Volac’s gleeful cackle pierced his ears, torpedoing his thoughts. Notia turned her head, looking over her shoulder to follow his gaze.
The march of time faltered, mocking Kanruo for the transgressions he’d made.
It had all been a ruse, bait to lure him into returning.
And it worked.
Notia’s focus shifted. Her eyes widened as they followed Volac’s gaze to where Kanruo stood.
A shadow reared up around Volac and his hand clenched around Notia’s wrist. He spun, as if they were partners in a Latin ballroom dance, and pulled her close.
A wet, slapping sound reverberated through the trees, followed by the sharp crackling of bones snapping as Volac plunged his hand into her chest.
“NO!”
A breath later, Volac’s grimy digits emerged from Notia’s chest, slick with black blood in the moonless night. Clutched in his hand was her quivering heart.
Notia wobbled for a moment, her lips slightly open in shock as she tried to draw breath. Her eyes glazed over as a hand came up to touch the wound.
Her sickle dropped to the dirt, the sound dull and muffled as she swayed, blood pouring from her chest.
“Run,” she whispered, her eyes meeting Kanruo’s one last time as their light went out. Blood bubbled from her lips and she crumpled to the ground.
No, this wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. There was no way that this was real. It had to have been one of her doppelgangers. Notia would never die like that. She couldn’t . . .
Kanruo’s heart lurched in his chest as his teeth clenched together, threatening to grind into dust. Heat tore through him as his muscles seized up.
But Notia didn’t get up, and his vision blurred.
Volac tossed Notia’s heart up in the air, catching it as it came back down. The muscle splatted against his hand, squishing and squelching as he toyed with it.
The sight was too much for Kanruo to endure. Sorrow took a backseat to unadulterated outrage.
“Raijū! Yuko!” Kanruo cried out, his hand going to free his sickle as he charged at Volac.
The beasts thudded onto the ground alongside him, furious roars of thunder leaving their barrel chests as they charged.
“Such potential,” Volac mused, watching with interest as the beasts bounded toward him. A simple wave of his hand smudged the beasts out of existence, their forms dissolving in a wisp of smoke. “And you would waste it away in this forgotten glen, when the future could be shining.”
A malignant fury rose up in Kanruo. Everything had been taken from him within the hour, and now this man dared to taunt him about the Void? His vision bled red as he lunged at Volac.
He called upon every trick Notia had taught him, summoning magic from the darkest shadows of the moon. “Goddess send what had waked from its sleep to once again slumber deep. By powers of three and nine, banish and bind!”
He slashed, desperately trying to hook the curved blade around any piece of flesh, to cut him open, separate his hand from his vile body. Each time, Volac glided out of the way, brushing off the tethers of ether energy that would have restricted any other being.
Kanruo felt his power faltering as their deadly waltz wore on. He needed to end this quickly. He had spent too much of his energy defending against the sniffers.
Volac dipped by him a smirk on his face. Kanruo turned on the ball of his foot. He dropped his weight low, the muscles in his legs coiling as he gave a final burst of speed and slipped inside Volac’s defenses.
The curve of his blade angled perfectly at Volac’s unguarded throat.
Once more, Volac raised his hand, stopping the blow with a simple pinch of his finger. He glanced at the gleaming blade, amused by the boy’s plight.
Kanruo yanked backward, but the blade might as well have been burrowed in bedrock.
“It is going to be such a pleasure to break you, my boy.” He reached out and a blood-slick hand cupped Kanruo’s face.
With a flick of his finger, Volac sent Kanruo tumbling head over heels.
Kanruo came to a stop next to Notia’s body. Grief bombarded him as he stared at her. Her glamour had faded, her body mutilated. She had deserved a better death than this. He refused to abandon her to whatever foul machinations Volac had planned. Hissing, he struggled to his feet, moving to place himself between her body and Volac. His head was spinning, and his body shook with weakness, muscles burning.
Volac skulked ever closer, but Kanruo didn’t have the strength to go on. His fingertips were burnt and his clothing crackled with the static of electricity. Too much power. Too quickly.
“Now then, where were we?” Volac chuckled. His eyes were wild with delight as a legion of ghostly hands burst out of the earth.
They ensnared Kanruo in their grip, flinging him about as if he were a rag doll. He hurtled toward the ground, certain that the impact would break his spine. But at the last second, the hands snatched him away, tossing him between themselves in a mocking game of hot potato.
He thrashed to break free. His sickle passed through their incorporeal forms, unable to harm them.
The world flipped upside down as he was hung by one leg. He was the hanged man. From his inverted position, he saw Volac scratching a looming shadowy creature under its chin.
The Void. The Void was here.
Kanruo felt his breath catch in his throat as a numbness crept into his extremities.
“I’ll prepare the boy for you,” Volac crooned in a loving, sing-song tone to the spectral figure. “You’ll have free reign of this world soon enough.”
They turned to stare at the young witch. His vision went spotty and with a hiss, he kicked at the disembodied hands again. He had to get free, had to get away!
The more he struggled, the darker the world grew. The air became thick with humidity and then he was falling, endlessly falling, his fingers clawing for handholds that weren’t there. The viscous matter slowed his descent into darkness. The pitch blackness cradled him in clammy arms as it pulled him through the planes of reality. Sticky fingers stroked his hair and pulled at his skin. Their touch froze his flesh as he descended ever deeper, powerless to stop it.
13
Kanruo crashed to the ground, sending up a cloud of dust as his sickle flew from his hand, landing just out of reach. The ground was covered in a thick layer of gray powder finer than any sand. The delicate ground beneath him sank like quicksand as he tried to rise and look around.
Where was he?
A cold, bleak world stretched out before him, ashen and gray. Bleached white trees dotted the landscape. Stripped of their foliage, bark gnarled with red, weeping blight, they desperately reached their splintered branches skyward in search of absent salvation. Beyond that, walls and towers of shining white marble glowed. But its light offered no warmth, no hope, acting as a vacuum, draining the land around it.
With a grunt, Kanruo pushed himself to his feet, staring up at the structure that surrounded him. He was standing in the courtyard of a citadel, but where?
He reached out, one hand scooping up his weapon while the other searched for the magical threads that bound the world to the ether. But he found none.
A dead zone, entirely devoid of energy. But how? Even the severely radiated parts of the world had whispers of echoes in them, the mournful song of the dying earth that could be felt through the weak vibrations of the threads.
But here, here there was nothing but silence. An all-encompassing stillness as if the world were asleep.
He strained his ears, extending his senses, desperate to find something, anything in the barren expanse before him.
His obsidian pendant hummed, vibrating with urgency.
Kanruo looked down at the pendant. That had never happened before. What did it mean?
“Hello?” he called out, voice hoarse, only to have the sound swallowed by the landscape. Dread made his knees knock together. A parasite of unease grated at the inside of his skull, burrowing deep inside his brain.
A
s he took a step forward, black tar welled up from the compacted dust and sent spindly fingers to ensnare his legs. Each action felt more like swimming than walking. Just being in the dead place was draining him, an endless abyss sucking away at his life force.
The Void.
He felt it crushing down on his very being, zapping his strength, hope, and will.
Pain flicked against his tendons as he moved forward. Even breathing took concentrated effort, making him uncomfortably aware of how thick the air was, how it squeezed his lungs in a hydraulic press, forcing Kanruo to take shallow breaths.
With a strangled yell of exertion, he took another step forward.
A sense of hatred washed over him, aimed at the walls of this forsaken place.
Get up!
When had he fallen to his knees?
Get up! You must get up!
Kanruo pressed his hands to the ground beneath him and pushed himself up. His vision swam, and he bowed his head, panting from the exertion.
Black sludge burst from the dirt beneath his hands and feet. The wiry digits latched onto his flesh and clothes. They burned his skin, the sharp nip of pincers blistering his flesh.
Keep walking! Do not look at it!
Grinding his teeth, Kanruo struggled against the sludge. He stood, tearing free of the sticky tethers that bound him.
That’s it! Keep going!
Who was calling out to him? Was this voice even real? It wasn’t the Void. The inky, slinking quality was absent.
He was tired. So incredibly tired.
The sludge coiled around his feet, crawling up his legs. The smell of fermenting sweets filled the air around him as the sludge soaked into his leggings, itching his skin. It began to crystallize as it slithered up his knees. Like resin, it morphed from black to white as it hardened, threatening to bind him to the spot.
Kanruo slowly lifted his leg and was met with a sharp crackling as he broke the hardened tar. The earth that clung to the sole of his foot made a loud slurping noise, punctuated by a loud pop as the suction burst.
One foot in front of the other. He had keep moving.
Don’t give in!
He cast a lingering glance at the trees dotting the courtyard. Their spacing was too haphazard to be the work of any intentional landscaping. As he looked closer, the knots and sores on the trees twisted, the mangled bark rearranging itself until it resembled human faces. Mouths stretched open in silent screams as their eyes scoured his soul.
Was that where the trees had come from? Had they once been people, futilely trying to escape, only to become ensnared and weathered away by time?
Keep moving, little supernova, the voice urged him. He felt a jolt of pain rip through his heart.
Notia. She was dead. She was dead and it was his fault.
“You made it further than I expected.” Volac’s voice purred in his ear in cold delight.
Kanruo whipped around, his weapon before him. He brought his sickle high over his head, and as he locked eyes with his tormentor, he brought the blade down with all his strength.
His sickle cut through Volac’s arm at the shoulder, severing the limb from his body with only the barest hint of resistance as it slid through tendons and bone. The arm fell to the ground with a moist squelching sound.
He stared at Volac, panting and shaking with adrenaline. Any normal person would have been screaming in pain, clutching the wound and bleeding out.
There should have been blood, whole spurting fountains of it. But only a thick, fetid mucus dripped from the wound. The smells of rotting cabbage and ammonia crawled into Kanruo’s nose and he stumbled backward.
“So much fight in you.” Volac grinned, his teeth gleaming in the perpetual twilight. “You really are perfect.”
Kanruo turned on the balls of his feet and ran.
He didn’t know where he was running to, only that he had to escape this strange upside-down realm. But if he did, could he fend the man off? The pact he’d made with the Void seemed to give him godlike power.
Volac raised his remaining hand, and a snap of his fingers resonated through the courtyard.
Kanruo jolted to a halt. The adrenaline that surged through him bled out of his veins as his limbs were restrained by a thousand disembodied hands.
He thrashed but the hands would not yield, their biting grip leeching the strength from him. Then his head was yanked back by his hair. He watched in ever increasing horror as Volac walked over to his severed limb.
Delicately, he bent down and picked it up. Blowing dust off it, he reattached it to his body.
“What the hell are you?” Kanruo whispered.
“I am all that you can be and more.” Volac reached out, cold fingers stroking Kanruo’s face with his reattached hand.
Ice darted through Kanruo’s veins. It attacked his mind, slowing the glowing pulse of signals along neurons and sedating his heart. His body shook, overcome by cold.
Volac’s fingers traced over his lips. Kanruo bit the digits as hard as he could.
The pungent tastes of ash and putrefaction filled his mouth as flesh tore.
Volac chuckled in amusement. “You can’t hurt me, little witch. But by all means, keep trying.”
A ghastly hand pried open Kanruo’s fingers, stealing his sickle from him and presenting the weapon to Volac.
“Hmm.” Volac studied the weapon with disinterest. “The weapon of a dead practice. You won’t be needing this anymore.”
Volac pried his hand from Kanruo’s mouth, the skin stretching and tearing as he did. Pus bubbling up from beneath the damaged flesh made Kanruo gag and spit.
“Give that back!” he rasped.
“No, I don’t believe I will.” Volac walked over to a tree, pressing the weapon against it.
The bark quivered and peeled back, the face locked within its blight weeping tears of blood-red sap. The liquid rolled down, melding around the blade. It seeped over the weapon to encase it within an amber plaque.
“There.” Volac took a step back. “It looks so lovely next to all the others.”
The tree shuddered as it began to swell until finally, the bark could contain it no more. A gash burst along the distressed husk, revealing countless other artifacts. Athames, pendants, crosses, sacred scrolls, and totems burrowed within the white bark.
“So many failures.” Volac sighed as he turned back to Kanruo. “But you . . . we will do so much better with you.”
“I’m not helping you,” Kanruo hissed defiantly.
Volac closed his eyes, bowing his head with a sigh. When he raised his head, his eyes were nothing but liquid darkness.
We’ve been waiting for one like you, little witch, the Void purred. It appeared, a phantom spectator towering over them. The long-legged haunt leaned down, bumping its head against Volac’s shoulder.
He reached up, scratching behind a pair of tufted ears on the phantom’s skull.
“The Void has so much to offer us.” Volac traced his tongue over his teeth as he turned back to Kanruo. “Once you’ve partaken in its communion, you’ll see how everything else is so . . . temporary.”
Be we, we are eternal.
Volac brought his hand to rest on Kanruo’s chest. His fingertips dragged over the synthetic fibers until they brushed against the obsidian pendant. He wrapped tainted fingers around the pendant, fondling it as if he could tease a reaction from the stone.
“You won’t be needing this, either.”
“Stop!” Tears burned at Kanruo’s eyes, turning into ice as they fell down his cheeks. Panic rallied in his chest, fighting against the cold that infected his veins.
With a firm tug, the leather shredded in Volac’s hands. “Pathetic trinkets and trappings, all of it. But it hid you from me quite effectively. Had it not been for the Union, I would have never found you.”
He walked back to the tree, pressing the pendant into its amber blood.
“Now we can begin.” Volac stroked the tree’s bark.
“Go to hell
,” Kanruo spat. He watched as Volac drew close to him once more, eyes of bottomless abyss fixed on him. Hungry.
Volac rested his hand on Kanruo’s stomach.
“But you will.” The spectral hands began to peel back Kanruo’s clothes.
“Let me go!” Kanruo struggled, the synthetic fibers tearing as the hands overpowered him.
They flung him to the ground, pressing his face into the ashen dust, letting the tar wrap its biting tendrils in his hair, around his neck, arms, and legs, leaving the hands free to devest him of his clothes.
The tar snapped over his eyes, blotting out the world. The hands were slick and slimy against his flesh as they continued to expose him.
Fine nails traced over his back, making his flesh crawl. The pads of clammy fingertips followed, pushing and pinching his skin, testing its malleability.
“You will be perfect.”
“NO! STOP!”
Kanruo lay huddled in a corner of the marble citadel. When the tar had finally released him, he’d frantically crawled into the structure, hoping to put distance between himself and Volac. But it was a futile attempt.
“Run wherever you like, little witch. This is my domain. I will always find you.” Volac’s coy words echoed in his mind, carried on a biting wind that cut straight to the bone. “All roads lead to me.”
The marble was hard and unforgiving on his battered body. He’d tried to stand, only to slip as his blood slicked the stone, the falls littering him in bruises. This nook had been the first place that offered shelter as he struggled to stay conscious.
He couldn’t stop shaking, the persistent cold burrowing deep into his bones. His body stung. Vicious rips in his flesh wouldn’t stop bleeding, and he couldn’t stop the tears from welling up in his eyes.
He was alone, trapped here. No one had come when he’d screamed. No one had stopped Volac from . . .
The stinging memory of being held down and violated made him wish he could disappear, wake up from this living nightmare, and a wave of sobs broke from him.
We could stop him. We could make things right. No one else has to suffer.
Kanruo covered his ears. The Void was complicit in this sadistic ritual.
The Last Moon Witch Page 14