by D M Wozniak
The distant clanking turns into silence.
“Your plan is horrible,” I say dryly.
He laughs. “I make do with the limited resources available to me.”
He gets off his horse, walks it over to the closest trunk and tethers it there. I do the same.
“I’m not here to commit any violence,” I say quietly. “My goal is to intimidate. To get out of this without any bloodshed whatsoever.”
He nods as we begin walking in the direction of the throng.
“Let me do the talking,” he says. “I have an idea.”
As we approach, some of them murmur to each other. The words voider, fake, and redskull reach me.
Once we round the gentle bend in the road, we stop, about twenty yards from the beginning of their column.
Their torches go on and on, into the distance.
There are easily a hundred armored men with painted black skulls upon their dull-gray breastplates, but I see a few semi-armored children mixed in the crowd as well. Boys wanting to become murderous thugs like their fathers.
One of the lead men steps forward. A red skull has been painted upon his breastplate, surrounded in a circle of gold. His face is entirely covered in metal. He holds a mace in one hand, and an outstretched torch in the other.
“You have yourselves a voider,” he says, his voice a muffled shout.
“Yes,” Colu says. He briefly turns to me, before staring straight ahead once again.
“Not just a voider,” he says. “A master voider.”
“I heard that your last redskull was a fake,” the other redskull continues. “He had a stone, but couldn’t use it.”
Colu stays silent.
“I also heard that the master voider already left town. He’s headed south to the war. So I think that this man standing next to you is a fake too,” the redskull says, his metal head briefly swiveling to me.
After a pause, he’s seemingly made up his mind, as his armored head nods in the firelight. “Where are your skullmen? Hiding like cowards? Or have they all succumbed to hilma too?”
Again, more silence from Colu. He’s too wise to let himself be lured with insults.
The other skullman begins to laugh behind his helmet. “You’re weak,” he says. But then his laughter turns to anger as his voice becomes a full shout. “You are built upon a lie! Tonight, you’re finally going to taste the truth. The power of Prainise.”
His other skullmen begin to beat their sword hilts against their breastplates.
“If you think that this man is an impostor,” Colu shouts while pointing to me with his weapon, “Then why don’t you come over here and prove it?” For the first time, I notice that his dirty machete has been replaced with a gleaming sword.
After a pause, the armored redskull takes the bait.
He drops his torch on the dirt ground, and starts swinging his mace over his head while taking quick strides forward. All of the other men behind him stop pounding their breastplates. The whooshing sound of displaced air cuts through the silence of the night.
I enter the void.
Back in the cave, the imaginary voices in the storm speak to me as I direct my attention to the ground. It would be much easier to simply kill these people, but I am done murdering with voidance.
I’m going to teach them a lesson they will never forget.
Flying ahead of myself, I enter among the indivisibles in the dirt between us. I see the thick, ancient roots of the millionescents, the thousands of insects and fragments of minerals and rocks and things long dead. I move between them like a bird through branches, breaking all of it up along the way.
The indivisibles begin to collide into themselves, the larger pieces exploding into smaller ones. Vibration and homogenization.
First, I do this at the surface. It is easy here. But then I go deeper and deeper, into the hardened clay, where the indivisibles are more tightly packed and the wind whips around me faster.
There it is.
I reach hidden water, and begin to raise it upwards. Pulling upon the black sea, long buried, to see the sky once again.
Pull.
At the first sign of pain, I remove my fingers from the stone, and reenter the world of the living. I fear that I’ve taken too long already.
But my fears are unfounded.
The road between us has become an oval, muddy pool.
The redskull from Prainise doesn’t realize this. He walks into it, shouting out a muffled swear as his feet are submerged, but continues to foolishly step toward me. It only takes him three steps to be sunk down to his knees.
The sudden descent has taken him off-balance, and for a moment his mace falls motionless at his side with a soft thud. But then I hear him grunt in annoyance, and then this grunt becomes a full-on, livid scream.
He stops trying to move, and instead begins to swing his mace rapidly.
He’s going to let it fly, so I grab the voidstone again and concentrate on the square foot where he is standing, warming it up further and deeper. I do it quickly, letting the wind rip into me, since I have no other choice.
When I let go, I see that he’s sunken into the road further, buried up to his chest.
The redskull throws his mace, but it’s too late. He has neither height nor leverage.
It flies toward me, but slides across the ground and hits my feet.
The other skullmen from Prainise, clustered far behind their buried redskull, look to one another. Their soft, metallic movements are the only sound. I wish that their faces weren’t covered, so that I could see the fear present there.
The redskull must share this same fear. I don’t need to see his face—his shocked silence is proof enough.
He knows I am no impostor.
But the redskull is now trapped between me and his men, between a gamble and a lie. There is no way out.
“Attack the voider!” he screams desperately.
His men look at each other, unmistakably shaken by what they've seen.
The time is now.
Once more in the void, I repeat my tactic while I walk forward in blindness, through a colorless world full of screaming. Is it the screams of the wind or the screams of the men from Prainise? And does it matter?
Yes, it matters. One is imaginary, while the other is real.
I let the wind rip into me, since I need to do this quickly. The wind hurts, but a sword or mace will kill.
Dampening the ground around me as I progress, I turn the entire road into quicksand.
This is an art, as if I am painting with a brush. Purposely, I leave a snaking path of solid ground in the middle, where I can walk without getting stuck myself. Out of reach but not out of sight, I meander through the throng, working ahead of me until I reach the rear of their company.
A few of them escape and run off. Their forms are like glowing clusters of indivisibles, full of teeming life, the opposite of the decaying ground below. I let the living ones go, since I cannot split my attention between two goals.
By the time I exit the void, I know I have gone too far. My fingers are numb and my body is so weak that I collapse against the trunk of a millionescent. I didn’t even notice that it was there. I would have fallen down upon the ground, but the thick, smooth-skinned tree appeared when I let go of the blackness.
Spinning and slumping down upon the ground with the tree to my back, I look down the length of the road. At my lesson to Prainise.
A hundred writhing necks and helmets stick out of the road like heads of lettuce growing in someone’s macabre garden. Although these round stumps are silver instead of green.
The rest of their bodies are buried in the mud.
Most of them had held onto their torches while getting entombed, so it’s much darker now with their flames extinguished. But a few had cast them aside. These torches now sit upon the surface of the mud, flames still raging.
One nearby skullman screams louder than the others, as his torch happens to be resting against his helme
t where it landed. It’s slowly cooking the skin off of his face behind heated metal.
I let him scream.
Chimeline and Blythe come running in from the darkness of the tree-line. A few of Colu’s skullmen appear as well, blow darts at their side and mouths open in shock. They stand on the opposite end of the quicksand, at least twenty-five yards away.
“Don’t walk into the road!” I yell, but my voice comes out weak and hoarse. It’s no match to the screams coming from the men in the ground, nor the distance my companions are from me.
“It’s not stable,” I uselessly add. It’s a whisper.
“There are children in here!” Chimeline cries.
It’s hard to make out details from my range and low vantage point, but I see enough. Blythe puts his arm across her chest, preventing her from coming closer. He then cautiously steps forward, testing the ground with his wide stance. Reaching out with his hand, he tries to pull someone up from the muddy ground with a scream of exertion. Colu comes near and lends a hand.
Together, they exhume a boy about ten years old from the road. He’s covered in grime, and shaking uncontrollably.
“Dem, you buried the children!” Chimeline screams at me from across the garden of heads.
I try standing, but I cannot seem to push myself up with my feet.
“There’s another one!” says Blythe, pointing all the way to the back, near where I sit. I follow his gaze and see that he’s right. A small boy’s face is covered in mud up to his mouth, his small arm flailing.
“It’s not safe!” I call out, but my words are drowned out by the drowned. I hear Colu yell as well. “Circle around!” he shouts.
But Blythe doesn’t hear him. Or he’s too headstrong. He begins walking down the safe path that I made, which snakes through the center. His arms are out at his sides as if he is a traveling performer walking a tightrope. And he makes it most of the way there.
But then he slips.
Chimeline screams out behind him, as his entire body falls into the road to his waist. He puts a hand on a nearby man’s helmet, burying it completely in the mud and silencing his screams, but it doesn’t offer the effulgent any leverage. Soon he’s submerged down to his chest, and the more he fights, the deeper he sinks.
“Stop!” I cry out to Chimeline and Colu, who are starting to walk down the same narrow path, as I try to crawl over to Blythe.
My legs are useless things. But every other moment, they hit something in the dirt and gain purchase. A shot of lighting courses up through me. It’s barely enough for me to inch my way forward, using my limp arms as well.
He’s close to the edge, where I ended the voidance, and because of this, I am able to reach him.
It looks like he has found the solid edge too, but he’s not leaving without the boy.
Lifting up his chin to the night sky, he holds up one of his hands. It clutches the boy’s hand.
“Give me your other hand!” I scream.
Out of the earth, it appears.
I grasp it by the wrist, but I don’t have the physical energy to pull him. I cannot even feel my own fingers, but I can feel his fingers tightly wrapped around my wrist.
There is only one way to do this.
Using my other hand, I grasp the voidstone one last time, and let the voices cut me even deeper. If it weren’t for the screams in the wind, I would hear my own, as I create a geyser of pressure underneath both Blythe and the boy.
As I am ripped apart, so is the world. It spits them out in dark bubbles and hisses.
They collapse on top of me as I let go of everything. The effulgent and stone. Both life and death.
The boy is crying, Chimeline is crying, and Colu is still yelling at everyone to not move. Blythe writhes by my side, mud covering his face and body.
“I heard them!” he frantically says, wiping away mud to reveal wild eyes. He kicks himself backwards, almost in disgust or fear of me, until he’s almost at the opposite side of the road.
I lay on my side, unable to move. Darkness comes at the edge of my vision, but I see enough. The effulgent points a shaking hand at me, a disbelieving look upon his face.
No, he’s pointing at my voidstone.
“I heard my people! They are crying out for help!” he says.
I want to reply. I want to ask him what he means, but I can’t. As the darkness bleeds into the center of my vision, all that is left is his haunted face, and then his haunted words.
“They’re entombed in your stone!”
Voidreaming
“We should move here,” Marine says, her arms around my neck. “Permanently.”
“What?”
“Think of it, Dem—no more cold winters.”
Her blue eyes are a window into our surroundings.
I let out a disbelieving laugh as I look around, thinking how the environment makes her request seem more absurd than it really is. But, no. Even strolling through the winding walkways of the university commons wouldn’t help.
We’re entwined as one, underwater, bound within a sphere of air, courtesy of my voidance. And beyond us lay the flooded ruins of a Xian Galleon. A wooden three-mast ship that sank years back, well before I was a child. We’re in the captain’s quarters, off the stern. Shattered, paned windows surround us, a massive table is bolted to the floor, and small, brightly-colored fish swim past us in all directions. Outside, the endless turquoise waters of Xi Bay flow past us.
Our honeymoon destination.
“I feel at home here,” she adds.
“Marine, our home is in the citadel, for better or for worse. That’s where the university is.”
“The university is like garden ivy. Its influence is far reaching. It extends even here, at the border of the Northern Kingdom.”
I nod once, slowly. “Yes, it does. But I am the master voider. I belong at its heart. Which is the citadel.”
She rolls her eyes. “It’s boring there.”
“At times,” I admit. “But that is where the important decisions are made. With the support of my submasters and in front of the king. With His Majesty’s blessings.”
“Ugh!” she exclaims. “I don’t care about decisions in cold, stuffy rooms full of overweight, aging men. I care about this!” She briefly takes a hand off my neck and extends it to the sphere’s edge. Rainbow luminescence like a dragonfly’s wings ripples out in concentric circles. “This is where voidance is meant to be. Exploring the edges of our world. Exploring the edges of our power.”
I shake my head at her disregard of protocol, as I realize that the sphere around us is slowly decreasing in size, due to the pressure. So I briefly enter the void to maintain it.
At this depth, two patterns of voidance work in unison. The first is the sphere of air, allowing us to breathe. The second is the weight.
If all I manipulated were the pocket of air, this sphere would launch upwards at an impossible speed, spitting us into the sky, as the world seeks equilibrium.
And so I must weigh the membrane down, keeping us at this depth indefinitely. One system of voidance fighting another.
She speaks to me as I reenter the world of blue.
“Did you ask His Majesty about the grant?”
“What grant?”
She looks at me dangerously. “The one we discussed last week.”
I take a deep breath. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he won’t approve it.”
“What do you mean, he won’t approve it?”
“One of my submasters has already taken on that task.”
She pouts. “I don’t understand why that matters.”
“It matters because the king isn’t going to fund the oversight of sea research from the citadel, not when there’s a voider stationed here who is already doing the same thing.”
She folds her arms. “Well, that’s exactly why we should move here. You can keep better tabs on him.”
“You know that I need to be at the citadel. The king
needs me.”
“So do I.”
Curiosity, guilt, and annoyance rise within me. “Are you seriously telling me you will not be happy in the citadel?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Marine, when you agreed to marry me, you knew the life awaiting you.”
“I know. I just feel that you’re squandering an opportunity. Voidance is...” she looks around again in all directions. “So much more than burying our noses in books.”
I follow her eyes past the membrane. A school of yellow fish darts around us, moving as one.
“What if we go on holiday?” I say, turning back. “Places like this. Xiland. The archipelago. Whenever I can get away.”
She shrugs her shoulders and looks away. “Which is what? Every few years? When the king gives you permission?”
I momentarily close my eyes, torn with conflict. I thought that all of this was behind us. The struggle of balancing the intensity of her love with the stability of my station. But it’s found its way here, where no men dare tread.
I cannot have her be unhappy.
“We’ll go as often as you need,” I say.
She perks up. “Every year?”
“If that’s what you need to be happy.”
“Promise?”
I nod. “I would do anything for you. You know that.”
“But what if the king needs you?”
“The king comes second.”
She takes her hand from around my neck and gently places it on my bare chest, pulling the hairs there.
“I like the sound of that.”
I kiss her. Gently at first, and then passionately deep, and she responds in kind.
“One moment,” I say urgently, as I grasp my voidstone. “Let me give us more room.”
I extend the membrane, almost to the entire captain’s quarters, pushing out the water and multi-colored fish though the dozens of shattered windows. It takes its toll. I feel the wind ripping into my being before the brief numbness sets into my fingers.
But her reaction is worth it.
Instead of floating, as before, we’re now able to stand on our own.
Marine’s eyes are wide at my display of power.
I pull the straps of her dress off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Picking her up, I set her down on the angled table. The entire ship is lopsided on the seabed, causing the room, including the attached table, to slant abnormally in one direction. Briny seawater continues to drip off it, hitting the floor, a small waterfall the only sound.
