.
Men could not have made this place.
“Nephi.” he murmured.
“Hunter.” Her fingers grazed his arm. “Find anything?”
“Nothing. Empty, save for us.”
“We’ll be dead in a few days,” she shuddered. “Doesn’t matter what Wrail said. We’ll starve down here.”
“No.”
“No?”
“We will live. Indefinitely.”
“How do you know?”
“I do not want to say.”
Sick with his thoughts, he wanted to fall to the floor and sink into a century-long sleep. He reached out for Nephenia, needing her to steady him, but instead touched an object in the darkness.
“Find something?” she asked.
“Yes.”
He played his fingers across a stone surface. Tall, he sensed. A pillar. A column. Obsidian. He placed both palms upon it, and by touch alone he discerned the column’s surface was etched with unknowable, unreadable glyphs. The marks were not the words or messages of previous prisoners, but were shapes in a language he did not know. Lowering his hands, he felt a shock of cold run the length of his spine.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He pulled his chains taut and backed away. “No doors. No windows. No way in or out but the tunnel above us. Nothing but us and this pillar.”
“What now?”
He closed his eyes and exhaled. “We have little choice. We wait and try not to lose our minds.”
The next hours, grim and soundless, passed like sands through an hourglass, each grain plummeting slower than the one before it. As he sat against the pillar and closed his mind to the world, Nephenia napped beside him, able somehow to find shallow sleep upon the hard, frigid floor.
He slept none.
He sat awake, meditative and brooding, for what felt like an eternity. Strange feelings overtook him, the darkness invading his body. It was the Null Chamber, he knew, working its will against me. He expected to be hungry, tired, and cold, but bit by bit the sensations of life abandoned him, stolen by some manner of magic he did not understand. The deadness was such that even his wounds went numb, his pain dulling from sharp and ceaseless to a single murmuring thrum.
“I feel nothing,” he said after time unknowable.
“Nor I.” Nephenia stirred. “Like we’re already dead.”
He said nothing more, and Nephenia returned to sleep. Or perhaps she was asleep all along, he thought. And I dreamed her voice.
Much later, he awoke. A narrow shaft of light, no broader than a blade and no brighter than candlelight, meandered into his sights. The light cut from the wall behind him, fluttering into the room with all the force of a child’s whisper.
He lifted his heavy head and gazed upon the intruder. The beam cut cleanly into the dark, shining upon a pinpoint of obsidian floor. It was a hypnotic, almost angelic thing. Particulates of silver-lit dust glided through it like floating stars. Out of place, he thought. But very welcome.
Leaving Nephenia to doze, he clambered to his feet and tracked the beam to its source. In the outer wall, he found a crack in the dark stone, a sliver no wider than a flattened palm into which the golden glow crept. Dawn outside. The world turns without us.
With every passing breath the light grew stronger. It carved through the blackness of the Null Chamber until he was able to see a small section of the floor, a sliver of the column, and then at last a glimpse of Nephenia, who remained peacefully unaware. After a few hundred breaths, he heard a distant noise beyond the crack, the faintest hint of waves lapping upon an imperceptible shore. Sloshing beyond his prison, the water’s rhythm was a welcome breach of the otherwise insufferable silence. The lake below Archaeus, he imagined, a pebble’s toss beyond this wall.
So close. So far away.
Enthralled, he started when he felt Nephenia’s hand fell lightly on his shoulder. “Where’s it come from?” she yawned, a sliver of sunlight slanting across her eyes.
He turned to her, at last able to see her. In the gentle light she looked as beautiful as ever.
“The sun rises,” he said. “Not much, but all we have.”
“I’ll take it.” She bobbed sleepily beside him.
“As will I.”
* * *
Twenty days, lonely and lulling as autumn rain, plunged t
hrough the hourglass.
Each hour felt like a single tick of eternity’s clock, every heartbeat infinitely frailer than the one before it. For the Hunter, the light and dark became a tortuous cycle. For twenty dawns the sliver of sunlight surged into the Null Chamber, a fragile symbol of hope, but then came twenty inevitable nights, dreaded times during which the world was invisible, shrouded by shadows so dense even the sounds of his breathing were muted. By day he could not help but dream of escape, yet when dusk returned and the crack in the chamber wall went cold, his heart slowed and his hopes went utterly still.
Stronger-willed than a few weeks of misery could quell, he suffered the early days of his imprisonment in near total silence. Hour after endless hour flowed past him like rivers, dark and sluggish and cold. Most of the time he uttered nothing, withdrawing instead into his mind’s abyss. Other times he thought to offer comfort to Nephenia, who spent her waking moments pacing the darkness, but always words eluded him.
The cycle continued. Wrail never came back. Nor any of the Master’s soldiers. Though he waited to die a slow death of starvation, his hunger never returned, and he never grew sick or weak because of it. His beard ceased to grow, his hair the same. His only accomplishment during the long, slow weeks was the removal of his manacles and chains, which he managed after days of picking and prying. Thereafter he tried to exercise and meditate, wanting to tire his mind as much as his body. And yet I remain hopelessly conscious.
Much was different when darkness came. Each eve, before dusk stole the last of the light, he hunkered along the outer wall beside Nephenia. These were the only times he and she came together. As the darkness closed in, she nuzzled close to him, my sole source of softness in the world.
And when she slept, he suffered.
Though he desperately sought to join her in slumber, he never fell far before the whispers intruded upon his mind. The Ur are real, he began to believe. They are here, but not.
Their voices, dry and dead as leaves curling in an autumn flame, came to him each night. They lived and died at the very edge of his perception, haunting his heart with promises of a thousand horrible deaths:
When ours reigns, yours will suffer.
During sunless dawns your skin will stretch from towers tall and black.
On starless eves yours will hang from gibbets.
Dead and empty, your eyes.
Watching the world burn.
And ours will wake you every night forever.
To make you die again.
Whenever Nephenia slipped into unconsciousness beside him, whenever he was closest to joining her in sleep, the Ur voices arose like serpents’ hisses in his ears, wooing him to unwanted wakefulness. They called his name and the names of all those he had lost, their cruel language rattling inside his bones, his blood, and his head. He tried to resist them. Hard and stoic and strong, he endured the horrid whispers as though he and his heart were made of stone.
I will not last long.
And so, his sanity fraying, his twenty-first day of imprisonment arrived. Dawn slinked through the hole and into the chamber, cold and vivid as a ray of sunshine glittering atop ice. Nephenia arose beside him. He felt the familiar touch of her fingers on his arm, and the voices of the Ur fled from his thoughts.
“Still alive?” She sighed.
“Still alive.” He squeezed his fist several times to make certain.
“Oh.” She shrugged sleepily. “How many days?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Is that all?”
If any part of life in the Null Chamber could be called pleasant, now is the time. Nephenia rested her head on his shoulder and curled her legs close to his side. Even through his numbness, he felt her warmth and sensed the serene beating of her heart.
“Almost feels normal, waking with the sun.” He played his fingers through her hair. “Until I remember where we are.”
She snuggled closer than usual. “I know what you mean. I’m sorry you have it worse.”
“You should not be,” he said.
“But I am,” she said sympathetically. “I feel it when your skin goes cold. I sense it starting when the sunbeam goes away. You don’t sleep, not much, not anymore. Something keeps you awake.”
Troubled that his nightly suffering was so noticeable, he shuddered. “Best if I do not talk about it. I endure it so you do not have to.”
She let out a sigh and left his embrace to sit beside him. In her absence he felt colder. “Hunter?” She looked at him. “Do you think we’ll we be here forever?”
“It is possible.” He shrugged. “We have no tools, only a shard of rock from the crack. The only way in or out is the tunnel. And yet…forever is long time. If they wanted us dead, we would be. They have a reason for keeping us here.”
“But what’s the reason?”
“The Wolde will come sooner or later, and then we will know.”
“It’ll be Wrail, not the Wolde.” She slumped against the wall. “To fetch you for the Master and me for his soldiers’ pleasures. Were I weaker, I’d say we should spare ourselves the wait and slay ourselves.”
“No. Never.”
“And why not?” She sat directly in the light. “What else is there? We had nothing before we were caught and even less now. I’m no coward. I’d dash myself to pieces against these walls before submitting to Wrail. I’d let you kill me. I’d let you snap my neck or strangle me in my sleep, if the mood struck me so.”
For many breaths, he gave no answer. He expected her to leave in her usual huff, to pace the room as she always does, but today she did not. She fixed her gaze upon him, her eyes glimmering amber. “So why then?” She blinked. “What do we have left?”
He retreated into unfathomable thought, leaving her to wait. He felt oddly unlike himself this morning. The tips of his fingers tingled, his head felt light, and his focus felt dim as twilight. Despite the light the room seemed especially dark, and the thickness in his head blurred his vision like a cloud covering a starless, moonless sky.
“We should talk of other things,” he said. “Despairing does little to help.”
“Other things?” she countered. “What other things?”
The blurriness in his vision faded. The strange sensations abandoned him, the tingling in his hands suddenly gone. He felt out of place nonetheless. It was as though, between the space of one breath and the next, I lost myself.
He blinked hard, expecting to recover, but a part of him seemed to be missing.
“Is something wrong?” She sensed his uneasiness.
“Nephi, I think now is the time.”
She searched his eyes. “Time? For what?”
“There is no sense in holding anything back. There are truths you should know, things better off put into the light.”
“Oh, at last.” She scooted closer. “I’m listening.”
He closed his eyes. Like a morning’s haze torn to tatters by the warming sun, the fog in his mind cleared. He knew what he wanted to tell her. Should have said it long before now.
“I owe you an explanation,” he said. “Nothing is as it seems. There is no Master, no Lykaios. I am not the Hunter.”
She gazed at him unflinchingly. The look in her eyes convinced him that these were words she had long waited to hear. “Go on,” she bid him.
“You have heard the name Lykaios,” he continued. “You have heard about the Master. These names are ever present in Romaldar.
“But the Master is not the Master, nor Lykaios, nor any name the Wolfwolde calls him. He is not who anyone believes him. His real name…is Grimwain. He has other identities, but Grimwain is his truest, the one he will answer to when all others are no longer useful. None of this would have happened if not for him. You would be married, I would not be the Hunter, and the Wolfwolde, whatever their purpose, would not exist.”
She clenched her jaw. “How do you know this?”
His memory, so shrouded by vengeance, was a hard thing for him to exhume. He took ten breat
hs to recollect his past, remembering much with an ill taste in his mouth.
“I have hunted him for so very long,” he said with a grimace. “I followed him across Thillria. I chased him through the forests of the Moerlahn and nipped at his heels when he crossed the mountains of Yrul. I studied him, learned his habits, and struck at him whenever I could. I know this man better than I know myself, though still not well enough to know what he means to do. He is my enemy, my one and only.”
The light drew a deep shadow beneath Nephenia’s eyes. “You hate him?”
“Always and forever.” He nodded.
“He wronged you. He did something to you. He took something away?”
“Yes.”
None of it seemed to surprise her. Tilting her most tranquil gaze at him, she reached out and touched his arm. “Tell me,” she said. “There’s no reason not to, especially now. If we’re to be here forever, I’d rather no secrets.”
“It began with Rellen.” His gaze went distant. “Rellen was my friend. He lifted me from a life in the shadows, from even darker days than this. But then there was Grimwain. Grim took Rellen from me, from the world. Cut him down with a smile. Had I been stronger, I might have saved my friend. But I failed, and now there is nothingness.”
Compassion shimmered like starlight in Nephenia’s eyes. “And you became the Hunter.” She understood. “For revenge’s sake.”
He exhaled. “Whatever else Grim planned for Romaldar or for the world, I never cared. I only wanted his death. Honoring Rellen by living a good life became less important than destroying his killer.”
“And now?” she asked.
“Now…” The fire in his eyes went out. “Now there is no Hunter. Now there is only me, only Garrett. That is my name, yes. Garrett. I have not said it or heard it in so long. I forgot it, and it forgot me.”
“Garrett.” The way she said it helped him remember.
“From Mormist, where the mountains are blue in the summer, white in the winter. I fought with Graehelm against the Furies. I have seen the most terrible things this world has to offer…and the most beautiful.”
Here, in the unlikeliest of places, he felt the shadow lift from his heart. The breaking felt at once liberating and terrifying, for the very moment he remembered his name he realized the horror of his imprisonment. All the deeds that had brought him to the Null Chamber smoked inside his mind.
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