Holy Darkness

Yuya was glad he couldn’t see the big toe on his left foot. This was the third time he had rammed it straight into a sharp rock.

Somehow, the echoing grunt of pain that followed seemed to give him a vague sense of the width and height of this tunnel. Maybe he had been down here long enough to develop a sort of basic echolocation, a loose understanding of how his voice echoed off of rock.

He stepped over the rock where he’d bumped his toe, and immediately bumped the top of his head. No, perhaps not. He stepped slowly, and kept hands outstretched in front of his face.

The impulse to keep moving forward, to plunge deeper into the blackness stayed with him, until he came to a spot where he could hold his hands up, left or right and not touch the cave walls. Faintly in the cold damp, he felt a salty breeze cross his face. A sound like gentle waves lapping on rocks reached up from… below him. Far. Yuya went down on all fours, and crawled at a snail’s pace over the uneven floor, until he felt a dropoff. He had entered a very different space, different enough that the echo of his voice off the walls might actually tell him something useful.

He vocalized softly, a somewhat wanting imitation of the opening to a song that had been stuck in his head inexplicably for the last several weeks. When he heard no echo at all, he raised his voice, and belted out the song’s first proper lyrics, glad Grant wasn’t here to endure his poor attempt to pronounce the English interspersed with the Japanese:

Nao ret mi oppan da scah!

Tokeatta viros!

Niji ni kuro wo sashi tobitatsu!

ah-h-oh…

He was most of the way through the verse, by the time the first words echoed back to him. He faintly recalled the speed of sound was three hundred something meters per second, so dividing that to account for the sound bouncing off the rocks and coming back, this cavern chamber had to be… well, enormous.

And yet the space available to him seemed small, a precipice over a vastness of fuligin-black water below. If he were to lay down here, he would wish to wedge some portion of himself between two of the jagged rocks making up the floor, should he fall asleep and roll toward the edge. Normally, he had a healthy trepidation when it came to heights, but he sensed that this was where he was to remain, for the time being, and meditate. This deepest, darkest reach of Nod, with no sliver of light, and no sound but the water lapping below and the beating of his heart, was where he would find the Lord of Death, and himself. He felt around until he found a relatively, flat, smooth rock, and sat on it with his head bowed, his forearms across his knees.

Yuya couldn’t claim to have truly emptied his mind before, to have attained the state of mushin that was a central feature of what the great Zen teachers called for in meditation. Always, some errant thought or another pecked at him. Often a song stuck in his head. But in this place, where the only difference between keeping his eyes open and shut was the feeling of salty air stirring against his eyeballs, he became as a void effortlessly.

And then something he had never been taught to expect began to happen: slowly, gently, something else, something so much richer, so much more vibrant than the noise and static that normally filled him, began to trickle in.

Yuya had an inward sense of a cool light, like the glare off of fresh snow. Had he not detached himself from the world a moment before, forced himself to stand even just for this moment in indifference to life or death, it would have been a terrible presence he now felt, annihilating. Instead, it was a comfort, like the walls of Ak-Toum against the terrors of the Galkha Desert, like Haiseiko’s saddle beneath him on the great unknown of the northern steppes. Like a word of encouragement from his father back on Earth.

In this vision of light, there were spots on the periphery where its light didn't reach. By all rights, it was bright enough to engulf everything in the vision, bright enough to engulf everything that existed. Yet, seemingly in some act of forbearance and clemency, shadows were allowed to exist at the margins.

For a moment, Yuya felt discomfort at being engulfed in the light, but that soon passed. The sensation was more one of anticipating the pain from a light too bright, a reflection that blinded, than of any actual pain caused by looking upon it. Once this passed, a creeping sense of shame wormed itself into his mind. It was obvious to him this light was the inexact representation in an unaccustomed mind of a far greater thing than he coming into his presence, of the Lord of Death to whom he had sworn himself to get here. Could he ever fulfill his end of the agreement? Become a worthy, even slightly meaningful, servant to something so vast?

Was he not here merely to be punished for his sloth?

Without realizing it, Yuya had shifted his attention to one of the shadows. It grew in his vision, until all was dark, and he was once more keenly aware of where he sat, on a narrow precipice in a lightless cave.

He wondered whether the doubt– which now seemed responsible for throwing him out of the vision– had come from within, or been whispered in his ear by those shadows.

Whatever the case, his heart thumped and his breathing was sharp. Over them, he could only faintly make out the waves below, and…

There was a scraping sound on the wall behind him, to the right of the tunnel he had stumbled out from. A rock slid loose, and impacted the precipice near where he sat as he looked back. In a lesser darkness, the light thrown by the sparks it threw would have illuminated nothing at all. But to his eyes in this moment, pupils dilated as wide as they would go, they were as a dozen torches flaring to life before being snuffed out.

The flash didn't last long enough to give him an impression of color or movement. What he did make out was a shape, out of place on a jagged line of rocks above the tunnel exit.

The creature, like Yuya, was garbed only in a loincloth, though its was ragged and soiled. It was painfully thin, but its skin looked shriveled and its joints looked… broken inward, the kneecaps pushed up in front of the thighs and the elbows up to mid-tricep, as though it had been crushed inward and healed into that new squat, deformed shape. The eyes, beneath overgrown black bangs, were tiny dark beads, while the ears and nose had grown to uncanny proportions. Despite all this, there was a recognizable human origin to the thing, like this body had been subjected to a transformation along the same lines as the gangly demoniac the Bekhites had used in their attack.

The darkness returned, now punctuated by a handful of specks burned into Yuya’s vision where the sparks had flown. He heard bony feet drop to his small ledge, and dove for the loose rock where it had fallen.

He tugged at one sharp end, felt no give, and swept his hand around until he felt something give. Taking up the jagged piece of basalt, he came up to a crouch.

He smelled the thing a moment before he felt it. His open left hand met a bony chest, as two sets of long, slender finger wrapped around his elbows. With the rock, he struck where the thing’s head must have been, felt a gaping jaw dislocate. It screeched like a sickly bat, and shoved him back with surprising strength.

He tried to regain his footing, stepped back to meet only air, and fell. The twisted creature came with him, letting go of him only once they were both in free-fall.