Chương 190: [2.18] Silver-Age Scavengers

Sol, The Raven From Rome We sat still as stone in the embrace of the first primordial fear. The darkness was absolute, and yet there were shadows. Small shadows like skittering rats, long shadows like serpents and thriving vines, tall shadows like blood-drunk giants, and swimming just beneath the surface of the sea of clouds, there were enormous shadows, circling the stage a thousand tons over.

"I was warned," came the frightened voice of a girl who had thought herself a woman before that moment. Her whisper pierced the yawning silence.

"I was warned by my father, by the Gadfly, by Dona and the rest. Even Bakkhos warned me away from the path that I had chosen, in his own way. But I would not be dissuaded." The faint tremor in her voice was forced out by resolve, even as a menagerie of incomprehensible noise began to flood the sanctum of her heart, as though her little whisper had broken down the barrier of silence for every nightmare in existence, from the least of them to the most terrible.

I heard a distant, scraping struggle, and belatedly realized that it was coming from right beside me. Griffon was fighting to say something, fighting to move free from the wine-dark waters of the pool, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. The shadows swallowed it up before it could make it to me. I reached out for him—and felt the cold kiss of a raven space swallow up my arm.

A moment later, as that cold, slick darkness shuddered and lurched further up like some oil-slick insect, swallowing my arm up to my shoulder, I realized it was no pocket space at all.

"It is difficult enough for a cultivator to plan out a cohesive set of principles, even if they've set aside decades for the task. I ascended to the ninth rank of the Sophic Realm in less than a decade, and no matter how many times I was urged away from my course—no matter how many times my father punished me in the hopes that I would see reason—I did not form even one single pillar of my own.

"I couldn't bear the thought of taking up those empty places for myself, when that meant a cultivator slipping into stark Tartarus that I could have saved."

"And what was your reward for all of your troubles?"

"A dead end," Selene admitted.

"They tried—my father, my mentors, even you. They tried to feed me only the broken principles that suited one another best. Like the creation of a mosaic, they tried to salvage a cohesive whole from the black bile of broken hearts. In the end, they came close—so close that it made my father spit blood. But they failed." I gripped the oil-slick shadow swarming up my right arm with my left hand, but it slid through my fingers and left a stinking residue on my fingers and palm that burned like tethered fire.

I tried wrenching my right arm out by force, but that only seemed to excite the creature. It swarmed further up, until its tiny leech-like fangs were sinking into my collarbone, anchoring themselves in the bone as leverage for the grotesque thing to lever itself further and further up, seeking to swallow me whole. I tried to banish it with gravitas, but the Captain's virtue had no place here, in this primordial dark.

I tried calling out to Selene for help, or at least some explanation, but with a sinking feeling I realized she couldn't hear us for all that I could hear her. She kept delivering her lines without a hitch no matter how I roared.

"The nine that I had taken could never function properly together. There was no path forward, no pillar under the sun that I could internalize as my tenth to avoid the reckoning ahead," Selene explained in quiet resignation. She was breathing heavily, in exertion and in fear. I couldn't see her. I couldn't hear what she was fighting through on that shadowed stage. But I could imagine.

"The tenth step of every realm exists for the sole purpose of consolidation. At the peak, a cultivator seeks stable ground before they make the leap to the realm above.

"No matter what I internalized as my tenth pillar, I knew it wouldn't be enough to account for all the flaws and dissonant foundations of the nine that I had stolen first. When the time for consolidation came, and the load-bearing nature of my principles was tested, I knew that they would crack and sunder.

"Regardless of my final choice, the heart demons would come. And so, I chose to stop running from the possibility, and instead, I turned and made ready to stand against them when they came." Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Ting. A spark lit up the primordial dark, if only for a moment, and only just. It was accompanied by a chime—like a chisel striking stone, but with an otherworldly resonance to it.

It was a sound that I had heard only once before, and only then in a memory. It was the sound that adamant made when it was struck.

"Of all the pillars in my heart," Selene spoke softly, "only one of them was freely given." Ting. Another spark. Another resonant chime. I was already looking back this time, and so I saw it — the unmistakable shape of the Tyrant Riot, sitting cross-legged before that tenth adamant pillar, chiseling away at it like it was mundane stone. The blank-masked Selene's back was to me, obscuring all the finer details of her. The shadows were thickest and wildest around that pillar.

As another chime rang out and a third spark illuminated the dark, I saw the faces of the primordial shadows surrounding that tenth pillar, and my blood turned to ice in my veins.

"They had all doubted my resolve in the beginning," she spoke.

"Bakkhos was the last of them to let his doubt go, and only then because he found me out before I could internalize my tenth pillar on my own terms.

"He stopped me, then, before I could face my demons alone."

"I saved you from yourself, fool girl." I felt those curved leech-teeth brushing almost delicately up my neck, ghosting along my jaw as they sought a proper anchor to hook themselves through. Ting. A spark flew, and I bore witness to the nightmare that was eating me alive. At that moment, something all too mortal inside myself, buried deeper than any military conditioning could reach, broke apart in screaming madness. I felt my heart stop beating, felt my muscles go slack.

And I heard — like the distant stirring of salt and ash — the final breath slipping past my lips. Ting. My eyes slid off the nightmare's oil-slick back and fell to the pool at my feet. I saw Griffon in that moment of adamant clarity. I saw what he had been struggling against. I saw it consume him. I reached for the wheel inside my soul. Once, twice, I tried to grip its spokes and they slid through my fingers, oil-slick with that primordial taint. The captain leads from the front. I'll rise. Ting.

I saw Griffon vanish into the mouth of darkness. Our eyes met the moment that it swallowed him, gone but for a single outstretched hand that the nightmare eagerly gagged and swallowed down. My fingers closed around an ivory spoke. [I am a raven, and I am an unkindness.] The wheel turned. My undulating carrion-feeder wailed at a pitch that could shatter stone as I pried its hooked teeth out of my cheek and ripped it open from tooth to tail-tip, disemboweling it and spilling its guts into the wine-dark pool. Ting.

The titanic parasite in the pool stared up at me with its thousand milk-blind eyes. It was no leech or serpent after all. I could see it for what it was now—clearer than I could have even in the light of day. It was a maggot. A corpse-eater from a long-dead era, one of many that fed and grew fat upon the buried titans that the Father cast down. The maggot rippled in panic, tried to dive and slip away into the hidden depths at the bottom of the pool.

I caught Griffon's hand in mine and pulled him from its stomach in one savage motion, tearing out its insides along with him. Griffon emerged in an animal fury, flinging himself over the side of the pool and gripping my wrist tight enough to crush iron, his chest heaving with that same pre-human panic that had nearly killed me. He stared down at the wailing, gutted mess of a silver age bottom-feeder, outlined by the intermittent flashes of adamant spark-light.

"What?" Griffon rasped, the whites of his eyes stark.

"Is that?" I could hear him clearly now— in fact, I could hear it all. I could hear every ungodly, boiling nightmare sound that went on in this primordial dark. I could see it all clearly too, through the thin veil of the Raven mantle.

"Put on your cloak," I told him. But he only jerked his head to the side.

"Sol?" he hissed.

"Where are you?" As if he couldn't see the hand gripping his.

"Your raven mantle," I urged him. His jaw flexed.

"I can't." I frowned, considering our surroundings. I couldn't leave him here alone, at the mercy of the shadows that had languished longest in that deepest dark beneath the earth. If he couldn't don his Raven mantle, a lie would have to do. Reaching out, I drew a shroud of ivory silk from this nightmare and settled it over my brother. Griffon lashed out the second he felt it touch the crown of his head, nearly tearing it apart on instinct, before his higher reason asserted itself and he went still.

I pried my hand away from his and stepped back, watching closely. The ivory gave off only a false light, too dim for anything but a shadow to perceive it — but that alone was more than these ugly, wriggling things could bear. I watched the bottom-feeders shy away from it, skirting around the dim glow rather than testing it. Satisfied, I stepped away from my brother and up onto the stage. Off to commit unspeakable violence.