"They spoke truth," the brain-burning voice repeated itself, though its source had yet to move in any perceptible way. "We come together. We orbit one another without our own awareness, and seek a collision."
Ghi didn't look like he was seeking a collision. Like the speaker, he stood completely still. His eyes never wavered from Dahrkren's distant figure―not to me, not to the exit. They remained as focused and unblinking as painted, glowing marbles.
"I do dislike the idea of being moved by fate, and not of my own volition," Dahrkren resumed. Despite the horrifying quality of his voice, his tone was shockingly conversational. "Don't you?"
Ghi didn't respond; he made no sign whatsoever of even hearing the words. Which seemed, of all things, to disappoint Dahrkren. Seriously. The first move I ever saw him make was a shrug. A shrug. No sweeping, grand gesture. No evil, shaking laughter, even. This guy, this incarnation of death, lifts his robed shoulders, drops his gaunt face, lets out this sort of exasperated, hell-rattling sigh, and shrugs.
I guess he'd hoped that the Vessel would be a little more engaging.
"You are aware, yes, that your brothers have all perished?" he asked with disdain. "Did you feel it?"
Still not a word from Ghi.
"Please. I am only curious," coaxed Dahrkren. The many pitches of his speech were surreally stoic, strangely gentle. "When you killed my own, I felt it. After all this time, I finally felt it. They were a part of me, you know. And to me, their passing felt like my own fingers breaking."
I heard a startling crack very close to me, coinciding with a numb spasm in the long-stifled nerve endings of my left hand. I looked down.
The guy had range. My pinky finger was sticking out, broken at the middle knuckle, perfectly perpendicular to my palm. On the bright side, at least he'd picked the hand that I could barely feel.
I must not have elicited the desired reaction. The adjacent finger suddenly snapped at the knuckle and bent backwards, right in front of my eyes. I shrieked out loud, out of sheer surprise and disbelief. Ghi's head jerked sideways, not even a whole inch, before he caught himself. He would not take his eyes off the threat, not for anything.
There was a smile in Dahrkren's voice now. "And when my eldest were destroyed, here in this place, it felt worse."
A fast series of gristling, snapping sounds followed his words. I braced, but there was no additional pain. It was Abe's leg that had been smashed; pulverized at the kneecap by sick thought alone. Being unconscious, Abe merely made a soft sighing sound, almost pleasant. I bit my lips together. Don't scream, don't scream.
"Did you feel likewise when your brothers died?"
Ghi's skin was beginning to change color. His hands tremored at his sides.
"Then you must understand why I wanted only the witness, to swallow her heart and her memories whole. I simply wanted to understand how you had done these things to me. And yet our very natures have brought us together here. So very interesting." The voice picked up momentum, a ravenous, scathing edge. "And now it seems that I know all that I require about the Vessel. That you are nothing, that you are not a concern. Do I need her heart now? I think not. I think I will silence it."
I wondered dimly why he was wasting all this time breaking fingers and talking about eating memories or whatever. Was he just enjoying himself? Getting his kicks? Maybe. I guess if you've spent millennia in dark, unpleasant places, waiting for your enemy to show up, you'd kind of want to drag things out a little bit.
Or maybe ... was he afraid of Ghi? Now that he had seen what the Vessel were capable of? Was he looking for a weakness, trying to create a distraction?
And what had he said about silencing what? Whose heart?
Ghi still hadn't moved or spoken in all this time, but I saw the tension in his limbs tighten when a pulse shot through the room, dragging the temperature down to a painfully bitter degree in just one instant. The parts of my body that were not already numbed by cold and trauma seemed to lose all feeling. Beneath my hand, Abe's chest shuddered. The proximity of death was palpable in so many ways; the air was suddenly musky and reeking, nearly too thin to breathe, and it was filled with an awful sound, a booming, gloating, sound, worn out brakes with a touch of giddiness.
Death was laughing again.
"Unnecessary!" Ghi broke, calling out over the sound. "Save it for me. I'm here, aren't I?"
"So you are." The hideous laughter melted into speech. "Now show me. Show me how you will take me from this world." Dahrkren took a step forward. I could see the long pale robe he wore, opened in the front to reveal a bare and shockingly white chest. The garment hardly moved as he took that single step and stopped.
He didn't need to move any more than that. He knew that Ghi was bound, blind, buried under thousands of years of instinct, all directing him at the speed of light. Sooner or later, Ghi would move, whether he wanted to or not.
"Show me." The voice broke like a wave.
And it started. Ghi stalked forward, fluid and robotic at the same time, as powerless as a moth confronted by a lighthouse. Not a single tendon hesitated, not a moment of his focus shifted. He wanted this. His skin lit up like a paper lantern as he advanced, and Dahrkren's hideous peal of laughter raked outward again in response.
"Yes!" the awful voice squealed, tenacious and eager and so much louder than before. Ghi's steps quickened; his arms quivered visibly. Sizzling veins of purple-white light danced on his luminous skin, and his eyes were blank porcelain, wide and brightly shining. The air sapped thinner and colder, and the voice ever louder, both deep and shrill.
"Yes, show me. When do I shrink?" it wailed as Ghi drew closer. "When am I overcome? Where is this fury I am supposed to fear?" A million nails against a chalkboard. Pure bleach pouring into my ears, into my brain.
Then the loudest sound yet. Ghi's arm swung outward like a boxer's, though yards remained between himself and Dahrkren. A blinding white lance of lightning erupted from his thrown hand and sang out into the open space with a single, ear-splitting crack. I heard a chorus of shattering glass, followed by sharp and overlapping echoes. And above all this, the most unholy scream, a sound that would make you beg to be deaf.
The light was there and gone so quickly, leaving a solid white bar across my sight. I could not tell whether it had hit Dahrkren or whether he had deflected it somehow, whether his bellowing noises meant pain, anger, amusement, or all three. Before I could observe anything else, I saw the snow white skin of his chest burst open.
He split apart from clavicle to navel and released a monstrous cloud of silky black ink, which grew to well over fifteen times the size of his body in one illogical instant. This all crashed into Ghi with the solid force of a speeding car.
No defense seemed possible. Ghi's only reaction was a delayed yell of astonishment as the black wave surged outward, bearing him away from its motionless source, solidifying and soaring until it collided with the concrete wall some thirty yards away. The yell ended with a conclusive yelp and the hollow, wet sound of bones breaking.
I didn't have time to turn away or cover my eyes. Irreverent to velocity, the phantom limb retracted from the wall the second after impact, its many fingers twisting around Ghi and dragging him across the floor at terrific speed. Wild sparks and gnarled claws of light crackled over and around him, sizzling the blackness it touched but never getting rid of enough of it. He was overwhelmed and outmatched. Heinously.
Dahrkren watched all of this serenely, motionless despite the frenzied tentacles of night writhing out of him. I feared that he intended to swallow Ghi whole, right into his open chest, but the snaking anomaly did not fully rewind. Instead, it arched upward, jerking Ghi fifteen feet off the floor and slamming him down again.
And again. And again.
I lost count. The violence of it was indigestible, hardly believable at this scale and closeness, something only possible in a cat-and-mouse cartoon. All the slamming, the twisting from side to side so brutally fast, reminded me of a dog shaking the life out of something al
ready dead.
I hoped Ghi was already dead. I really, truly hoped he was.
It stopped. Not twenty seconds after it had burst into existence, the blackness melted to the ground and wound itself back into Dahrkren. His skin closed together seamlessly with a sound like fresh paper sifting past fingers.
He strolled, in such a chillingly human way, to where Ghi lay on the ground in one twitching, twisted piece. I understood then what had happened to Jesse, why he'd looked the way he did after facing all those Hollows alone. Only Ghi looked worse. Much worse.
My insides sank. He was still alive.
The black wounds worked dense and fast, chewing him up at an alarming rate, marring most of him beyond any recognition. His bent arms pushed against the floor but got him nowhere; his legs did nothing. They were dead weight. Broken spine.
The light from his eyes waned; they were wide and rolling as he grappled with the comprehension of what had just happened. His chest bowed upward and he gaped his mouth open with shocked effort, marveling that he could not bring air in, nor push any out. Blood erupted in a fountain from his throat instead, spilling with an audible splash out across the floor.
Dahrkren stepped into the ruby puddle and paused there.
Dazzling light crackled and hummed responsively out of Ghi, snapping occasionally into one concentrated blast, like the shock from a downed power line, blind and aimless. Dahrkren ignored this. He pulled one foot back and speared it into Ghi's shattered ribs. Ghi's fingers flexed against the floor. His mouth roared open, but nothing came out but more blood. The rabid, many-toned laughter rang out again, softer than before. It quickly turned into a growl, then a snarling, then a cry of fury.
"Eight! Thousand! Years!" Dahrkren raged, driving each word in with another savage kick. "I suffer beneath you for eight thousand years, and this is your final blow? You can't even survive my outrage? What about my agony? My hunger? My wrath? Who is left to survive that?"
I knew the answer to that one.
All of us.
You and me, folks.
The floor beneath me trembled slightly, coinciding with the fierce rumble of nearby thunder. I watched, dead in so many ways already, just waiting my turn. I watched Ghi's fingers, his eyes, praying that he would just stop, just die already, god or not. The rest of humanity was barred from my mind. I wanted this to be over with. For him, for me.
Dahrkren planted a white, bare foot heavily on Ghi's chest and leaned down low to answer his own question.
"No one will be left. Nothing will be left."
Ghi's eyes were still on the liquid side of glassy, possibly not seeing a thing, but still alert. It's a comfort now to know that he couldn't give a damn about what Dahrkren was saying, not a word of it. He was not thinking about how the curse would now be lifted from Dahrkren, from all the Hollows. He was not lamenting that all the Vessel had failed before they had even begun. Or that death was now free, after thousands of years of cowering, to consume and destroy and spread, wherever and whenever it pleased, to stifle every beating heart until life of any kind became ancient history.
No, Ghi wasn't thinking about any of that. He was only thinking: Why the hell am I here? Why us?
The floor shook again, and this time it didn't stop. Another crack of thunder sounded overhead. I heard an explosion, a banging of metal―the door to the stairs being blown right off its hinges.
I heard Dahrkren's gasp of surprise, a layered hissing like the brakes of a subway train, but I didn't see the look on his face. There was suddenly too much light in that direction, in all directions.
Again, my body reacted before I understood. I shielded my face, buried it into Abe's side. Without thinking, I reached up and clamped my hand over his eyes, pressed my elbow into his shoulder, trying to anchor us both, because my mind was commanding one primal thing:
Hold on.
Hold on, and don't look.
The wind screamed. Thunder cymbaled and snarled without end. I felt the intense, unbearable heat of nearby fire, and heard the crash and spray of water. The ground shook, harder and harder, until it was bucking violently, bringing down everything around us, rattling the platform overhead, our shield. Dahrkren's shrieking, the hideous sound of his pain and shock, was nothing. It all but drowned in the howling and roaring, the thundering and churning, the tremors. The fury he had been begging to witness only minutes ago. The advent of terrible power, fierce, divine, rising.
P A R T I I I
A L L T H E D I F F E R E N C E
Vessel, Book I: The Advent Page 65
