skin and traveled through channels up his arms and legs, through his spine and into his brain. A fierce, unbearable sting, infinite, breathtaking, unfathomable. Then the wraith enveloped him and swallowed him whole. Inside the creature was darkness, a darkness he'd thought complete.
He'd known nothing about darkness then.
Inside the beast was the pain of dissolution. The knowledge that he was being devoured. Eaten alive. The thing had something like teeth, but they were hooked; they dug into the flesh and tore, slurping away skin and blood. They reached around bone and snapped and sucked. Time slowed for him, a reitic property of the fel-ala that he himself had designed. The purpose of this was so that each cut could be experienced fully, individually. His consciousness was forced into the depths of the pain, each slice, each bite, one after another after another.
This was the pain he'd devised for her. The nemesis. Using only himself as a measure, he'd constructed the most nightmarish end he himself could imagine. And now it was his to experience.
As he twisted and thrashed in the belly of the fel-ala, it occurred to him that the pain was only the prologue. Only the appetizer to the true meal. Knowing it was coming made it all much, much worse.
If he ever escaped from this-and he wouldn't, he knew-he'd have to remember that knowing made it worse. A bit of useless knowledge to ponder forever.
Because that was the meal; that was the meat. After the pain, came the eternity. Even as he thought it, he felt the pain begin to recede, not because the fel-ala had finished with him, but because there was less and less of him to sense it. His body had been consumed almost thoroughly. His eyes had been ripped from their sockets, his manhood shredded, his entrails drawn from him, tied in knots with nimble hooks and yanked piecemeal from within. He'd felt internal organs puncture, rupture. By the time his lungs collapsed and he stopped breathing, it was almost a relief. The death of the body was imminent.
There was the rising panic and wholly other pain of suffocation. His chest, what was left of it, bucked and heaved. He would not have guessed that he'd have the energy for that by now. The pressure grew in his chest and head. The pressure soon pushed out all of the other pain. He felt his heart stop with a sickening, straining leap. Then it all faded away. The sound of flesh tearing and his own gurgling (and from somewhere, tinkling laughter). The visceral, seething agony. The smell and taste of thefel-ala's digestive liquids and his own blood mingled. And last, the blackness that was not yet complete. The blackness that was a painting of night compared to night itself.
True darkness. Infinite darkness, eternal. It embraced him. A silence beyond silence.
If he'd had a body he would have shuddered. The lack of sensation of any kind enveloped his mind, and at first he was relieved; the pain was over, finally over. For a time he was calm. Had he any lungs he would have breathed deeply, sighed.
Then he noticed the darkness. The lack, the total lack of light, of sound. The lack of being. Nothing with which to reach out, nothing with which to see or hear. Nothing.
For a time there was only the darkness and the horror of the darkness.
Then the itching started.
In his quest for power he had seen enough horror-caused it, experienced it-that he had lost the ability to go insane. It was a requirement of the Black Art, one of the first things his father had taught him. And if he was unable to lose his mind, then his nemesis was doubly so. She had been committing atrocities when the gods themselves were young. This was only an expression applied to anyone else, but with her it might have been a reality.
It was cliche, he knew, to think that it was thoughts of revenge that sustained him. He'd been avenging his father's death for as long as he could remember. But now it was his own death that demanded satisfaction, his own torment. This was new.
No, he would never lose his mind. And in that knowledge there was a slim hope. The slimmest. Even though he'd been certain of his victory, some paranoid part of him had compelled him to devise an insurance policy. Even if it never did him any good, the thought of those idiots bumbling around trying to follow in his footsteps, using useless plans for his masterpiece, gave him a touch of satisfaction. And a touch of hope.
They would never guess. How could they? Only Hy Pezho could be so audacious. Never in the wildest dreams of any of Mab's great thaumaturges would Hy Pezho's solution occur.
That was what put him above all others: He dared what no other would.
Thoughts of revenge sustained him for a very, very long time.
In an instant, nothing then something. Everything. Pain, blood, sound. Harsh smell, rank spellcraft odor. Darkness, but only the mundane kind.
