by Anna Carven
They had been called katach, the Rulers, and they had been powerful in the use of the ka’qui.
What the fucking kubat was for, he had no idea. It was a relic from a lost age, ancient and mysterious and sinister. Perhaps the man depicted on its lid had once been its occupant, forever locked inside and separated from his ka’qui.
“Get inside.” The Mistress watched impassively as Ashrael stepped into the box, unable to refuse her command. He lay down and crossed his arms over his chest, completely subservient to her will. She stood over him, her power surging into his mindbond, preventing him from moving, and for a moment, she even stopped him from breathing.
Oh, how he hated her.
I am going to find a way to kill you, bitch, and I am going to enjoy it.
She laughed again. “Enjoy the silence, Asha.” The lid closed, cutting off his last link with the outside world. He entered a place of absolute darkness where there was no sound, no movement, no second sight, and no ka’qui.
There was no Noa. He couldn’t feel her anymore, and that was the worst torture of all.
He wanted to scream, but even his voice had been stolen, leaving him with nothing but silent eternity.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Noa ran down the corridor, heading towards the command area of Silence. She had to alert the warriors. Something terrible was happening to Ashrael, and she was powerless to stop it.
They had to do something. They had to save him. After all, they were the ones who’d fucking sent him to the cursed Dark Planet in the first place.
She tried to reach out to him through their bond, but he was distant.
Run. Tell them to take you as far away as possible. His chilling words echoed through her mind.
Dread coursed through her. The feeling grew, turning into a deep chasm of impending doom. She called out to him, trying to grasp onto their bond, but it was like clutching at vapor.
Echoes of Ashrael’s anguish washed over her as he grew more and more unreachable. Noa’s world was falling apart. One minute he’d been there, and the next minute he was fading, stolen away by some dark, unseen force.
What the hell is happening?
She increased her speed, her long legs pounding the dark floor. She pumped her arms, willing herself to move faster. Her ka’qui seethed around her, wild and untamed, and beneath it all she could feel the dark heart of Kythia. She struggled to control her ka’qui. She’d been pretty good at controlling her power lately, but now the thought of losing Ashrael had thrown her off balance.
Ash? she called, longing for the reassuring sound of his mindspeech and the comforting touch of his aura.
He didn’t answer.
And then she stopped in her tracks.
Because all of a sudden, he was gone.
Frantically, she searched for him, desperately calling for him through the bond, but all she got was stony silence. It was as if the umbilical cord connecting them had been severed.
And all of a sudden, those infernal unwanted thoughts - the stray thoughts of the hundreds of souls onboard Silence - flooded her mind.
“No,” she cried. It was like the dark old days all over again.
Terror and grief rose in her. If she could no longer feel him, that meant only one thing.
He was…
No. She couldn’t bear the thought. “This can’t be happening,” she whispered, her thoughts fracturing into a million pieces as her mental barriers failed completely.
Where are you?
Her mind exploded. She fell to her knees, clutching at the sides of her head. Her power surged, amplified by the closeness of the Dark Planet. The corridor tilted as Silence listed to one side, a huge groan reverberating through its dark walls.
Noa barely noticed. A terrible emptiness was growing inside her. She closed her eyes and reached out through the fog of chaos, trying to find Ashrael. She couldn’t accept that he was gone.
“She’s here,” a voice growled, and seconds later, hands were on her, hauling her to her feet.
“Hey, Noali.” A large hand rubbed her shoulder. “What’s going on?”
Their voices joined with the hundreds of swirling thoughts entering her mind, becoming an indistinct blur. If there was such a thing as psychic hell, then this was it.
“What the hell is wrong with her? Did she cause that just now?”
“I don’t know. Navigation just comm’d me. They say the disturbance came from inside Silence.” The hand shook her again. “Hey, Noa, snap out of it.”
“Look at her eyes. They’ve gone all funny.”
“Kaiin’s Hells. You think this has something to do with what’s going down on Kythia? Have we heard from the almighty Silent One himself?” The speaker was talking in Kordolian, but somehow she understood him. His thoughts were inside her head. Meaning transcended language.
“Nah… he refused to take a comm. Was worried it might make him detectable. But it’s a full-scale revolt going on down there now. Anything’s possible.”
The ship listed to the other side.
Someone swore in Kordolian. “I fucking hate this touched business… I need to get back to Arin.”
Ashrael. Where are you?
“Wake up, Human.” The hand rubbed her shoulder again. In irritation, she swatted it away, blurting unintelligible words of protest.
“Let’s get her to the med-bay. Call Elgon. He’s the only one on this whole fucking ship who might have any idea what’s going on with her.”
Noa vaguely felt herself being lifted into someone’s arms.
Ashrael.
She wanted to be in his arms. She wanted to feel his soft lips on her skin and inhale his comforting scent. She didn’t want it to end like this.
She reached out again and touched something immense.
Kythia.
The land of his birth had stolen him away from her, and she didn’t understand why.
Her emptiness grew, and so did her darkness. The dark heart of Kythia called to her, and she raged at it, wishing with all of her being that Ashrael was here with her now.
Why did you take him from me?
She was carried for some distance before being gently deposited on a soft surface. “We found her like this. What’s happening to her?”
A familiar psychic touch rippled along the edges of her mind.
“What do you think, Elgon?”
“The bond is severed,” the old man whispered. “The Mistress has gotten to him. He might even be locked away in a kubat. To a user of the ka’qui, there is no crueler punishment.”
The Mistress has taken him.
“If he’s back in her hands, then there is little hope he will get free again, especially if he’s in the kubat. She will be lost. Breaking a sarien’s bond is the worst thing one can do to them.”
“How do you know so much about all of this, old man?”
“I’m not proud of it, but I used to be a minder for the Program. They only use people like me.”
Break their bond?
No!
Noa grabbed onto the swirling threads of the Universe and pulled them towards her, fighting for some semblance of control.. This was strangely familiar. She had felt this way before.
A concerto, performed in front of an audience of thousands. Her memory threatening to fail her. The melody trying to lose itself amidst a hurricane of notes. Her hands starting to seize up. Everything on the verge of falling apart. She would lose the climax and the glory.
Lose Ashrael?
No.
No fucking way.
Something inside her roared, and she opened herself to the power swirling around her, feeding her emptiness with it.
Her anger grew. What good was this stupid power, anyway? What was the point if she couldn’t bend time or twist fate or bring Ashrael back?
“By the Goddess,” Elgon whispered, “we have to stop her.”
“What the hell is happening now, old man?”
“She’s tapping into Kythia’s power.
She’s drawing on it. She’s not supposed to do that. It is forbidden. It will destabilize the entire system.”
“Talk properly, old man. What does that even mean?”
“Some are sensitive Kythia’s latent power, but I have never seen a reaction as strong as this. She is disrupting the balance of the entire planet. Tell the medic to sedate her. Do it now!”
With every fiber of her being, she fought against the Universe until something sharp went into her arm. Her fractured consciousness started to drift away.
“Just got a comm from landside,” a gruff voice said as she started to go under. The voice blurred, becoming hazy and indistinct, but she caught the last words. “Sounds like the whole fucking planet is about to get torn apart.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Everything was shaking. His body shook. The kubat shook. He couldn’t hear anything or feel his ka’qui, but he was moving.
A violent tremor rocked him and the lid of the kubat slid halfway open, revealing a world filled with chaos.
The collective fear of thousands of souls hit him all at once as his ka’qui roared back to life, no longer dampened by the stifling walls of the kubat. He tried to sit up and found that he could actually move. He attempted to stand, only to fall flat on his back as another intense tremor shook the world.
Things were falling from the ceiling. The noise was deafening. A loud, endless rumble was punctuated with distant explosions and sharp crashes.
He waited until the worst of it was over. Then he stood, looking around with his second sight.
After an endless period of complete sensory deprivation, he struggled to regain his bearings. The first thing he did was try and reach out to Noa, but he couldn’t feel her amongst the sound and movement and the swirling, frantic, fearful energy radiating from thousands of people - within the Palace of arches and beyond.
The air was charged with tension and violence, and the world continued to shake with rumbling aftershocks.
The Mistress lay in a corner of the room, her hood thrown back to reveal her face. A large stone had fallen from the ceiling, pinning her beneath it.
They weren’t in the palace itself. They were deep beneath its surface in the ancient catacombs and warrens that ran through the dark rock below the palace.
It was said that this place was supposed to be a tomb, a burial place once used by the long-extinct Zor, but Ashrael had never seen any trace of their dead civilization apart from the kubat.
The catacombs had been his home; the place where he’d lived, slept, ate, trained, and been subjected to the Mistress’ tyrannical rule during his incarnation as a Silent One.
“Look what your idiot Human has done,” the Mistress wheezed as Ashrael walked over to her side, navigating around fallen boulders. “Even I know better than to try and tap into Kythia’s dark power.” Her frail body was crushed, and black blood pooled around her, trickling across the stone floor. Her face, fully revealed to him for the first time, was old and withered. She was completely hairless, even down to her eyebrows and eyelashes, and all of her teeth were missing aside from her short, sharp incisors.
She struggled to breathe. Her once awesome power was a shadow of its former self. The body couldn’t sustain the ka’qui if it was dying.
And her grip on his mindbond… it was growing weaker with each dying breath.
“What have you done to her?” Ashrael growled, able to speak once again. He squatted down beside the mistress, a terrible coldness spreading through him.
He couldn’t feel Noa at all.
He reached out for the bond, but there was nothing. It was the same as when he’d been locked inside the kubat.
Silence.
The Mistress was smiling. “So our world comes crashing down, all because of Humans.” Her voice barely audible, but Ashrael could read her lips. “The mighty Kordolian race, brought down by such a weak species.” She wheezed with silent laughter. “The General who sold out his Empire for a Human. The Prince who relinquished his throne. The Assassin who found his sarien. Do these Humans possess some infernal sorcery to hold such power over you, boy?”
She was as emotionless as ever, radiating only her usual cold amusement.
Even as she was dying.
There was no anger, no shock, no surprise.
She was more alien than any of the Humans Ashrael had encountered.
“What have you done to her?” he asked quietly, trying to fight the growing tremor in his hands. He clenched his fists, torn between white-hot rage and cold fury.
With a great wheezing effort, the Mistress turned her face towards him. “I do not know what has happened to your sarien, boy, but the ignorant bitch has destabilized the core of the planet with her meddling.” Pain creased her ugly face but her smile held true. It was the worst kind of smile, made all the more malevolent because of its blandness. “Maybe she is dead. She was your sarien. You will never know another like her.”
No!
Her words were pointed barbs, aimed to strike deep within his heart. And even though she was about to slip into the afterlife, she seemed to enjoy his pain.
She had always enjoyed seeing him in pain.
Ashrael watched as the life slipped from her, her ka’qui weakening. The last cruel vestiges of his original mindbond slipped away, leaving him unfettered, but he barely noticed, because he was too swept up in his anger and grief.
Where is my sarien?
Below him, hundreds of souls trembled as their minds were freed from the Mistress’ clutches.
Where is she?
He reached out for Noa, desperate to feel the comfort of their bond. He was unable to think, his cold fury growing into a towering storm.
He wanted to kill the Mistress. He wanted to wrap his hands around her neck and strangle the life from her, watching as she begged him for mercy. He wanted to taste her fear and watch her squirm helplessly. Visions of him tearing out her eyes and her throat with his bare claws entered his mind. He would then carve her heart out of her chest, like a tribesman from the Vaal.
He wanted to exact revenge for all the times he’d been suffocated and locked in the kubat, for all the times he’d been forced to wear a pain collar, for all the times she’d relished the taste of his agony as she’d reinforced the mindbond, for all the times she’d placed her hand on his head and burned away his ka’qui channels, shaping him into a mindless killer.
But sweet revenge had been stolen from him by a fucking falling rock.
And he couldn’t find his sarien.
The ground was still shaking under his feet. Slowly, he rose and left the Mistress behind. Her features were twisted into a faintly mocking expression, but her life was gone.
Ashrael exited the punishment room and made his way down a set of dark uneven stairs. He entered the room below, avoiding fallen rocks and bits of debris as he walked into a chamber of horrors.
Hundreds of prisoners stared at him fearfully. They were Kordolian and alien alike; he saw a couple of scaly-skinned Soldar and a Veronian with pointed furry ears. An Avein moaned in terror as he passed. She was missing her magnificent glossy black wings. They’d been amputated. He came face-to-face with a Kordolian male, a tribesman of the Vaal clearly identifiable by his ritual scars and long braids. He glared at Ashrael, radiating hatred, his swirling ka’qui amplified by his anger.
But he couldn’t speak, because his mouth was bound. He couldn’t move, because his arms and legs were held in mindlocked restraints, and he was chained to the wall. Like all the other prisoners, various tubes and monitors were attached to his body, and two thin needles attached to wires had been inserted into his temples.
Ashrael’s anger grew as realization dawned on him. This was the reason the Mistress had grown so powerful in such a short amount of time. She’d been harvesting the ka’qui from these poor souls.
He stared at the Kordolian for a moment. The tribesman glared back at him with all the hatred and venom in the Universe. His killing intent was fierce, e
ven though he’d been imprisoned for Kaiin knows how long.
Hold still, brother.
Ashrael reached within himself and channeled his ka’qui, threading it into the mindlocked bonds. He wasn’t supposed to know this technique, but he’d figured it out on his own. He’d observed the Mistress enough times to know where to softly apply his energy.
It took great concentration and effort, draining his already depleted reserves, but when he was done the restraints around the prisoner’s arms and legs fell away. He pulled out a Callidum throwing knife and severed the remaining wires and the bonds attached to the wall. He turned the dagger and handed it to the tribesman, whose eyes had widened in surprise.
Free the rest, Ashrael said as the room shook, causing dust and stones to fall from the ceiling. Hurry now.
His anger mirrored Kythia’s discontent. The Dark Planet had been dormant for so long, and now it was awakening, expressing its anger. Ashrael left the prisoners and made his way down another flight of stairs. He tried to reach Noa again, but there was only silence from her side.
He couldn’t bring himself to believe she was dead. Not yet. Because if that was the case, then everything would be over.
And that terrified him more than anything else in the Universe.
He traversed crumbling passages and disused rooms, going deeper and deeper into the heart of the underground until he found the place he was looking for.
He’d been here only once before, back when he was a mere novice. When the Mistress had found out, she’d locked him in the kubat for an entire cycle, depriving him of food and drink and ka’qui until he’d emerged wasted and skeletal, hovering close to death.
The room was buried deep within the stone core of the palace’s foundation. It was re-inforced with Callidum walls and sealed with a thick Qualum door.
When he’d first found it, it had been open, and he’d been astounded at its contents, because as a simple novice, he’d never held a tome or a datafile in his hand. It was a room of knowledge. The ancient secrets of the Dark Planet were hidden in this room. The collective knowledge of the Zor was contained here. He’d accidentally activated one of the datafiles and it had delivered him a holo-image with a softly spoken narrative in High Kordolian.