Darkness and Nothing Else

Darkness.

That was the first thing I became aware of.

Not the ordinary dark of a night with stars in it. This was absolute. It pressed against me like a second skin. It was the kind of dark that makes you check whether you still have eyes.

I tried to blink. I tried to move. Nothing answered. My limbs were heavy. My chest was weighted. My tongue sat thick in my mouth.

I was awake and I was locked inside myself.

At first there was silence.

Then voices.

Low, echoing, like whispers carried a long way down a cavern. They overlapped each other. Murmurs sliding over stone. Voices that had not been arranged for me to hear.

"The time is nearly here."

"We have him. The Marked one."

"Fate delivered him into our hands. As it was written."

My pulse went in my ears. It was the only sound in that place that belonged to me.

They were talking about me. I wanted to shout. My body declined. My breaths came shallow and I could barely feel my chest move with them.

Footsteps somewhere nearby, uneven and dragging. I could not tell whether they were approaching or going. The air smelled damp. Old stone soaked in something metallic.

Blood. Ash. Possibly both.

Then a new voice, deeper and sharper than the others. Calm. The kind of voice that has never had to raise itself to be obeyed.

"Do you not see it? The pattern has held for centuries. The Marked emerges. The chains tighten. The wheel turns. This one is no different. He is power made flesh, and power does not escape its purpose."

A softer voice answered, hissing.

"He resists. He still believes in the freedom he had. That is dangerous."

A pause. I could hear the smile in the deeper voice before it spoke.

"All the better. Resistance ripens into despair. And despair opens the gate."

A murmur went around them, the sound of a congregation agreeing with something.

My stomach turned over.

A gate.

I pushed against the thing holding my body and nothing happened. My body was stone. Inside it my mind was screaming and none of that reached anywhere either.

The whispers got clearer.

"With him, the ritual can begin. The chains break. The old ones rise."

"The humans will kneel as they knelt before."

"Their guardians scattered. Their faith coming apart. All of it as it was foreseen."

Chains. Ritual. Rise.

The words scraped along the inside of my skull.

Images came up unasked. The altar in the temple with blood across it. The vision of heads on pikes. The screaming of beings from centuries before I existed.

I could no longer tell which of those were mine and which had been put there.

More footsteps. Closer this time. My skin prickled and I could not flinch. Something hovered above me, and I could feel the cold weight of it without being able to see it.

"He feels it,"

a voice rasped.

"The Marked one stirs."

The deeper voice again. Amused now.

"Good. Let him listen. Let him taste the edges of it. He will understand soon enough that resistance was never one of the options."

I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to say that they were wrong about all of it.

I lay there and drowned in the sound of their devotion.

Time did not behave properly in that place. Seconds went on for a long while. It might have been hours. It might have been minutes and my own mind stretching them.

The whispers never stopped. Sometimes they were about me. Sometimes about things considerably older.

"The Scar was a wound. Not an ending. Veyren failed to complete the cycle. This one will not."

"The Guardian of Peace blinds himself. He still holds to the false light of our words. To the promise we made him. He will fall the way all of them fall."

"The girl and the boy. Useful as leverage. Nothing beyond that."

Kaelra. Talen.

My heart jolted hard enough that I felt it in my throat.

Were they alive. Did they know where I was.

The thought of their faces pulled me back from the edge of something I had been drifting toward without noticing.

If I could move. Even a finger. Even a breath louder than the ones I was managing.

The deeper voice spoke again, lower, the way people speak when they are confessing something to people who already agree with them.

"The world believes us to be scattered shadows. They do not see that we are the continuation of the truth itself. We were born out of betrayal and forged in human greed. When the old ones were cast down and their blood went into this soil, that was not death. That was transference."

A pause.

"And now, through him, they return."

Old ones. Cast down. Blood in the soil.

My mind went back to the temple. The beings with skin like shadow and flame, being slaughtered by people who looked like me.

Was that what he meant. Were these people worshipping those things.

Or something that had come after them.

The whispers got fervent.

"Blessings of the Marked."

"He is the vessel. The bridge. The key."

I clenched my teeth, or I thought I did. It felt like my jaw should have broken from the effort. My body stayed exactly where it was.

I was not going to be their key. I was not opening anything for them.

Then, for the first time, the deeper voice spoke to me directly.

"You hear us. Do you not."

The chamber went silent. My heart was going loudly enough that I assumed they could hear it.

"You cannot move. You cannot speak. And yet you listen. That is sufficient."

I wanted to prove him wrong about something. Anything.

"You wonder where you are. You wonder why you are bound."

A pause.

"You are exactly where you were always going to be. The moment you carried the Mark your path was set. Every choice you have made since then, every step, brought you here. Not by chance. By design."

The words came around me like something with coils.

"You dream about breaking free. Freedom is a story. Power of your kind does not exist without a purpose attached to it. Yours is to end this hollow world so that it can be made again."

Silence. My breathing. My heart.

Then the whispers came back up, louder, fanatical.

"The end approaches."

"The vessel is ready."

"The Marked one will wake the blood that sleeps."

I wanted to deny all of it and the words kept getting into cracks I had not known were there.

What if they were right.

What if none of it, the arrival, the power, the mark, had ever been mine to steer.

Kaelra. Talen. Their voices came back through my memory, shouting, laughing, calling me out of an illusion once already.

I held onto that. To them. To anything that was not this.

The deeper voice went quiet. The dark thickened around me and I could feel it pressing harder, as though the void had decided to finish the job itself.

I did not know how long I could hold against it.

***

Kaelra's hands would not stop shaking.

She pressed them flat against the table in the strategy room and made them still. Maps in front of her, marked in red ink. Sightings. Rumors. Places where the cult's presence had been felt and confirmed.

None of it was enough.

"We're running out of time,"

she said.

Talen paced behind her with his jaw clenched hard enough that she could hear his teeth.

"Then we move faster. We take this city apart if we have to."

Corvin stood near the window with his arms crossed.

"Recklessness gets you killed. It doesn't get him back."

"Then what do you suggest?"

She turned on him.

"We sit here while they do whatever they're doing to him?"

Corvin's eyes softened. His voice did not.

"I suggest we use what we know. They operate in shadow. Shadows leave traces. We follow the traces."

Kaelra exhaled sharply and made herself focus.

He was right and she hated it.

Talen stopped pacing.

"The market district. That's where they took him. Somebody saw something."

"Already checked,"

Corvin said.

"Most of the witnesses are too frightened to talk. One merchant mentioned chanting. From beneath the old temple ruins in the eastern quarter."

Kaelra's heart skipped.

"That place has been abandoned for years."

"Which makes it ideal for people who do not want to be found."

Talen was already moving toward the door.

"Then that's where we go."

"Wait."

Corvin's voice stopped him.

"You take backup. I'm coming, and we're bringing a full squad."

Kaelra nodded.

"We leave in ten minutes."

The eastern quarter smelled of ash and rot. The buildings leaned at angles they had not been built at. The walls were scorched from the siege and nobody had come out this far to start repairs.

The temple ruins were ahead of them. A skeleton of crumbling stone and broken pillars.

Kaelra had her daggers out. Beside her Talen's magic crackled faintly, barely held. Corvin and four other wardens moved in formation behind them without a sound between them.

"Stay sharp,"

Corvin whispered.

"If they're here there will be defenses."

Kaelra's eyes went across the shadows. Everything she had was telling her they were close.

That he was down there. Somewhere under all of it.

Hold on, she thought.

We're coming.

They went down into the dark.

The chains burned.

Not with heat. With something further in than that, something that got at the edges of my mind and pulled downward.

The whispers had stopped.

There was only silence now, and in the silence I felt it start.

The ritual.

My body convulsed. Mana surged through me in waves I had no control over, going in directions I had never sent it. The mark on my skin flared and burned as though something were rewriting it while I lay there.

I tried to scream. Nothing came out.

Somewhere under all of it I was still hoping someone would reach me in time.

It was already too late for that.

The dark was inside me now.