Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  “I am me again,” he said to Nephenia. “Same as ever.

  “And I know what Grimwain is doing.”

  Threads in the Dark

  Now that I know who you are,” Nephenia offered, “maybe we can start looking for a way out of here.”

  Garrett stood and rolled his shoulders. The Null Chamber dust swirled through the invading sunbeam, a thousand tiny stars floating between him and her. “A way out…” His breath made the stars swirl. “Yes. It’s time.”

  She rose before him, a slender smile creasing her mouth. “Good. I’m with you.”

  As the sliver of sunshine carved its way through the dark, he and Nephenia crouched in the fragile light. Their first plan was simplest; they acted upon it when the light was brightest. He led her to the hole in the ceiling they had fallen through, and after taking his life’s deepest breath, he hoisted her atop his shoulders. Still as stone, he balanced as she groped at the darkness, hoping against hope she would find a way to climb into the passage above.

  “It’s too high.” She wobbled atop him. “I can touch the ceiling, but the stones are too smooth. I can’t pull myself up.”

  “More obsidian,” he grunted.

  “Wait…” she said. “I think I…no…too slippery...cold as death…ach…let me down.”

  She climbed off his shoulders and stood in the sunbeam. “We need another way. Up is impossible.”

  “We will think on it,” he said. “We have forever.”

  One day passed, then another. Whenever not plotting their escape, he sat in the dark and filled the void with stories of his life. Of his days spent learning to fight under Lord Ahnwyn of Triaxe, he told her everything. Of the war against Furyon, his journey to Malog, and the destruction of the Orb of Souls, he offered all that he remembered. “I was not the Hunter during those days,” he reminisced. “But my life was little different than now. I was beloved only for my blade. And no other reason.”

  If she was bothered by his tales of violence, she offered no sign. “Would that I’d traveled as you did,” she sighed. “Before last winter, I’d never left Yrul. I met tutors from Roma, travelers from Graehelm, and weary sailors from the frozen southern shores. But all the stories from the outside world were just that: stories.”

  “Better to stay at home and hear stories than to be lost,” he said.

  “No,” she countered. “Better to leave home. Better to know people like you.”

  Three days after their first attempt, he arrived at a second plan. He came to it suddenly, leaping to his feet in the middle of conversation.

  “What is it?” Nephenia begged to know.

  “The crack in the wall,” he said. “The piece of obsidian we found.”

  Days ago, he had stumbled across the daggerlike shard while pacing at night. And now it has a purpose. Plucking the shard from its hiding place against the wall, he lifted it to his eye. “Sharp on one end,” he muttered. “Blunt on the other. Like a hammer.”

  Rapt, Nephenia watched as he knelt before the wall and chiseled at the hole. Stroke after stroke, he chipped and sliced and whittled. Black powder glittered in the sunbeam. Tiny flecks of ebon stone fell to the floor.

  “Impossible,” she doubted. “It’d take weeks, maybe months to carve a hole big enough.”

  “Maybe years,” he grunted. “But we cannot die here. We have nothing but time.”

  “Years?” she fretted. “We’ll go mad long before then.”

  “Then let us hope it goes faster. I will work. You keep thinking of other ways.”

  For days, he chiseled.

  His work was no easy thing. Blood flowed from his fingers, his flesh tattered by sharp obsidian. With each tiny stroke the bones in his hands vibrated, the black flecks dancing in the sunbeam before coating his flesh. He worked no slower for all his pain. He cut and carved, pared and chipped, and bit by bit fragments of obsidian dust crumbled in dusky showers to the floor. Ever his companion, Nephenia watched in wonderment as the crack widened and deepened, delighting as the sliver of sunshine brightened more and more of the room.

  “A little more sun today,” she said each dawn.

  “A little more air,” he agreed.

  Tireless, he worked. But for all his determination, I know I am clawing my way through a mountain. The crack widened too slowly. The shard wore down by the hour. Though the Null Chamber healed his hands each night and the pain became bearable, after nine days of chiseling he began to believe as Nephenia did.

  “It’ll never work,” she told him. “Nine days, and it’s not even wide enough to put your hand through.”

  “Nine days or nine hundred, I have to try.”

  And then it happened. On the tenth dawn, just as he began to work, the shard splintered. A sound like glass breaking destroyed the rhythm of his work, and a piece of shard cut deeply into his palm. Disgusted, he squeezed a rope of blood from his fist onto the floor, where it dried and evaporated.

  “Bound to happen.” He tried to taste his blood, but found his flesh already knitted, sewn shut by the Null magic.

  Like frost melting beneath the sun, Nephenia stood in the sliver of light and wept, her tears turning to dust before drifting to the floor. “It’s done then. We’re doomed,” she sniffled.

  There was nothing more to say.

  The crushing silence returned.

  Knowing Nephenia well enough to sense she needed her time alone, Garrett lingered beneath the crack. We will hope for other ways to escape, he thought.

  But we both know there are none.

  Heartbroken, Nephenia vanished into the blackness at the far side of the room. He wanted to go after her, to promise her this was not the end, but he could not bring himself to offer what was impossible. The Null Chamber felt more inescapable than ever. He could almost hear Wrail laughing. Mocking us. Waiting for us to lose our sanity.

  The days thereafter slogged by.

  He sensed the seasons changing, the light in the crack paling and dying earlier with each passing eve. The sleepy sounds of falling rain were replaced by the wind’s bitter whistling. Though stagnant, the Null Chamber never grew any colder, retaining the quality of changeless deadness, stifling all sensation beyond the barest hints of warmth whenever he and Nephenia were close together.

  Weeks drifted past, possibly months. The entire earth might have been consumed by the Wolfwolde or turned to ash by the Ur, but he never would have known. He and Nephenia meticulously searched every inch of the room, feeling for cracks and hoping to find more shards, but it amounts to nothing. Day after dimly-lit day, night after dreaded night, the truth became ever clearer.

  There is no leaving.

  Winter deepened, and the ninety-ninth evening of imprisonment arrived. Having long given up counting, he sat still in the dark, imagining the countless eons to come. After another dismal day of thinking, brooding, and wanting to talk to Nephenia but never trying, he found himself in a grim state of mind. He lurked beneath a stream of grey sunlight, glowering at the floor like a dead man upon his own grave.

  The last of the daylight thinned. Nephenia pattered to his side. There was no conversation. Not anymore. Not ever again. She wandered across the room and lay beside him, nudging him once to make her presence known.

  He felt calmer with her near, but the feeling soon fled.

  The moment the blackness shrouded the room, the Ur crept back into his mind. He felt them in the corner of his consciousness, the ghosts of ghosts, drifting in his head like the wind between a million tombstones. His blood froze in his veins, his heart slowing to a crawl.

  And ours will wake you every night forever.

  To make you die again.

  That night, with the Ur plaguing him and the dry winter’s wind howling through the crack, he was certain he would begin his descent into madness.

  But it was not to be.

  He sensed something was different when he realized Nephenia was still awake. He felt the barest brush of her breath upon his cheek, her heartbeat drumming
against his side.

  “Garrett?” She tugged at his shirt. “Are the whispers here?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they saying? You never tell me.”

  “You would not believe me.”

  “I would. I feel them, too. We aren’t alone here.”

  “I will survive,” he said. “No choice.”

  “I’m here.” She snuggled closer. “We’ll outlast them. Together.”

  Together, he thought. In this place forever.

  Absently, he ran his fingers through her hair, as so often he did when she was asleep. Her tresses felt the same as every night, smooth and delicate as silk, unchanged after many months of stasis.

  He touched her. The voices fled.

  “The first time in a hundred nights,” he murmured.

  “The first time for what?” she asked.

  “You should sleep now,” he said. “This is no time to stay awake.”

  She lifted her head from his shoulder. “No. I don’t want to sleep tonight.”

  She sat up beside him. He tasted her warm breath against his cheek. He saw nothing, but he knew the look in her eyes. Searching. Always searching. If not for the darkness in his heart, he would have understood.

  In silence, she straddled his lap, encircling him with her legs. He sat very still, not yet knowing.

  “I want you to stay quiet.” She put her finger to his lips. “Promise me; not a sound.”

  She kissed him.

  With lips warm as summer, she stunned him with her mouth’s softness. His heart thumped like thunder, his numbness thawing. He felt purpose behind her kiss, desire where he had expected none.

  “Now,” she said. “Kiss me back.”

  He did not dare deny her. He dropped his hands to her waist and searched for her mouth with his. His timidity died in a matter of breaths. His hands wandered up to her cheeks, down to her neck, and then all the way down to the tops of her thighs, which felt hot beneath his fingertips.

  This will not last, he thought. The dark will drown us.

  She kissed him ever harder, hardly pausing to catch her quickening breath. He felt the heat between her body and his, warmer than anything. Grasping, she tore his shirt from his shoulders and spilled it beside hers on the floor. She pulled away only long enough to untether the rope belt from her sackcloth skirt, afterward returning her mouth to his.

  “We’re warm,” she said between kisses. “Can you believe it?”

  Yes.

  He slid his hands across her naked, smoldering body, grasping her bottom and pulling her close. He wished he could see her, but instead he imagined her: her cheeks bronzed like a dawnlit sky, her soulful gaze glittering. He thought at any moment it might stop, certain his darker self might rise against him and drive her away, but she overwhelmed him.

  “Don’t stop,” she whispered in his ear, tugging her skirts atop her hips. “I want this.”

  Darkness and despair be damned, he took hold of her hips and drove himself inside her, slowly at first, then again and again and again. Whether it was madness or loneliness or love, he no longer cared. In this moment she was his, and I am hers. He laid her upon the hard obsidian floor, pinning her hands behind her head. He buried himself inside her, ravaging her as he had no other woman. At first he wondered whether she desired it to go this far, but when her whimpers turned to groans and the sounds of her pleasure echoed like ocean’s waves throughout the room, he abandoned all thought. Her body became his dominion, and for as long as he could withhold himself he made love to her.

  He did not remember separating from her. At some point in the middle of the eve, he collapsed upon the floor and descended into the deepest slumber he had ever known.

  His dreams were of nothing, of darkness unbroken even by the worming whispers of the Ur. It was a healing sleep, ten years’ convalescence in one night’s span. When he awoke at dawn his only feeling was the ecstasy of the previous night still thrumming through his bones.

  Sleepy-eyed and satisfied, Nephenia awoke and greeted him with a contented grin. She uttered the softest sigh, and without speaking a word, stood and walked into the pale, wintry beam of morning light. He followed, taking in the stunning sight of her nakedness.

  “Garrett,” she said his name like never before.

  “Yes.”

  “Every day from now until the end, I need you to help me forget we are here.”

  Falling Up

  Our child might’ve been a king,” mused Nephenia. “Or a queen. It could’ve happened, if things were different.”

  Garrett cradled her in the dark. Her hair cascaded down his arm, her fingers intertwined with his. “True,” he said. “Would have been tall.”

  “With copper hair. And a stout heart,” she added.

  “And a love of the mountains.”

  “A shame,” she sighed. “If we’d met another time, another place, I think I’d have loved you. You aren’t like men of Yrul or Romaldar.”

  “You were a married woman,” he reminded her.

  “And?” she quipped. “I only did it for my family. If I’d stayed home a maiden, I’d be dead. And now that’s what everyone else is: dead.”

  He held her close. It felt like the only thing to do. He tried to imagine being with her beyond the confines of the Null Chamber, but the feeling was impossible to grasp, a snowflake in a winter’s blizzard. The longer she laid with him, the more he concluded: there is no life beyond this, no meaning further than the flesh anymore.

  For the last twenty days, he had made love to her. Each time the sunbeam had cut through the gloom at dawn, he had risen from sleep and hauled her into his arms. When night claimed the world and darkness held sway, he had washed over her with kisses and caresses, and more. Her body had become his dominion, her whispers the only sounds he heard.

  Strange, it seemed, that I touch her so, and yet I dream of another.

  With a sigh, she extricated herself from his grasp. She wandered to the crack in the wall, where she dropped her shirt over her shoulders and donned her sackcloth skirt. In the wan, fragile light she wrapped her arms around herself, and he beheld her as though she were angelic, a dewdrop suspended in the cool, breezeless air.

  “What now?” she asked. “Do we never die? Do we stay forever young? How is this existence possible?”

  “I do not know,” he answered.

  “I wonder what goes out there.” She clutched herself tighter. “War? Peace? Is everyone else dead? Are we the only ones left?”

  He scooped up his clothes and dressed. In thoughtful silence, he walked to her and stood beside her in the sunbeam. Yes, he thought. In here, we are the only ones.

  He did not make love to her that day. She paced in the shadows, and he dwelled in meditation. Come late afternoon, the sunbeam faded and shadows consumed the Null Chamber, the world gone grey like the ocean before a storm. He had never felt so at peace. Never. Even before this place.

  At dusk, he and she convened at their usual place, huddling beneath the crack in the wall.

  “Good night.” He brushed her forehead with a kiss.

  “Good night,” she murmured back.

  She plummeted to sleep. And though he hoped to peacefully drowse, as I have for twenty nights, he found no such luxury. Shadows began to crowd his mind, chittering and gnawing like locusts. He closed his eyes, ready for the flood.

  One moment, he was stroking Nephenia’s arm and awaiting a nightmare.

  In the next he held his breath and listened to the darkness.

  Something moved in the chamber. The faintest noise drifted through the darkness and infiltrated his ears. The sound was like a serpent gliding atop water, slithering somewhere in the center of the room. He froze, his every muscle taut, his breath a cold stone in his throat.

  “Nephi.” He roused her. “Wake up. Something moves in the dark.”

  She composed herself quickly from sleep. “Wrail?” she whispered. “The Wolde?”

  “Neither. Listen.” He took h
er hand and locked it within his own.

  The slithering sound died. The barest thud echoed in the dark. The noise was no louder than the falling footsteps of a mouse, and against the backdrop of Null silence it seemed certain it was not human.

  “Someone’s here,” Nephenia whispered.

  “If I had the Greyblade…” he wished.

  She stood in the darkness, and after sucking in a deep breath, shouted, “Who’s there?”

  He might have been angry, but there seemed no sense in it. Unless the sound was imagined, whatever is here might as well find us and be done with our destruction.

  “Who’s out there?” she challenged again, this time louder. “Show yourself! We’re not afraid!”

  He stood with her. Creeping, he and she walked away from the wall and toward the middle of the room, where the black pillar of the Ur awaits. He moved until he touched the pillar’s cold obsidian with the pads of his outstretched fingers, A shiver coursed through his bones.

  “Colder in here,” he remarked.

  “Maybe it was nothing,” she whispered. “Maybe a rat, maybe something Wrail threw down here. We’ll never find out until the light comes back.”

  “No,” he said. “Listen closer.”

  Tumbling into the Null Chamber like a stone dropped into unfathomably deep water, a human voice echoed from above. It was muted, dulled as if by a vast distance, and yet audible.

  “Garrett!” it said. “Garrett Croft! Are you alive?”

  Impossible. He could hardly believe his ears. The voice was a man’s, somehow familiar. By its tenor, he knew it did not belong to Wrail, or any soldier of the Wolde.

  “Who is it?” Nephenia clutched his arm.

  “Not sure.” He shut his eyes and listened.

  “Garrett!” The voice rang out with greater desperation. “Damn you! Are you down there? Give us a shout, a knock, anything!”