The inside of the cave is dank and cold. He finds m ore skins, some of them human, most not, all tainted by the ebon touch of the Whisperlands. Tunnels lead off into deeper chambers. He smells rot and ice. Pools of neretic slime bubble up from the ground.
There are tools and weapons, spears and shreds of clothing. This thing has feasted on creatures in the Wh isperlands for some time. It’ s gorged i tself on travelers and refugees and natives and other mutations. He isn’t sure how he destroyed it so easily, except that it seemed unused to direct confrontation. It normally took its prey by surprise.
He wonders if m aybe it hadn’t wanted to die. Maybe it didn’t understand why it had n ’t changed like the other creatures, and it couldn’t go on living in a land carved from nightmares.
In a way, he feels sorry for it, even after he finds it’s young.
They a re grotesque. They mewl like sick kittens and writh e like lampreys thrown from the water. Their mouths have not yet fully formed, and their limbs have yet to grow their blade appendages. They are a mass, a pile of pale flesh and slime held in a bowl in the earth. They look like they ’ ve just been born.
They were, he realizes. That wasn’t the mother I killed, but the father.
He presses deeper into the cave. He isn ’t sure how, but he knows he is n ’ t safe, not w hile these creatures live. They evolve quickly, and they will hunt him.
The mother i s still weak from birthing the offspring. Her body is bloated, not thin an d flat like the male’s but fat and bulbous. She looks like a living egg-sack.
Her limbs whip out at hi m, but he’ s able to elude them easily. Without thinking he charges into the room and slaughters her. P art of him believes he is meant to do this.
That this family of hunters is not meant to be here, and that he is meant to set them free.
He finishes the young quick ly. His heart p ounds as he exits the cave. White blood covers his chest. His limbs shake, and he isn’t even aware of his own tears until he’ s halfway up the rocky hill side.
His feet tread across dark stone. The hill is steep and covered in drifts of black ice and frozen clay. Ooze clings to his boots. Rocks dislodge beneath his feet and tumble down to the forest below.
The trees grow thin ner as he climbs. They stand at slanted angles, aimed at the blood sky like jagged spears.
The forest beneath him is like a black ocean. A dead wind chills his skin. Shadows scramble just out of sight. He sees child-like shapes and hears cackling laughter.
Memories flash back at him, and it’s difficult for him to hold them off. He sees ghouls in the darkness as they chas e him across a mist-covered landscape. He sees a dead city at the edge of the world.
He thinks of Snow. He remembers her, burning on the train.
It wasn’t your fault, he tells himself, but he ’ s told himself this before, and he never believes it. He tries to convince himself she was dead already, that the girl he’d grown up with was gone, her identity wiped clean by the vampires of Koth well before he ’d found her.
It doesn’t help. In the end, he ’d killed her, and that guilt has scarred him. He will forever bear that wound.
Tears stain his face, but he pauses, breathes in air filled with grit and shadow, and thinks about wh at he wants to go back to. It’ s difficult, at first, to remember, and for a moment he feels a kinship with the hunter beast, a creature that had grown so confused and lost and desperate it no longer wanted to continue living in the nightmare it was trapped in.
But after a moment more memories come to him, good memories, and they fill with him with light and warmth. He sees Mike and Ronan and Maur and Grissom and Ash, and especially Danica, so beautiful, so much under his skin, and if he sees her again, he tells himself, maybe, just maybe, he’ll tell her how he feels, he’ll take advantage of the chance he’s been given, he won’t make the mistake again of drifting apart from someone he cares about, not again, never again, not like with Snow.
He wants to see them… all of them. No distance or obstacle will keep him from going forward.
I have to try. It’s all that I have left.
He comes to the top of the massive hill and steps over the ridge. A flat field stands before him. B lack skulls on the ground mark the border to another region of the Whisperlands. R ows of stakes protrude from the earth like broken fingers. Thin trails of blood smoke rise up from shallow pits and curl into the sky.
A cold building made from black bones stands in the distance, right at the edge of a nother dead forest. The shrine is low and built in vicious angles, like something reached down and crushed it into splinters and edges. A pair of unmoving skeletons, their frames burned black and their eyes fi ll ed with cold fire, stand s vigil outside the twisted door.
He steadies himself, readies his blade, and walks towards them.
EIGHT
The skeletons are motionless as he passes between them and enters the shrine. Their cold and burning eyes stare out in to the wastelands.
Two of the arcane natives wait in side. The ir oily black bodies are so dark it’s almost impossible for him to make them out in the thick shadows.
They a re folded in contorted prayer. Their fing ers end in steaming frost claws and their eyes shine like frozen moons.
The rest of the shrin e is an endless void. E ntering is like s tep ping in to an icy pool.
He quietly sets his blade on the ground, kneels low, and spread s his hands. Information plac ed in to his mind by the Eidolos makes him understand this is needed to earn their trust.
They were once captives of the Whisperlands, just like he is, but they’ ve evolved. Decades spent in that fugue has destroyed whatever they once were. They are necrosis beings, more shadow than living.
And they, too, have reason to oppose the Shadow Lords.
They regard him suspiciously. He doesn’t understand what might be going through their alien minds, but he feels the darkness push against him.
They gaze into his shadow-drenched soul. He’ s forgotten so much about himself he i sn ’ t sure what they ’ ll find.
His body shakes. H e’ s afraid, but he knows this is necessary. He ’ ll endure anything if it will help him escape this prison, this quagmire in the endless dark.
They’ re closer now. He didn’t see the m approach. The ir bodies are featureless except for narrow slits for eyes and the barely discernible outlines of grim faces. They stand shoulder to shoulder and look at him, look inside him. Their touch is as cold as death.
H e’ s on his knees. He prays with them, only it isn’t prayer, not tru ly, for there are no g ods t here, no deities except for the soot angels, twisted succubi whose likenesses are cast upon a slab of stone: a mongrel avatar, an orgy of dark seraphim twisted together in a violent erotic dance. Claws and teeth and bat’s wings fuse together. T he trio of wom e n is locked in a tangle of shadow s.
He’ s seen this before, in history texts and drawings. It was in the church where Dane Knight performed the sacrific e that created human magic. There had never been any reports of the triple-succubus likeness having been seen anywhere else.
The statue bleeds darkness, a different dark ness than the air in th e Whisperlands. Theirs is an ancient and primal power. It fuels the mad arcane natives, tho se aboriginal marauders. They pay homage to the core of demonic flesh.
He looks i nto its gruesome multiple faces and sees a force that has beheld ages. It is not of his world, or perhaps of any world. It bears a purpose. It searches.
We search, one of the natives tells him. The words echo through his mind and repeat, layers of sound filter ed over one another, a resonant and whispered meaning. We hunt.
What do you search for? h e asks, but there is no answer. It occurs to him they might not even know.
