“This is called the Void? I did not know that!”
Dru was beginning to have visions of floating for the rest of his existence, trying to fight his way through a convoluted conversation with something that half of the time viewed him as a meal. “Do you understand what I mean?”
Stentorian laughter nearly deafened the mage. He put his hands to his ears, but the effect that had was less than negligible. The laughter went on and on until Dru thought his ears would burst. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the raucous sounds died.
“That was entertaining!”
“What… was?”
“I got bored listening to this voice so I thought I would listen to your other one as well! It says such humorous things! Fright is a fun thing! Do I frighten you much?”
Piecing together the full situation from the mad comments of Darkness, Dru realized that the unnerving creature had chosen to spy upon his thoughts. It now knew of the sorcerer’s fear and desperation. There was no saying how deep the probe had been, but it had been deep enough.
There was no sense lying… for now. As he worked to shield future thoughts, Dru answered, “Yes, you frighten me very much, Darkness! You remind me too much of what my kind are like, what I was once like! You could swallow me up with hardly a care! You’ve invaded my mind! Shouldn’t I be frightened?”
To his surprise, the entity contracted until it was only half its original size. The eye stalk sank back into the depths from which it had come. “I did wrong, it seems. I understand that now. I understand more, having listened to your inner voice.” Darkness sighed, a sound so human that Dru could only stare in astonishment. “I will help you however I can to take you home.”
“Thank you.”
Darkness grew jubilant again. “So, my little friend! Where is it?”
Dru had been so desperate to get this far that he had not even thought about what to do when the moment came. “It’s…” He paused. How could he explain to Darkness what he himself did not understand. “I… wasn’t prepared when I was thrown here.”
The inky blot laughed again, albeit much quieter this time. The sorcerer silently thanked him for the sake of his ears. “You are such an entertaining little Dru! Are all Drus like you?” Before the Vraad could explain how names worked, Darkness continued, “Give me access to your inner voice again! Let me experience your arrival again!”
It made sense to let Darkness survey his memories of the incident, but Dru could not help feeling as if the creature might tear his mind apart seeking those particular memories. They were not surface thoughts; they were conscious and subconscious impressions that even under the best of circumstances the Vraad would have been hard-pressed to recall.
“Come, come! Are you afraid of me? I am gentle!”
Shuddering, Dru finally nodded. When there was no reaction from his amorphous companion, he realized that Darkness did not know what the nod meant and quickly added, “Go ahead. Do it.”
He expected the worst. He waited for the blot’s probing to wrack his mind. Dru waited for something, anything, but felt only his own heart as it beat anxiously.
“But this is fascinating! Unbelievable! I must see these things! So much… so much filled Void! How do you stand being so cluttered? How can you not feel squeezed together?” As Darkness spoke, his shape contracted farther until he was only a little larger than the floating spellcaster. There was awe in his thunderous tones, awe at the existence of so many things, so many solid things.
Dru feared that the blot had experienced too much, was no longer able to cope with the situation, but that was dispelled when Darkness suddenly expanded again, growing and growing and growing… until it seemed he—he?—would fill the entire Void with his ebony self.
“I must go there! I must go with you! The forms! The… the…” Darkness apparently had no words for many of the things he had experienced in Dru’s head. The Vraad made a note of that; his nebulous friend was not perfect.
“Can you find a path out of here?”
“To be sure! Can you not feel the many ways? Can you not feel the paths that cross through here? There are endless choices, though some I will avoid since you are so fragile! I think I know the best way!”
Hope sprang to full life within the breast of the sorcerer. Freedom would soon be his! At the moment, it mattered not to him that his freedom would also mean letting the creature sorcerer loose upon Nimth. Darkness was no worse a threat to the world than the Vraad race had ever been, and with power once more his to command, he believed that he could hold his own against the black entity.
His thoughts were interrupted by yet another change in his unnerving companion. Darkness was contracting again, but now his form was also shifting. More and more, he resembled a crude black mouth, like the maw of some huge beast. The maw was disturbingly close to Dru and was getting closer with each passing breath.
“Darkness! Wait! What are you doing?”
Did the mouth actually smile? “Have no fear, little Dru! I am only making myself into a form that will be able to carry you! I will not, as you constantly fear, take from you! You have given me too much entertainment and I owe you! In fact, I owe you for an entire existence! To think of all that solidity together!”
Closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, Dru waited for the creature to envelop him. When he felt nothing, the sorcerer dared look.
“Serkadion Manee!” He floated in the center of a huge bubble in which there was no light save two pinpricks of an ice-blue color. There had been no feeling of transition, no sense of being swallowed whole. He breathed a sigh of relief, then nearly choked when the two blue dots swelled and became a very real pair of glittering eyes that lacked pupils.
“You are whole?”
“Yes… yes. Thank you.”
“You will be cushioned in here. I will let you see how we travel. Perhaps you will be able to do it yourself… should you need to, that is.” Darkness’s understanding of the Vraad language was becoming stronger and stronger. Except for an excess of formality, he spoke as well as any Vraad.
The bubble began moving; Dru knew this only because Darkness informed him of the fact. The sorcerer tried to brace himself for anything, then realized the futility of the attempt. What could he do, lacking power as he did?
For a long time—several hundred breaths, by Dru’s count—nothing happened. The Vraad watched as emptiness was replaced by more emptiness. His companion spoke little during that period, a sign that this was a tense situation even for the nearly omnipotent creature. Safe and secure within, Dru began to wonder more about the thing now calling itself by so apt a title as Darkness. Was it a demon of legend? Serkadion Manee’s books had mentioned the summoning of such spirits, but no Vraad living now had ever succeeded in summoning them. It had long ago been assumed that demons were either the products of great imagination or golems of fanciful design. Yet, his companion certainly fit the descriptions of a demon.
Could it be, Dru pondered, that some being much like Darkness had been the truth behind the legends?
He was never able to answer his question, for in the next breath, Dru collapsed, his mind suddenly a chaotic cornucopia of intense sensations. Pain, happiness, fear, sadness, indifference, anger… he went through each emotion in the blink of an eye. Other feelings that he could not exactly identify intermingled with the rest. The Vraad crawled to his knees and put a hand to his head. Darkness said nothing, but the bubble that was his form trembled constantly. The sorcerer fell again, but struggled forward even still. His eyesight was blurred, giving him liquidy images of the same emptiness that he had become so sick of and—
And was there something out there now?
Still Darkness did not speak, but Dru knew that the “demon” did not have the effort to spare for such a minuscule thing as conversation. His unearthly companion had located what appeared to be the way out of the Void and the two of them were even now breaking through. The emptiness had finally been replaced, but by what was hard to say for cer
tain.
It looked very much like a pale path of light… a path that, when Dru looked behind them, seemed to run on into infinity. Ahead of them was a different tale. The path continued on for some distance—as well as the Vraad could judge—but then faded away slowly until it became—Dru forced his eyes to focus—until it became a mist very much akin to that which had blanketed the wraithlike forest.
“Free!” the sorcerer hissed without realizing it.
His joy turned to panic as the path before them suddenly split into one and then countless identical paths that turned in all directions and faded away in the same manner as the first. Which one led to his world, the Vraad fretted silently, and where did the others go?
One path that Dru did not want Darkness taking was a single path that appeared to curl within itself like some perpetual double loop. It was exceedingly inviting, for reasons that Dru could not define, yet it also filled him with a sense of mortality, of the death that had nearly claimed him. He breathed a sigh of relief when his companion ignored it.
At some point, the overwhelming assault on his brain had ended. Dru hardly felt comforted by that fact, faced with what seemed the impossible task of choosing a path.
“So many…” he whispered. To Darkness, the hapless sorcerer quickly asked, “Do you know which one?”
The icy orbs stared at him in resolute silence. Whatever decision Darkness had come to, the Void dweller had chosen not to include the tiny, insignificant human in it. Perhaps that was for the best, but Dru could not help feeling a bit of Vraadish indignation at the exclusion.
They alighted onto one of the paths.
Around them, the others faded completely away.
Darkness had made his decision and there was no time to turn back. Already, the incredible creature was nearing the mist. Dru closed his eyes, hoping that a repeat of the onrush of sensations was not in the offing. Hoping, too, that they would not be destroyed or, worse yet, left again marooned in the midst of the hellish Void, this time with the knowledge that there was no escape.
Absorption by Darkness would be preferable to an eternity here.
They plunged into the mist… and a tear—a literal rip in the emptiness—opened wide before them. Dru waited for some horrific assault on his mind and body. It never came. A brilliant glow temporarily blinded him.
“Through!” Darkness laughed gleefully, a child who had succeeded in some great task his parent had set for him. “I am Darkness! I am truly amazing!”
Dru made no attempt to argue with him. He only wanted to step onto the scarred surface of Nimth and take his daughter into his arms. At this point, he was even willing to take Barakas in his arms. Anything, so long as he was free again… and once more a mighty Vraad.
“Such a wonderful place! Are all these green things the trees that I learned of from your inner voice?”
Green things? Trees?
Dru frantically pressed himself against the clear body of his “demonic” savior and peered at the world to which he had been brought.
Trees, hundreds of trees, a vast forest, greeted his eyes. A mountain range stood proud in the background.
A resplendent blue sky completed an image of beauty and tranquility.
“So overwhelming! Nimth is truly a wonderful place!”
The Vraad could not respond. In his desperation to be free of the Void, he had forgotten of the two lands, the two worlds, buried in his memories. Darkness, as was his way, had dug only so far into those memories… and had pulled up the most recent, the most vivid.
The wrong ones.
Darkness had brought him to the other side of the veil… and to the shrouded realm.
VI
IT HAD TAKEN Rendel far longer than he had supposed it would to reach the outskirts of the immense mountain chain. His barely constrained impatience, however, had gradually been supplanted by an even more virulent emotion—anger.
None of his spells worked as they should. Oh, they did what he wanted them to do, but generally to a lesser degree. They also had a tendency to fail the first time, as if the something did not want the spells completed. His growing distrust had forced him to walk the entire trip and suffer the effects of an unbroken world. Rendel stared with arrogant distaste at the scenery around him. It was pretty, yes, but hardly interesting, especially after having seen so much of it. Someday soon, though, he and the others would subdue the Dragonrealm and make it as it should be.
By now, Rendel thought, choosing a rock upon which to sit for a moment, his father and the others knew he had abandoned the plan. Barakas had probably taken much of his anger out on Gerrod, but the pale-haired Vraad could do nothing about that. That was what his younger brother was for, taking the brunt of things. Rendel liked Gerrod as much as he liked any of his brothers, sisters, and cousins—which was not that much at all—but, in the end, it was his own concerns that mattered. And was that not what his father had always taught them?
Rendel had his own agenda, one only he was privy to. The Lord Tezerenee had always been bringing up the outsider, the fool Zeree, as the one most knowledgeable about the ka and the nature of the realm beyond the veil. Never had the patriarch really asked his son if he knew more than he said. Rendel knew far more, having studied greatly in secret. Each sighting had been personally visited, albeit surreptitiously. Each phantom land had been carefully mapped. Each had been scanned for anything out of the ordinary… or perhaps it was best to say anything out of the extraordinary, for even Rendel had to admit that as a whole the Dragonrealm was truly different from his Nimth. Trouble was, most of it had no place in his grand designs.
Eyeing the first intrusion of night in the early evening sky, the Vraad cursed the time differences between Nimth and the Dragonrealm. Three days of walking and now the setting sun reminded him again that he had to push on before the trek became too treacherous. Until he had a better grasp of the intricacies involved in utilizing his powers, he would keep their use to a minimum. That meant facing an even harder walk than the one he had just completed. Yet, if he persevered—and Rendel had confidence in his ability to eventually turn every situation to his own advantage—then all his plotting would have been worth it.
In the mountains, he knew, there was a place he could rest, a place where he could attend to his needs, and begin to carve out a domain of his own, one that would equal, nay, surpass his father’s and all the rest. One where Rendel could at last be alone.
Inspired, the Vraad rose from his resting place, ready to continue even if it meant wandering through the dark of night. Only a little farther and the cavern he had discovered, along with all its treasures, would be his.
His higher senses chose that moment to warn him of the closing presence of one or more creatures. Rendel whirled and studied the trees he was leaving behind. The damnable forest. All throughout his journey, he had felt the eyes upon him. Not merely the eyes of beasts, but ones belonging to other observers, observers who succeeded in staying beyond his reach. They had let him be so far, but he knew that was about to end. Rendel did not fear them. Even with his abilities hampered as they were, he was still a Tezerenee… and a Vraad, of course. There was nothing more potent than that combination. His kind had conquered and broken one world; the Dragonrealm would be no different.
The grandiose visions forming in his mind were shattered by the fluttering of massive wings all about him. Rendel summoned a fiery staff, then summoned it again when the first attempt gained him nothing but smoke. Simultaneous with his spell, the rock he had been sitting on melted. Rendel grinned at the feeble attempt on his life and took a step toward the trees. Large things flittered about the treetops, but always just out of sight. His watchers had finally chosen to come for him. He would make them regret that decision.
Raising the flaming staff high, the Vraad put both hands at the center and twirled his weapon around and around, building speed as he did. When the staff was little more than a blur, tiny balls of fire shot forth in every direction. Treetops became orange i
nfernos in a matter of seconds. If his adversaries would hide from him, then he would just remove their cover.
As the seconds passed, he heard no shrieks and saw no winged figures fleeing from the damage he had caused. The fire continued to spread, reaching other trees through intermingling branches. If left unchecked, it would likely spread throughout the entire forest. Rendel was unconcerned about that; all that mattered was mastering his unseen companions.
Then, as swiftly as the fire had grown, it began to die. The sorcerer glared at the treetops as, one by one, the flames were snuffed out by magical forces. Rendel swore. This was not how it should have gone. The staff had always been one of his favorite and most potent devices. The magical flames were stronger, more resistant to counterspells or even natural attacks, like wind and water. They should not have died out so easily. Rendel had underestimated his foes.
Dismissing his staff—which, as it happened, coincided with the withering of a pair of trees to his left—the Tezerenee folded his arms and gazed intently at the area where he had heard the rustling of wings. He stood motionless, forcing his will upon the world, taking from it what he needed for this assault.
A wind rose. It was a light breeze in its infancy, but Rendel pushed it beyond that. From breeze it became a prestorm wind, full of vibrant life and shaking even the stoutest of limbs as it coursed through the nearby forest. Still not satisfied, Rendel pushed harder, turning the wind upon itself, making it follow its own tail around and around. Leaves, dirt—anything loose and tiny enough—were swept into the funnel. It continued to grow, a tornado twice as tall as any of the brown and green leviathans it stood among.
Rendel was still not satisfied; he wanted a rampaging maelstrom that would tear the forest out by its roots… and with it his shadows.
The unseen watchers had not counterattacked, which to Rendel meant that they had used what they had and were even now cowering in the trees, holding on for dear life. He was slightly curious as to what they looked like, if only because they might prove useful slaves, but it would be just as satisfying if the elemental force he had unleashed tore their limbs from them and battered their bodies into pulp. Rendel had never fought a foe who was not one of his kin or at least one of the other Vraad. The golems and other constructs his clan used in mock combat did not count. His would-be attackers here had been a real, albeit minuscule, threat. The Tezerenee allowed the satisfied smile to spread farther across his face. He felt a growing pleasure at his handling of the brief affair. His had been the first conquering blow. His enemies had fallen before him like… like leaves in the wind, he decided, laughing.
Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. II Page 40
