Skiagraphia IX (1/3)
Title: Skiagraphia
Chapter: IX (1 of 3)
Section word count: 18,985
Additional notes: UM KAY. This took forever, and then even longer still, and I'm super sorry and won't let it happen again. Again, this is going up in parts (this is about half of the chapter, but I combined two parts into one because there'd've been yet ANOTHER cliffhanger otherwise) but because it's been so damn long, I'm going to update this on fictionpress probably in a day or so. So I'm not even bothering to lock it on DW or LJ.
Thanks to chair_chan and envelopeflaps for betaing!
previous part
[ IX.i ]
“You should take your shirt off,” I said, and slid my hands out of Keyd’s. If I was sure about anything here, it was that I had to deal with the core of the entities, the home base. So that meant the mark right in the middle of Keyd’s chest.
Keyd nodded, and unbuttoned the top part of his long vest and then the shirt under it. He slid them both off his shoulders so he was naked from the waist up. I hadn’t seen him undressed for a while, and he’d lost muscle. He was still in better shape than I’d ever be, but he just looked…wrung out. A wet shimmer rippled over the mark on his chest when he breathed in. Only for a second or two, but I’d never seen it do anything like that before. This had to stop, this had to get fixed right now.
I let out a breath, shook out my hands and then rested them on his shoulders. “When you’re ready.”
Keyd didn’t take his eyes off me. “When you are.”
I was as ready as I’d ever be. Sitting this close to him and actually touching him meant that I couldn’t help but get a sense of his energy, and it wasn’t even close to normal. It was like fuzzy static, bad radio reception crackling through how his energy normally felt, a lot worse than the last time I’d felt it.
“Fuck, Keyd,” I muttered. He reached up and closed one of his hands over mine. His skin was dry and chapped with heat.
“Alan. Do this.” Keyd gripped my fingers hard, never looked away from me. “I...need it to be over.”
Either by killing him or curing him. One way or the other.
I swallowed down the sick lump in my throat. This was my idea, and Keyd believed in me enough to let me do it. I just had to fucking do it. “Okay. Okay, fuck. Here we go.”
I planted my palm in the middle of his chest, right on the mark, and held it there. Even stronger heat radiated from it, just baking off of him. Energy crackled up eagerly around my fingers, and I grit my teeth against the static shocks that snapped at my skin. Keyd pressed his lips together hard, and I could feel his heart thumping at a regular pace-which meant it was going much faster than normal for him.
Something flickered between us and opened, a sudden connection strong enough to take me off-guard. The bond. I hadn’t done it.
I nearly pulled my hand right off him, but managed not to. “Keyd-”
“I didn’t-” His eyes flicked to me. His pupils were huge and black. “I didn’t do that.”
We’d been closed off from each other for so long that this was almost a totally new feeling, like back when we’d first made the bond and I’d had no idea how to deal with it and what being constantly aware of two other people was like. I’d been used to the tiny faint thread, the little peephole that closing the bond had narrowed everything down to.
Now the whole thing was back, and for a moment it all seemed kind of normal-as normal as it’d been before we’d closed it off. But there was something....under it. Some kind of force, a sense of something else, swelling up from Keyd’s side of the bond and barreling towards me. It was like being in the path of an oncoming train; I knew it was bearing down on me, could feel the vibration of it coming, hear the sound of it, and I was right in the path of it.
“Keyd-” I started, but I could see in his face that he wasn’t doing it; couldn’t control it. “Wait-”
That was all I managed before it got to me. It slammed into me like a punch, and everything exploded with flashes of light. Heat shot up my arm from Keyd’s chest; spiking through my bones and dragging deep into my muscles. A heavy hum plugged up my ears and the air turned thick and charged. Everything tunneled down to that connection between us, shutting out everything around me.
And it was pulling at me-dragging me in. And I couldn’t resist it; couldn’t stop it.
Keyd’s hand dropped to my knee and his fingers clawed into me, and I think I said something to him, or I tried, but I couldn’t hear my own voice and the whole room was stretching away from me and blackness was boiling in, my lungs were burning for air, muscles screaming with heat.
There was one final second to think that this had been a really bad idea, and then everything blacked out.
#
I didn’t exactly wake up. I was just aware again.
Fuck.
Fuck.
What happened?
I couldn’t feel anything. Or see anything, hear anything-there was nothing. Not even blackness, just a colorless empty nothing. And I was just…existing. There was a faint sense of moving, falling, a downward drift. Almost being pulled; being dragged. But I couldn’t move myself. Didn’t even seem to have a body. I couldn’t talk; no sound when I tried to yell. Fuck, nothing.
I couldn’t be dead, because I was still aware and thinking. That made sense, right? Shit.
Then.
The-air? space? what the hell was this?-got darker around me. Slowly, by inches, turning a grainy blue-black. There was a place fading in around me; things I could actually see. Sort of. It was more like picturing something in my mind. It all wavered and dimmed if I didn’t concentrate on it, blurred out and lost details.
A circle of tall pale pillars and arches. Simple shapes, all the same height. None of them connected to anything; not holding anything up or even sitting on a solid surface. They were all rising out of a pool of dark quiet water, and there wasn’t a floor at all. It reminded me of something in a distant, unimportant way. There was no source of light, but the pillars gleamed and reflected in the dark water. Which was glassy and deep and near motionless; only a slight shiver glistened over the surface once in a while.
My bodyless self settled into a slow floaty spin right in the middle of it all. I wasn’t in any kind of control; all I could do was look. I could see too much at the same time, almost all of the circle at once-disorienting and unsettling because there was no way I was seeing this place with my eyes. Or hearing it; everything here was completely quiet. Quieter than quiet. Like sound didn’t even exist. There weren’t even the noises that I’d expect to hear just from my own body-a heartbeat, breathing. There was absolutely nothing.
The circle of arches had one gap in their pattern; an opening into a hallway lined with more pillars. They stretched down in two long rows until they faded into solid blackness. A deep distorted echo vibrated out from the dark; a noise that I felt more than heard, a sensation that filled up the soundless space and sent ripples bulging under the dark water.
Something was down there. Not something physical, but...a presence. A feeling of power, of something at least partly aware and alive. And it felt like Keyd-not him, but his energy. The entities. The same feeling that’d sucked me in for a couple weird menacing moments during the kre ismaret, that I’d felt just now when the bond had reopened between Keyd and me. Except now it was everywhere, constant and getting stronger every second. Stronger and closer.
I couldn’t see it, but I felt it when it flooded into the circle of pillars. Something was just there with me suddenly, all around, everywhere. Like the feeling of being watched by a million invisible eyes, or the creepy hyperaware feeling when someone stands right behind your shoulder without saying anything. There was a heaviness to the space around me now, settling like a thick wet blanket over my...mind, or however I existed right now. It molded all around me, close and tight and suffocating. I felt...drained, like everything was being pulled out of me-sapping me of strength and energy and even breath. I wasn’t exactly breathing in the first place, but now every atom of my existence was that desperate tight aching from needing air, and there was no way to make it stop.
Then the pressure got worse, started to burn, to squeeze. I was trapped in it, being taken apart and crushed down all at the same time. The place around me-the pillars, the water-was shaking away into blackness, warping, blotches of color flashing everywhere. This was not friendly. This thing was...trying to hurt me. It’d pulled me in here, to whatever this place was, and now it was gonna fucking smother me to death. It knew-it had to know, somehow. That I wanted to get it out of Keyd, cut it off from the host that kept it alive. It was trying to stop me before I could.
And I couldn’t fight back, couldn’t even struggle. Stupidly helpless. I wasn’t physical right now, I couldn’t...
But I still had a body somewhere. Somewhere outside of this weird place I still did exist, was still connected to my body, and that body had a shitload of light energy stored up in it. That was...that was what could hurt this thing. That’d been my original idea, the only plan I’d really had.
I had to get back to myself. I knew where I was, I knew it, but I wasn’t connected.
I had to think about where I was, the room, the people there. How things felt. It’d been....raining, right? Raining, dark outside, the light in the room low and warm and gold. I’d been sitting down, in a wooden chair that was hard and uncomfortable. I tried to picture all of it, feel it, but all the frantic airless heat and ruthless pressure was like being crumpled down into a helpless burning ball. A dull ringing droned constantly, a single bleating note like a phone left off the hook. Things flicked around in my consciousness and I couldn’t hold them, couldn’t focus. Thoughts fizzled out as soon as they formed. I clawed at them, desperate. The bed, the room, I needed more than just the words for them, come on. It couldn’t end like this.
Keyd would die. I’d probably die. I might be dead now. And Keyd’d trusted me to do this, to help him, to fix this. If I couldn’t even help my fucking self, what good was I to him?
Goddammit. No. I needed to....I just needed to find something, just-Keyd. I had to, I had to-
And then. One clear image. A fast glimpse of my own hand, pressed against the mark on Keyd’s chest. I felt the heat from his skin and the burn of stale air in my lungs, heard the sound of rain against windows. All distant, like trying to grab onto a fading dream. But real. I knew where I was, attached to my own body by a long narrow thread of awareness.
My body, and all the energy that was just sitting there, stored up in it.
Blackness rose up again and clawed me back down into the suffocating boiling pressure, but it didn’t matter, because now I could reach back along the strings that joined me to myself. And I did; hooking on to that core of energy packed up inside me and dragged it forward, through the connection and into this place.
A burst of soundless light bloomed in front of me, sending bright sparks and jagged tears of light spiking into the dark. The sound-the endless awful ringing-dialed up louder and sharper and wilder until it was more like a scream, a high-pitched wail that just went on and on and on. It filled up everything. All I could do was keep pouring energy out, channeling it like a lightning rod, even if I was pretty sure it was going to kill me. Everything turned to heat and white and that horrible shrieking sound; I could almost see it, taste it, feel it all around me and through me.
Then, a shudder. A change; a new feeling underneath everything else. Something strong, even stronger than what had almost just suffocated me to death. And that something pushed back. An overwhelming cold wave of power from nowhere. It was like an entire ocean had suddenly rolled in over me, wild and untouchable and intense. It rushed in everywhere, tumbled my senses around, uprooted everything as I tried to hold on and keep myself grounded. But my sense of self broke, snapped apart, lost in the whirling confusion and darkness all around me. Endlessly, no sense of time or self, lost and powerless and uncontrolled, until suddenly-
A breathless moment of absolutely nothing. Everything-the whole universe-stopped.
Then.
The room and the real world slammed into place, throwing me into myself with actual force, hard enough to rock me back into the chair. A wave of hot prickles rippled up my entire body, and then every inch of me went numb. The whole world spun and tilted over-I saw a flash of faces around me, the healers’ room, the bed-and then everything seemed a lot taller and further away. I didn’t even feel it when I hit the ground.
Everything was gone. The heat, the light, the pressure, all of it. Everything but the noise-the unending shrieking. That noise was still going.
Because now Keyd was the one making it.
It didn’t even sound like a human voice. The noise just went on and on like some kind of wounded howling animal. Keyd’s body bent and arched off the bed, all his weight on his shoulders and heels, every muscle strained and pulled tight. His veins were turning dark and black beneath his skin, a network surging darker and then fainter again every time he moved. Akyo had pretty much thrown himself across the bed to hold Keyd down, keeping him pinned mostly in place. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t get to him, couldn’t help, couldn’t do anything.
Keyd stopped screaming long enough to roll to the side and throw up over the side of the bed. A thick black gush of liquid splattered to the floor and spread out in an oily puddle. Somebody in the room made a tiny sound, and I heard a noise from behind me like hands and knees hitting the floor. Another voice made a startled noise. Keyd was still retching and choking, clawing at the bed as Akyo held him steady.
All my efforts to move finally did something-I managed to roll off my back and onto my side. Now I had a sideways view of most of the room. Rysa was slumped on her knees a few feet away from me, head hanging down and shoulders hunched. Damao was at her side, arms around her and keeping her held up. Her body kept bunching up and lurching forward with dry-heaves.
Suddenly there were people around me, saying things, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling. I could see knees and boots in front of me. I tried to twist away. Touching me probably wasn’t a good idea. The hands let go, letting me slump back to the floor. Then a face leaned down in front of me. Ansa.
“Mrit jahol jinnhe?” she said. Her cheek was pressed right to the floor so she could look me in the face.
I flipped my fist over into a weak thumbs up. Then, realizing that didn’t mean anything to her, I managed to croak out, “jinnhe.”
Ansa leaned away again, her hands slapping softly against the floor as she pushed herself up. I heard her say something, and Rhet’s voice answered, but it all sounded so far away. Her boots walked away across the room. Somebody else’s hand-Rhet, probably-came down on my shoulder, squeezed. I didn’t try and shake it off this time.
Up on the bed, Keyd had gone quiet and limp. Akyo was trying to turn him carefully over onto his back. I couldn’t see much from the ground, but Keyd’s skin was grey and damp and his eyes were wide open. They were solid glassy black. He wasn’t blinking, and he looked like he was barely breathing.
“Keyd-” I tried, but only kind of a dry gurgle came out. I ended up coughing and panting hoarsely against the floor. Footsteps came back across the floor and stopped in front of me, then a hand cupped around my jaw and tilted my head up, pressing the rim of a cup against my mouth. Ansa again.
“Kusn eyuhadva demua,” she told me, and I did. It was just plain water, cold and pretty fucking wonderful. I drank about half of it before Ansa pulled the cup away again.
It helped just a little. Enough to breathe better and manage tiny words. “Thanks,” I got out, and then, because I didn’t think I was in frequency right now, “iaymat irad.”
Ansa glanced down at her hand, then curled it into a thumbs up and offered it at me. I almost could have smiled, in any other situation. I planted my hands on the floor, meaning to push myself up. Rhet caught me under the arms and tried to help. But he wasn’t helping right-I needed to get all the way up, stand up, get to Keyd, and all Rhet seemed to want to do was get me sitting.
“I wanna get up,” I told him, but wasn’t sure which language it’d come out in, or if it’d even been words at all. “Wanna get up. Please, c’mon.”
Everything was starting to crinkle and go grey at the edges and I couldn’t even see Keyd-I could only focus a couple feet past my own face. There was a cloudy dark people-shaped lump somewhere to my side and beyond that, grey static. Everything looked blurred, grainy. My head squeezed and ached. I needed to know what was going on, what was happening, how Keyd was. If he was still alive.
But Rhet was stopping me, now holding me down, pinning me to the floor with his weight. I dimly realized that he almost had to, because I was fighting him-scratching at his arms and trying to twist out of his grip. I froze, panting, fingers clawed into Rhet’s shoulders. Air tore in and out of my chest and scraped in my throat, and the room swam and wiggled and prickled with colors.
“Alan, we don’t speak your language,” Rhet’s voice said, sudden and close in my ear, each word in Isji coming slow and distinct like he was talking to an idiot. I couldn’t remember even saying anything, but my throat felt raw and scratched and used. “What do you want?”
“Keyd.” I might’ve whispered it, could have screamed it. I said it again. “Keyd-”
A short sigh, some distant mutters. Then several pairs of hands grabbed me, pulled at me, dragged me up off the floor. Little colored dots swarmed in front of my eyes and my balance swung. I reached out for anything I could-found an arm and a shoulder to grab onto. My depth perception was all out of whack and whole chunks of the room disappeared when I moved my head too fast. I closed my eyes and breathed, hanging on grimly to the shoulder I’d found.
There were other voices talking close by, and then someone else was at my side, familiar and comforting. I knew it was Rysa without even opening my eyes. But when I did look at her, I almost wished I hadn’t. She was sickly white and sweaty, the bones in her face too sharp under her skin. Wet trails of dark purple-black were coming out of her eyes and had streaked down her cheeks, and there were finger-shaped smears where someone had tried to wipe them away.
“Rysa, shit, are you okay?” I managed. “What happened?”
She stared back at me, shook her head. Fuck, still no frequency. I couldn’t do much of this in Isji.
“Hey, Rhet, hey,” I said, and pawed at him. “Tahmurje bialad.”
“Ynda,” he said, and touched his fingers to my head.
Normally, getting switched into frequency by somebody else was kind of like having a tiny bug buzz through your brain. Not this time. It was like a fucking electric spike driving through my head. It only lasted a second, but it was enough to make me jerk and dig my fingers into Rhet. “Shit, ow, fuck! Goddamn it.”
Rhet snorted. “Clearly you’re fine.”
Right now I didn’t actually care why that’d hurt when it never had before. Now that I could stand and talk to people again and see a little further than two feet ahead of me, I had other things to worry about. Keyd. And Rysa too. But she was already moving towards the bed, breaking away from Ansa and Damao and leaving them standing there uselessly. Akyo was in between me and the bed, leaning over Keyd, so I couldn’t see much of anything.
Rysa said something to Akyo and he stepped out of the way, and out of my range of attention. I shook Rhet off my arm-I mostly had my balance again-and edged over to the bed, close to Rysa’s side. Our shoulders bumped, and her hand patted blindly down my wrist until she found my hand, and grabbed it. A burned bitter smell hung in the air, kind of like charred hair and something else. It was strong and really fucking awful and I had to swallow against it a couple of times. It took me a few seconds before I could even make myself look down at Keyd.
He was greyish and damp, his hair matted down against his face. His veins looked too dark beneath his skin and there were way too many of them spiderwebbing down his arms and up his shoulders and neck. His mouth was cracked open, his lips dried out and colorless. His eyes were shut now, but it didn’t make anything better. There were shadows like bruises around them, and dried grey tear tracks streaked down the sides of his face. He looked like he was dying, or already dead. And I’d done it to him.
There was something else, too. Patches of black kept appearing and disappearing on him, cloudy under his skin like millions of little dark pinheads rolling up in waves from inside him. They’d prickle up over parts of his arms and face and chest and then fade away again. It was fucking creepy and awful to look at, like something alive was trapped and squirming around inside his body. And I guess it kind of was.
It took everything I had to stay standing there, not to run the fuck out of the room or even just look away. But Keyd deserved better than that, so I didn’t. Somehow.
“What happened,” Rysa said flatly. Her voice was hoarse and her grip on my hand was starting to hurt. She was shaking, or I was-I honestly couldn’t tell.
“I don’t...know.” I only had guesses, and I didn’t know how to share them. Keyd’s oen hated me-wanted to kill me. Had seriously just tried to. Would she laugh at that, or take it seriously? “I don’t think I did anything good at all.” Another little patch of cloudy black speckled up across Keyd’s cheekbone and then disappeared again. “I just...made it angry.”
“You’re trying to destroy it,” Rysa said. “Of course it is.”
“It just wasn’t like this with Ahieel,” I said. “Nothing fucking like it.”
Rysa didn’t reply. She was squeezing my hand so hard I could feel all the bones in my fingers grating together, and her arm was pressing harder against my shoulder. When I looked over at her, she had her head bowed down and the fingers of her other hand clenched into her palm.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “You probably don’t want to think about that right now-”
“Ahieel lived through this,” she said. “That, I do want to think about.”
I couldn’t say anything to that. After another few seconds, Rysa pressed a hand to her forehead. “I need to...lie down,” she said, and reeled slightly to the side before snapping back upright. “I can’t...”
“Okay,” I said. She really looked like she was about to keel over on the spot. “Yeah. Do what you need to.”
Rysa reached out, wrapped her arm around my shoulder and tilted me against her. She rested her face against the top of my head and let out a long breath. I closed my eyes. It was fine, touching her. Her energy, our half of the bond, was perfectly normal. Maybe a little more revved up than usual, but that was it.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I said automatically. It wasn’t anywhere close to true. But I wasn’t gonna leave this room. Being near Keyd and seeing him like this was awful, but I couldn’t leave him either. What if something even worse happened to him while I wasn’t here, while I wasn’t paying attention? I’d done this to him. I had to stay.
Rysa stood next to me for another quiet second, then slipped away from my side. From the corner of my eye I saw Damao head after her, catch up to her side and just offer his arm to her. She hesitated, her hand drifting toward him but not touching. Damao said a couple quiet words, she said something back, and then linked her arm around his and gripped it. They left the room together, moving slow and careful.
Once the door closed behind them, there was no one else in here. Even Akyo was gone. It was just me and Keyd, who was barely alive.
It took a couple minutes before I could get myself to move. Even then it was only two tiny steps to the chair that was still by the bed. I got a hand on the back of it, leaned there. Keyd hadn’t moved at all, not once, not even a twitch.
“You’re gonna be okay,” I said. Keyd’s hand was on the sheets at his side, palm-up and fingers curled limply in. I almost reached for him, then couldn’t. Touching him was...I just didn’t think I should. “You have to be okay.”
No response; nothing at all. Like talking to somebody asleep. Worse than asleep. There weren’t any of the little signs of someone sleeping, no shifting or little noises. The only thing that let me know he was still alive were the breaths he took every so often, which were slow and weak and awful.
“Fuck,” I said. I groped at the chair and got it under me just before I collapsed. Actually collapsed, like my body’d just fucking given up. The chair legs tipped a little and shrieked on the stone, and I clutched at the arm for balance. Tingling lines ran up and down my skin and my breath burned in my chest and came out in gulps.
“I’m so sorry. So fucking sorry.” I reached for his hand again and still couldn’t do it. Keyd took another thin little breath and suddenly, fuck, no, I couldn’t handle it. I had to get out of here, just needed to be somewhere else.
I was out of the chair, across the room, and at the doors about a second later. I shouldered one of them open and nearly ran down Ansa and Rhet, who were standing right outside. They staggered apart as I pushed between them. Rhet said something and started after me but Ansa snapped out a word and grabbed him back. Their voices echoed down the landing after me, but no one followed me.
There was less light in this part of the wing-the closer I got to the main area of the rhun the darker it got. Only about one of every three or four lamps was lit, and I vaguely remembered someone doing that as we’d first come through here, what felt like years ago. Enough light to see by, but not so much to draw attention to the building, to us. We weren’t supposed to be here doing this, after all.
The sky outside the tall windows was the same ugly grey gloom it always was, and little white flakes spun through it. Lumps of snow tried to pile up against the glass outside, and the air got colder around me. I moved along mostly by feel and luck. Just moving, not thinking. Needing to keep going, focusing on nothing else.
But I did stop, eventually. Only because I’d pushed myself too hard too quickly, and was so dizzy and shaky that I had to stop, lean on a wall, catch my breath, and wait until the world stopped swinging. When I was...better-ish...I raised my head, looked blearily around.
I was in a different wing of the rhun, nowhere near the healers’ rooms. This hallway wasn’t even lit up at all; the only light was coming in through the windows, from the dull metal grey of the featureless sky. It was barely enough to see by, just a handful of shades brighter than inside. And I was standing in front of a pair of doors that I knew, even in the near dark. They went to the rooms that were Keyd’s and mine.
My hand looked a lot further away than it normally did when I reached out, pressed my palm to the wood. It was cool against my fingers, carved patterns pressing into my skin. My other hand fumbled for the door handle, managed to grab it, twist. I pushed forward. The door gave a tiny groaning creak, and then swung open easily. The room inside was even darker than the hall, a grainy blackness with even darker lumpy hints of the furniture in front of the windows. I took a breath, stepped inside.
There was a portable lamp by the door-or had been, last time I was here. I reached out and my fingers crashed into metal and glass, and I grabbed clumsily at the thing before it tipped off the little table. I got it steady in my hands and, after a few false starts, lit it. I’d never been good at these things in the first place, they had weird little knobs and levers to strike the flame on inside that had to be done in a certain order, and right now I could barely focus on even simple things.
The lamp glass was a blueish-green and the flickering glow that came out of it was a little sickly, kind of ugly. It didn’t even do much-I could see in maybe a five-foot circle around me if I held the lamp up higher, which I couldn’t manage for long. My arm started shaking too hard. But I could get a sense of the place, one thing at a time when the wobbly light swung over them.
The day Keyd had first brought me here felt like a thousand years ago, but I could still picture his face and how nervous he’d been, how much he’d wanted me to like it. How he’d watched me just walk around, looking it all over, before he’d even told me what was going on. That he was trying to make a place for us, something that was ours. Something like a home.
I drifted to the left, through the wide doorway that went to the bedroom, my feet just kind of taking me there. The circular bedframe at the far end of the room was a huge hulking shape, something I could barely see until I got closer with the lamp. When I did, I stumbled to a stop, staring. The blankets and sheets were messy and unmade. Pillows thrown everywhere. Even one of the ratty old t-shirts I usually slept in was crumpled up on the floor. This had to be left from the last time Keyd and I had been here together. I couldn’t even remember when that had been.
I was on my knees suddenly, the floor cold under my hands and a distant ache in my knees. Glass crunched, and the greeny-blue light disappeared from the room. The air that dragged into my lungs wasn’t doing me any good-my head swam and my chest burned and I tried to pull in more of it, faster and deeper, but that only made it worse. Colored spots clogged my eyes and my stomach rolled in hot threatening loops. I lowered myself to the floor, stretched out flat and pressed my face to the cool stone, closed my eyes. It helped, a little.
When I opened my eyes again, a vague amount of time later, I was looking right at the shattered remains of the lamp, less than a foot from my face. A dark puddle of oil seeped slowly over the floor. I stared at the cracked and broken glass for a couple long stupid seconds, watching tiny glints of light slide over sharp edges. The floor had warmed up under me and wasn’t doing me any good now; I dragged myself up to my knees and sat there, hands in my lap.
I really didn’t want to go back there. I didn’t want to do this anymore. It’d been a stupid hopeless goddamn idea in the first place. Everyone had told me that, and I hadn’t listened.
But there really wasn’t any going back. I’d really started this, and it was either keep going or-
Or nothing. There wasn’t any other fucking choice. I had to finish this. One way or the other.
What was I even doing right now? I’d fucking promised I wouldn’t leave him. And here I was, nowhere near him, hiding and whining and feeling sorry for myself. And Keyd was dying. I was the only person who could do anything about it. If I didn’t do something, no one else would. No one else could.
Jesus, Alan, get the fuck up. Get up and go back there, or the guy you love is gonna fucking die and it’ll be your goddamn fault. Get up.
I got one knee under me, grabbed the curved edge of the headboard, hoisted myself to my feet. That was a start.
Keep going! Don’t fucking stop!
Yelling at myself seemed to help. I was up now, taking clumsy but willful steps towards the door. My foot kicked into something that clattered and clanged and crunched across the floor-the lamp. Totally broken. Dark oil drops spattered across the floor, and some of it was slippery on the sole of my shoe. I ignored it, left it there, made my way back to the main room in the dark. Through it, out into the hallway again, still moving slow but with purpose.
Going back, right now. It didn’t matter what I felt, I had to be there. I had to finish this. That’s what Keyd had wanted, nearly the last fucking words he’d said to me. That he wanted it to be over. So that’s what I was gonna do. Whatever it took.
#
It took forever to get back to the healer’s rooms, and not just because it was nearly impossible to see. My head was pounding and it still hurt to breathe and I had to stop and wait every couple of yards until I could move without thinking I was gonna throw up. I finally got back to the landing of the wing, and could see the lights way down at the end. But the hall itself was empty; Rhet and Ansa weren’t there anymore.
I made my way carefully down the hall to the healers’ room. The door was open a crack, and yellow light sliced out across the stone floor. I sucked in a hard breath, pushed the door open. And stopped, leaning on the handle.
Keyd wasn’t in the bed. The mushy snow had turned into rain, and the dark glass behind the curtains wiggled with water trails. Nothing else moved. All I could do was stare at the empty bed, my heart throbbing in my throat.
“Alan.”
Rysa’s voice. I looked around and found her in a corner of the room next to that big bathtub. She’d pulled a stool up next to it.
“Keyd-“ I started, and then couldn’t get anything else out.
“Here,” she said. She leaned over the tub, over something that was inside. I had a pretty good idea of what that was.
I eased myself over to her; still going slow and careful and pausing every few feet when the room spun and swayed. I got close enough to see the angle of a shoulder and curve of an arm, shining wetly in the low lights. Not moving.
“He’s-is he-“
“He’s breathing and his heart is beating.” Her voice sounded thin and rough, like she hadn’t used it for weeks. “That’s all.”
I forced myself to get closer. Keyd was lying on his side in the bottom of the tub, which was about half-full of water. Like Rysa had said; he was breathing, but not doing much else. He looked so fragile and small in there, curled up with his eyes closed and his wet hair stuck against his face. Rysa moved a wet cloth over him carefully, scrubbing him clean. Her hands were shaking, and I figured she had to be feeling a hell of a lot worse than she was letting on. I wasn’t great either, but I seemed to be doing the best out of the three of us.
Neither of us said anything. She didn’t ask where I’d been and I didn’t want to bring it up. For a few minutes I just watched her finish washing Keyd, and then she let the water drain out of the tub. She patted him dry with a bigger cloth and then leaned down, got her arms under him, and lifted him out. For a second I was afraid it was gonna be too much for her right now-she just looked so tired and worn out and she hadn’t stopped shaking-but she got him hefted up into her arms. Keyd just looked like a broken toy, collapsed and dangling against her.
Rysa carried him back over to the bed and set him down carefully. Keyd rolled out in a boneless heap in the middle of it and didn’t move. Rysa sat on the bed next to him and took his hand, but I still couldn’t make myself touch him. I sat in the chair instead and balled up one hand against my mouth. I could barely look at him.
“It’s not over,” I said, after a couple of awful minutes of just sitting there, staring at anything but him. “I think I have to try again. It’s not-I don’t think he’s even gonna wake up otherwise.”
“Do it, then,” Rysa said. She sounded so tired, and she didn’t take her eyes off Keyd. “You have to finish it either way.”
“It might hurt you again.”
“I’ll be ready this time,” she said, with something that was almost not exactly a smile.
I finally made myself look down at Keyd. He was so fucking pale and washed out, and the shadows under his eyes made him look even worse than he had hours ago. His lips were dry and colorless and his skin looked like it’d been sucked in too close against his skull; every angle in his face was too sharp and obvious. Those black patches weren’t coming up under his skin anymore, but there was a grey color to his whole body that made him look like some kind of goddamn zombie, and his veins were still dark and obvious. The oen mark on his chest was warped and kind of blurred across his skin, like it’d been melted. All I could think of was Oredaiken, rolling up his sleeves to show me his oen marks and how ruined they’d been.
“Shit,” I said, sitting back. My hands were shaking, and I shoved them under my arms and clamped down on them. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I can’t-I’m gonna fucking kill him.”
Rysa looked at me from across Keyd’s nearly lifeless body. “Better death than this,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“We don’t know what’s happening to him now,” Rysa said. “I can’t feel him at all, you must not be able to either. He could be in pain, he could be suffering. He could be trapped in himself with nothing but pain.”
“He probably is,” I muttered. Nothing about this entity shit was ever fucking painless, why would that change now? And Rysa was right; trying to feel Keyd through the bond was like trying to hear someone yelling underwater. He was there, just....muted and faint and far away. No real sense of him, or what was happening to him.
“And,” Rysa went on, “what if this doesn’t stop with him? What if degoen moves to us-hurts you or me next? We can’t know what it will do, especially now that you’ve done something to affect it. This could spread through the bond; we don’t know.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. We were all connected, after all. The three of us. I’d only been thinking about how to keep Rysa out of it the best I could, how to keep her from getting hurt or pulled into this. Exactly what she was talking about now. But that was really only one way of looking at it. From what I’d felt, how much sudden power there’d been right at the end…
I found myself remembering the lamp I’d dropped and smashed in the bedroom, all the broken pieces of it glinting across the floor in a puddle of oil and soaked wick. The wick and the oil that were the source for the fire, the power of light. The power that went out when the source was gone. The entities needed a source too-they didn’t just create energy from nowhere. They took it; from their hosts, from forces in nature, from anything that had natural forces they could use. It all had to have a source. What had pushed me away from Keyd at the end...it’d come from somewhere else. Someone else.
“Hey. Rysa,” I said. She made a soft sound but didn’t look away from Keyd. “I think I need your help.”
She glanced at me again. “How so?”
“I’m not exactly sure. But I’m thinking a lot of this-the way it fought me, I mean-is the bond. Not just between me and him, but it has your energy as sort of this...source, like a backup, to use against me. It had way too much power to fight me the way it did, to actually be only Keyd’s. I think it came from you.”
Rysa rubbed at her eyes. “Possible,” she said. “It did seem as though I was being...drained, somehow.”
“I’m really fucking winging this, but it makes sense, right?” I said. “We’re connected, and part of what I’m doing here is killing the bond, and the entities aren’t real happy about that. I think they’re trying to save each other, or-yours are, even if you aren’t meaning them to. Keyd’s care more about staying the fuck in him no matter what, and I’m just-you know, I have some of them in me but not the same way they’re in you. I think it was yours that threw me out, at the end.”
It made more and more sense as I was trying to explain it, and maybe that was enough to sound like I knew what the hell I was talking about. Because Rysa said, “all right,” and reached across the bed and put her hand on my shoulder, which seemed like her way of telling me I could stop trying to sell her on it. “What do you want me to do?”
That was the problem. It was like this whole goddamn thing, really. I had all these theories and ideas I’d collected from everywhere or just made up on my own, but how to actually do it was just pure fucking guesswork. How did we make this three-way bond-which nobody really had anymore because they’d gone out of style and ours was weird as fuck anyway because I wasn’t full-on hitched up to the entities-work in a completely different way than it naturally wanted to, to help beat a disease nobody’d ever survived?
All I could think of was that Rysa’s entities didn’t hate me, and we could touch each other and use our half of the bond with nothing bad happening to either of us. That was the one solid thing I knew, and it was at least something to work with.
“Okay,” I said, and went around the bed to her. “I don’t know the best way to do this, but I think we should probably be touching.”
“How about this. “ Rysa moved behind me and got close up against my back. She folded her arms around my sides, leaving my arms free, and overlapped the palms of her hands in the middle of my chest. I didn’t have one of their marks there, but I did have entities floating around in me, and this was the spot where important shit happened. And I could feel the one she had on her stomach, thrumming lightly right against the middle of my spine, even though my shirt.
“Good?” Rysa asked. Her chin bumped against the top of my head, and I felt her breath in my hair.
“Yeah,” I said. There was a real light vibration coming from the marks on her hands, too. Maybe we should have been skin-to-skin, but this felt fine. Strong. “Just...focus on me. Our bond. Keep Keyd’s part closed as much as you can. Just don’t let it use you.”
“All right,” she said. I heard her take a firm breath in and out. “I’m ready.”
“Okay,” I said, and put my hand on top of hers for a second. “You’re gonna be okay too. We’re going to do this, and we’re all gonna be okay.”
Her arms tightened around me. I took a deep breath of my own, and put my hands out over Keyd. Both of them this time.
A couple inches away from his chest, something resisted me. Like the wrong ends of magnets being pushed together. My hands wanted to go in different directions and slide away without touching him. Opposite of before, when something had basically reached out and grabbed me and dragged me in.
Rysa’s energy was a calm steady force around me. I focused on that, on our part of the bond, on the energy that was going between us. Used it to bolster myself, an extra jolt of strength and willpower and force. Something gave way, collapsed and broke against the pressure. And my hands slapped down on Keyd’s chest.
His eyes snapped wide open. They were completely black: solid and shiny and sightless. A sensation welled up around me, bubbling and spreading out from where my hands burned against his skin. For a second, the narrow tunnel that I’d felt the first time was back-the pulling, the sense of being helplessly dragged in and crushed at the same time-and then, it was gone.
Instead, it was pushing. Fighting against me, repelling me, even stronger than before.
It wanted to keep me away.
Goddammit, no. This fucking stuff, these entities, this thing that was curled up and cowering inside Keyd, draining the life out of him just because its instinct was to stay in him no matter what...it wasn’t gonna win. This time I knew what I was in for. And it knew that I wasn’t giving up without a fight, and that I wasn’t totally powerless against it. I was on the offensive this time; I was coming to it.
Rysa’s arms were cinched so tight around me that my bones were starting to ache, but it all seemed kind of far away and unimportant. I felt it, knew it was harder to breathe and that her grip hurt, but...it didn’t matter. All my focus was on pushing past the resistance coming from Keyd, the bubble of pressure that wouldn’t give. Grey spots blobbed into my eyes; weird sparkles rippled over everything. A low ringing built up in the distance. Keyd’s eyes were fixed open, still solid glassy black, not blinking in his colorless face. His chest heaved up and down with fast shallow breaths under my hands, his mouth half-open.
My hands burned, roared with heat, spreading in fans of fire up my arms. But I could feel something relenting; giving up, giving in. Just had to keep this up, a little longer, just hold on. I knew I was shaking, sweating, gasping for air, but it was happening to a body that was far away and only connected to me by a thin line of awareness. I had to keep that line, I couldn’t lose it.
Then suddenly. The wall of resistance bent, and snapped. Shattered. The tunnel opened. Dark fingers reached up around me, slid around my consciousness. I tumbled in.
#
A feeling of rushing down; falling endlessly into nothing. Or more like...I was hovering in place, and the blackness was hurtling past me. Sometimes it felt like both. Then-
The arches were back, the long hallway of pillars, the still water and the dim sourceless light. Only now the water wasn’t so still-little dark waves licked up against the columns and ripples plinked across the surface, like invisible things were dropping in. The entire place was tense, on edge, paused right before something intense. Power suspended, locked in a standstill. A breath taken in, and held.
It seemed like...it was waiting for me. For me to do something, make a move. An electric charge was dry and sharp around me, a feeling almost like static pulling hairs up from skin. And also with me, strong and humming with an even cool pulse, was Rysa’s energy. Clinging close and wrapped around me, just like she was back in the real world. That alone gave me more courage, more confidence. I wasn’t on my own this time.
And I knew what I was doing, where I was headed. I aimed right for that hallway, the two rows of pillars that stretched back into some unknown place. I had to get into this thing, right in the heart of it, where I could really do damage. And that meant getting down that dark hallway, where it’d come from before, where it seemed to live. It was the best strategy I had, the one that made the most sense.
But I was gonna have to fucking fight to get there. This thing’s collective will, or whatever, was here with me, didn’t want me anywhere near there. Pushing my non-body forward was like wading neck-deep through thick heavy mud, slogging endlessly through it. Every inch I moved was a constant straining effort. It felt like heavy fingers were sinking into my skin and dragging it off me, dragging me back, and I didn’t even have skin right now; this was still in my fucking head or something.
But I could still feel Rysa’s energy behind me like a reassuring wave, rolling against my back. If it wasn’t actually helping me go forward, it was keeping me from being pushed back. And at least I knew I wasn’t alone.
The gloom of this place was getting darker and murkier around me. I couldn’t tell if I was still moving straight forward, or even moving at all. And even trying to move was so fucking hard; I couldn’t keep it up forever. I had to accomplish something before the effort wore me down. The pillars to either side of me wavered in and out, flickering with black jagged lines, pulling away and then fluxing back towards me. There was a light drag against me from far away, tugging at me-not from Keyd, but from my own body. I was losing touch with this place; it was gonna slide out of my grip before I even did anything.
I needed some help getting through this suffocating blackness. If I came on too strong and too fast it might just attack me again, Rysa or no, but I had to fucking risk it. I wasn’t gonna get anywhere at all if I didn’t.
I reached down that thin line of connection I still had, my tether line back to the real world and my real self. There was a pause, a delay, the message getting slowed down somewhere. And then, finally; a spark. A fizzly pop of bright energy, rushing down that long stretched connection from my physical body. It crackled out white-gold in front of me and swerved off into the blackness ahead. Everything around it recoiled. For a quick second, there was a sense of clear space all around the trail of light. And then the glow went out, and the dark rushed back in.
Again. Do it again.
More effort. A harder push. The same hesitating lag, and then-a whole cluster of white sparks this time, shining in bright little arcs as they shot away from me.
The blackness stopped pressing in on me, let go, broke apart to cower away from the light and left narrow empty tunnels through the thick darkness. I picked one and dove into it, swooping down the open channel, following the faint glimmer of brightness up ahead of me. Upset ripples shook in the dark around me, angry and frantic but not enough to come closer. Maybe...it was even a little scared.
Then the dark closed in on me again, the open path collapsing. Things brushed by me in the dark, slithery mental nudges and touches. More aggressive now, and threatening. I didn’t think it was gonna grab me and crush me like the first time, but it was watching my every move and not liking any of it. It was experimenting, testing me, trying to figure me out.
But I was starting to think it didn’t understand much of what was happening here. And that maybe its ability to think and comprehend was more simple than I’d thought. It understood direct threats, reacted right away to them with blind aggression. But right now it was unsure; it’d been unsure since I shoved my way in here. Maybe Rysa’s energy being with me, all around me, was confusing it. It had to recognize her as something definitely friendly and not a threat.
I probably didn’t have long before it decided what to do about it. The dark around me was vibrating with tensed energy by now, rippling and strumming through me in hard waves. But I was there, I’d made it, I was in the middle of it now. I almost thought I could see a ring of the same pillars and arches here, a mirror of the place I’d just left, only dimmer and grey and more like a faded impression than anything. It wasn’t important-what was here and real was. The consciousness inside Keyd.
And it was everywhere. A sense of huge, vast, filling being. It took up every space, every inch of existence, stretched past what this place was and beyond. Endless. Against it I felt unimaginably small. What’d grabbed me before, the first time...it’d only been a fraction of what this thing was.
And it had Keyd, owned him, and didn’t want anybody getting close. And I was too close. I’d always been too close. Maybe it had known, in its simple way, that I’d always had the ability to hurt it. Not that I’d ever wanted to until now, until I had a reason, but it hadn’t mattered. It’d still seen me as a threat. The first-the only-sense of that I’d ever gotten was during the kre ismaret, when I’d skimmed near it for a fast second, and the thing had been so fucking hostile. I hadn’t understood what’d been going on then, only that it’d seriously unsettled me. Because it had seemed like a part of Keyd was actively rejecting me. And it had been...to protect itself.
Back then, I hadn’t wanted any part of Keyd to dislike me, even the weird alien magical parasite that just lived in his body and wasn’t actually him. But now, it was my enemy. I only wanted it to do one thing-get out of him.
And it’d only do that if it was dead.
The first sense of pressure and blackness started to close in on me, curling close and surrounding me and Rysa’s energy together. Digging in, trying to slither itself between us, prying me away. Trying to pull us completely apart, get me alone. It’d finally decided what to do. It didn’t want her; just me.
Couldn’t let that happen.
I pulled on the connection to my body, reached down it like before. Only this time I didn’t just pull a little energy through-I opened the connection as far as I could. Tapped into everything I had in me, dragged all of it forward. There was a rush, a bright burning, and then a flood of pure power hurtled down the connection at me, bursting it wide open and exploding into me.
I let it. I let it be everything, take up all of me, expand out in every direction except into the solid sense of Rysa that still wrapped close against me. I didn’t want to hurt her with this. This was what I’d planned-pull as much light energy into Keyd as I could. Shove it right up against the dark energy that was in him; let them fucking take each other out. Destroy this thing from the inside. The two kinds of energy were naturally at odds, already conflicted against each other without any encouragement. They repelled each other, and when they couldn’t do that-
They destroyed each other.
Already the pressure around me was peeling itself away, reeling back from the energy I was flooding into it. Gold-white rays spiked into the darkness, crackling into me, through me, and out again. Even though it was just cast-off energy and not the entities themselves, it seemed to be just as good. Doing what I’d hoped. It cut into the mass of the entities, striking and slicing and clawing against it.
And the mass had nowhere to go, nowhere to escape to. It had all of Keyd’s body but refused to leave it, so now it was trapped inside by its own choice. I could sense its heavy dark mass whirling and rushing in helpless circles, racing away from the light energy pouring in on it, trying to outrun it, avoid it, but it only had so much room to go. Sometimes it struck back uselessly, lashing out like a wounded animal. But there was always more light energy to replace what it destroyed, more and more of it every second.
I just hoped I had enough of it in me. And that I could hold on long enough to finish it. All of it had to die. There was no way I was leaving even one tiny scrap alive in him. Not taking any chances. So I kept on funneling energy, letting it use me, spike through me like lightning. I couldn’t control it anymore, or stop it even if I’d wanted to. It swelled into every empty space and tore into the wounded howling mass of the entities, a swarm of relentless power.
Around me the world turned white and screaming-everything was a vibration, burning and ringing with whiney shrieks and a thick rumble that tore underneath everything. I couldn’t feel Rysa anymore. I couldn’t feel myself. No sense of myself, of Keyd, of anything. There was nothing but the noise, the heat, the shaking.
Suddenly. Everything tunneled, greyed in, compressed down to a narrow point of awareness. And then collapsed into nothing.
part II
Chapter: IX (1 of 3)
Section word count: 18,985
Additional notes: UM KAY. This took forever, and then even longer still, and I'm super sorry and won't let it happen again. Again, this is going up in parts (this is about half of the chapter, but I combined two parts into one because there'd've been yet ANOTHER cliffhanger otherwise) but because it's been so damn long, I'm going to update this on fictionpress probably in a day or so. So I'm not even bothering to lock it on DW or LJ.
Thanks to chair_chan and envelopeflaps for betaing!
previous part
[ IX.i ]
“You should take your shirt off,” I said, and slid my hands out of Keyd’s. If I was sure about anything here, it was that I had to deal with the core of the entities, the home base. So that meant the mark right in the middle of Keyd’s chest.
Keyd nodded, and unbuttoned the top part of his long vest and then the shirt under it. He slid them both off his shoulders so he was naked from the waist up. I hadn’t seen him undressed for a while, and he’d lost muscle. He was still in better shape than I’d ever be, but he just looked…wrung out. A wet shimmer rippled over the mark on his chest when he breathed in. Only for a second or two, but I’d never seen it do anything like that before. This had to stop, this had to get fixed right now.
I let out a breath, shook out my hands and then rested them on his shoulders. “When you’re ready.”
Keyd didn’t take his eyes off me. “When you are.”
I was as ready as I’d ever be. Sitting this close to him and actually touching him meant that I couldn’t help but get a sense of his energy, and it wasn’t even close to normal. It was like fuzzy static, bad radio reception crackling through how his energy normally felt, a lot worse than the last time I’d felt it.
“Fuck, Keyd,” I muttered. He reached up and closed one of his hands over mine. His skin was dry and chapped with heat.
“Alan. Do this.” Keyd gripped my fingers hard, never looked away from me. “I...need it to be over.”
Either by killing him or curing him. One way or the other.
I swallowed down the sick lump in my throat. This was my idea, and Keyd believed in me enough to let me do it. I just had to fucking do it. “Okay. Okay, fuck. Here we go.”
I planted my palm in the middle of his chest, right on the mark, and held it there. Even stronger heat radiated from it, just baking off of him. Energy crackled up eagerly around my fingers, and I grit my teeth against the static shocks that snapped at my skin. Keyd pressed his lips together hard, and I could feel his heart thumping at a regular pace-which meant it was going much faster than normal for him.
Something flickered between us and opened, a sudden connection strong enough to take me off-guard. The bond. I hadn’t done it.
I nearly pulled my hand right off him, but managed not to. “Keyd-”
“I didn’t-” His eyes flicked to me. His pupils were huge and black. “I didn’t do that.”
We’d been closed off from each other for so long that this was almost a totally new feeling, like back when we’d first made the bond and I’d had no idea how to deal with it and what being constantly aware of two other people was like. I’d been used to the tiny faint thread, the little peephole that closing the bond had narrowed everything down to.
Now the whole thing was back, and for a moment it all seemed kind of normal-as normal as it’d been before we’d closed it off. But there was something....under it. Some kind of force, a sense of something else, swelling up from Keyd’s side of the bond and barreling towards me. It was like being in the path of an oncoming train; I knew it was bearing down on me, could feel the vibration of it coming, hear the sound of it, and I was right in the path of it.
“Keyd-” I started, but I could see in his face that he wasn’t doing it; couldn’t control it. “Wait-”
That was all I managed before it got to me. It slammed into me like a punch, and everything exploded with flashes of light. Heat shot up my arm from Keyd’s chest; spiking through my bones and dragging deep into my muscles. A heavy hum plugged up my ears and the air turned thick and charged. Everything tunneled down to that connection between us, shutting out everything around me.
And it was pulling at me-dragging me in. And I couldn’t resist it; couldn’t stop it.
Keyd’s hand dropped to my knee and his fingers clawed into me, and I think I said something to him, or I tried, but I couldn’t hear my own voice and the whole room was stretching away from me and blackness was boiling in, my lungs were burning for air, muscles screaming with heat.
There was one final second to think that this had been a really bad idea, and then everything blacked out.
#
I didn’t exactly wake up. I was just aware again.
Fuck.
Fuck.
What happened?
I couldn’t feel anything. Or see anything, hear anything-there was nothing. Not even blackness, just a colorless empty nothing. And I was just…existing. There was a faint sense of moving, falling, a downward drift. Almost being pulled; being dragged. But I couldn’t move myself. Didn’t even seem to have a body. I couldn’t talk; no sound when I tried to yell. Fuck, nothing.
I couldn’t be dead, because I was still aware and thinking. That made sense, right? Shit.
Then.
The-air? space? what the hell was this?-got darker around me. Slowly, by inches, turning a grainy blue-black. There was a place fading in around me; things I could actually see. Sort of. It was more like picturing something in my mind. It all wavered and dimmed if I didn’t concentrate on it, blurred out and lost details.
A circle of tall pale pillars and arches. Simple shapes, all the same height. None of them connected to anything; not holding anything up or even sitting on a solid surface. They were all rising out of a pool of dark quiet water, and there wasn’t a floor at all. It reminded me of something in a distant, unimportant way. There was no source of light, but the pillars gleamed and reflected in the dark water. Which was glassy and deep and near motionless; only a slight shiver glistened over the surface once in a while.
My bodyless self settled into a slow floaty spin right in the middle of it all. I wasn’t in any kind of control; all I could do was look. I could see too much at the same time, almost all of the circle at once-disorienting and unsettling because there was no way I was seeing this place with my eyes. Or hearing it; everything here was completely quiet. Quieter than quiet. Like sound didn’t even exist. There weren’t even the noises that I’d expect to hear just from my own body-a heartbeat, breathing. There was absolutely nothing.
The circle of arches had one gap in their pattern; an opening into a hallway lined with more pillars. They stretched down in two long rows until they faded into solid blackness. A deep distorted echo vibrated out from the dark; a noise that I felt more than heard, a sensation that filled up the soundless space and sent ripples bulging under the dark water.
Something was down there. Not something physical, but...a presence. A feeling of power, of something at least partly aware and alive. And it felt like Keyd-not him, but his energy. The entities. The same feeling that’d sucked me in for a couple weird menacing moments during the kre ismaret, that I’d felt just now when the bond had reopened between Keyd and me. Except now it was everywhere, constant and getting stronger every second. Stronger and closer.
I couldn’t see it, but I felt it when it flooded into the circle of pillars. Something was just there with me suddenly, all around, everywhere. Like the feeling of being watched by a million invisible eyes, or the creepy hyperaware feeling when someone stands right behind your shoulder without saying anything. There was a heaviness to the space around me now, settling like a thick wet blanket over my...mind, or however I existed right now. It molded all around me, close and tight and suffocating. I felt...drained, like everything was being pulled out of me-sapping me of strength and energy and even breath. I wasn’t exactly breathing in the first place, but now every atom of my existence was that desperate tight aching from needing air, and there was no way to make it stop.
Then the pressure got worse, started to burn, to squeeze. I was trapped in it, being taken apart and crushed down all at the same time. The place around me-the pillars, the water-was shaking away into blackness, warping, blotches of color flashing everywhere. This was not friendly. This thing was...trying to hurt me. It’d pulled me in here, to whatever this place was, and now it was gonna fucking smother me to death. It knew-it had to know, somehow. That I wanted to get it out of Keyd, cut it off from the host that kept it alive. It was trying to stop me before I could.
And I couldn’t fight back, couldn’t even struggle. Stupidly helpless. I wasn’t physical right now, I couldn’t...
But I still had a body somewhere. Somewhere outside of this weird place I still did exist, was still connected to my body, and that body had a shitload of light energy stored up in it. That was...that was what could hurt this thing. That’d been my original idea, the only plan I’d really had.
I had to get back to myself. I knew where I was, I knew it, but I wasn’t connected.
I had to think about where I was, the room, the people there. How things felt. It’d been....raining, right? Raining, dark outside, the light in the room low and warm and gold. I’d been sitting down, in a wooden chair that was hard and uncomfortable. I tried to picture all of it, feel it, but all the frantic airless heat and ruthless pressure was like being crumpled down into a helpless burning ball. A dull ringing droned constantly, a single bleating note like a phone left off the hook. Things flicked around in my consciousness and I couldn’t hold them, couldn’t focus. Thoughts fizzled out as soon as they formed. I clawed at them, desperate. The bed, the room, I needed more than just the words for them, come on. It couldn’t end like this.
Keyd would die. I’d probably die. I might be dead now. And Keyd’d trusted me to do this, to help him, to fix this. If I couldn’t even help my fucking self, what good was I to him?
Goddammit. No. I needed to....I just needed to find something, just-Keyd. I had to, I had to-
And then. One clear image. A fast glimpse of my own hand, pressed against the mark on Keyd’s chest. I felt the heat from his skin and the burn of stale air in my lungs, heard the sound of rain against windows. All distant, like trying to grab onto a fading dream. But real. I knew where I was, attached to my own body by a long narrow thread of awareness.
My body, and all the energy that was just sitting there, stored up in it.
Blackness rose up again and clawed me back down into the suffocating boiling pressure, but it didn’t matter, because now I could reach back along the strings that joined me to myself. And I did; hooking on to that core of energy packed up inside me and dragged it forward, through the connection and into this place.
A burst of soundless light bloomed in front of me, sending bright sparks and jagged tears of light spiking into the dark. The sound-the endless awful ringing-dialed up louder and sharper and wilder until it was more like a scream, a high-pitched wail that just went on and on and on. It filled up everything. All I could do was keep pouring energy out, channeling it like a lightning rod, even if I was pretty sure it was going to kill me. Everything turned to heat and white and that horrible shrieking sound; I could almost see it, taste it, feel it all around me and through me.
Then, a shudder. A change; a new feeling underneath everything else. Something strong, even stronger than what had almost just suffocated me to death. And that something pushed back. An overwhelming cold wave of power from nowhere. It was like an entire ocean had suddenly rolled in over me, wild and untouchable and intense. It rushed in everywhere, tumbled my senses around, uprooted everything as I tried to hold on and keep myself grounded. But my sense of self broke, snapped apart, lost in the whirling confusion and darkness all around me. Endlessly, no sense of time or self, lost and powerless and uncontrolled, until suddenly-
A breathless moment of absolutely nothing. Everything-the whole universe-stopped.
Then.
The room and the real world slammed into place, throwing me into myself with actual force, hard enough to rock me back into the chair. A wave of hot prickles rippled up my entire body, and then every inch of me went numb. The whole world spun and tilted over-I saw a flash of faces around me, the healers’ room, the bed-and then everything seemed a lot taller and further away. I didn’t even feel it when I hit the ground.
Everything was gone. The heat, the light, the pressure, all of it. Everything but the noise-the unending shrieking. That noise was still going.
Because now Keyd was the one making it.
It didn’t even sound like a human voice. The noise just went on and on like some kind of wounded howling animal. Keyd’s body bent and arched off the bed, all his weight on his shoulders and heels, every muscle strained and pulled tight. His veins were turning dark and black beneath his skin, a network surging darker and then fainter again every time he moved. Akyo had pretty much thrown himself across the bed to hold Keyd down, keeping him pinned mostly in place. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t get to him, couldn’t help, couldn’t do anything.
Keyd stopped screaming long enough to roll to the side and throw up over the side of the bed. A thick black gush of liquid splattered to the floor and spread out in an oily puddle. Somebody in the room made a tiny sound, and I heard a noise from behind me like hands and knees hitting the floor. Another voice made a startled noise. Keyd was still retching and choking, clawing at the bed as Akyo held him steady.
All my efforts to move finally did something-I managed to roll off my back and onto my side. Now I had a sideways view of most of the room. Rysa was slumped on her knees a few feet away from me, head hanging down and shoulders hunched. Damao was at her side, arms around her and keeping her held up. Her body kept bunching up and lurching forward with dry-heaves.
Suddenly there were people around me, saying things, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling. I could see knees and boots in front of me. I tried to twist away. Touching me probably wasn’t a good idea. The hands let go, letting me slump back to the floor. Then a face leaned down in front of me. Ansa.
“Mrit jahol jinnhe?” she said. Her cheek was pressed right to the floor so she could look me in the face.
I flipped my fist over into a weak thumbs up. Then, realizing that didn’t mean anything to her, I managed to croak out, “jinnhe.”
Ansa leaned away again, her hands slapping softly against the floor as she pushed herself up. I heard her say something, and Rhet’s voice answered, but it all sounded so far away. Her boots walked away across the room. Somebody else’s hand-Rhet, probably-came down on my shoulder, squeezed. I didn’t try and shake it off this time.
Up on the bed, Keyd had gone quiet and limp. Akyo was trying to turn him carefully over onto his back. I couldn’t see much from the ground, but Keyd’s skin was grey and damp and his eyes were wide open. They were solid glassy black. He wasn’t blinking, and he looked like he was barely breathing.
“Keyd-” I tried, but only kind of a dry gurgle came out. I ended up coughing and panting hoarsely against the floor. Footsteps came back across the floor and stopped in front of me, then a hand cupped around my jaw and tilted my head up, pressing the rim of a cup against my mouth. Ansa again.
“Kusn eyuhadva demua,” she told me, and I did. It was just plain water, cold and pretty fucking wonderful. I drank about half of it before Ansa pulled the cup away again.
It helped just a little. Enough to breathe better and manage tiny words. “Thanks,” I got out, and then, because I didn’t think I was in frequency right now, “iaymat irad.”
Ansa glanced down at her hand, then curled it into a thumbs up and offered it at me. I almost could have smiled, in any other situation. I planted my hands on the floor, meaning to push myself up. Rhet caught me under the arms and tried to help. But he wasn’t helping right-I needed to get all the way up, stand up, get to Keyd, and all Rhet seemed to want to do was get me sitting.
“I wanna get up,” I told him, but wasn’t sure which language it’d come out in, or if it’d even been words at all. “Wanna get up. Please, c’mon.”
Everything was starting to crinkle and go grey at the edges and I couldn’t even see Keyd-I could only focus a couple feet past my own face. There was a cloudy dark people-shaped lump somewhere to my side and beyond that, grey static. Everything looked blurred, grainy. My head squeezed and ached. I needed to know what was going on, what was happening, how Keyd was. If he was still alive.
But Rhet was stopping me, now holding me down, pinning me to the floor with his weight. I dimly realized that he almost had to, because I was fighting him-scratching at his arms and trying to twist out of his grip. I froze, panting, fingers clawed into Rhet’s shoulders. Air tore in and out of my chest and scraped in my throat, and the room swam and wiggled and prickled with colors.
“Alan, we don’t speak your language,” Rhet’s voice said, sudden and close in my ear, each word in Isji coming slow and distinct like he was talking to an idiot. I couldn’t remember even saying anything, but my throat felt raw and scratched and used. “What do you want?”
“Keyd.” I might’ve whispered it, could have screamed it. I said it again. “Keyd-”
A short sigh, some distant mutters. Then several pairs of hands grabbed me, pulled at me, dragged me up off the floor. Little colored dots swarmed in front of my eyes and my balance swung. I reached out for anything I could-found an arm and a shoulder to grab onto. My depth perception was all out of whack and whole chunks of the room disappeared when I moved my head too fast. I closed my eyes and breathed, hanging on grimly to the shoulder I’d found.
There were other voices talking close by, and then someone else was at my side, familiar and comforting. I knew it was Rysa without even opening my eyes. But when I did look at her, I almost wished I hadn’t. She was sickly white and sweaty, the bones in her face too sharp under her skin. Wet trails of dark purple-black were coming out of her eyes and had streaked down her cheeks, and there were finger-shaped smears where someone had tried to wipe them away.
“Rysa, shit, are you okay?” I managed. “What happened?”
She stared back at me, shook her head. Fuck, still no frequency. I couldn’t do much of this in Isji.
“Hey, Rhet, hey,” I said, and pawed at him. “Tahmurje bialad.”
“Ynda,” he said, and touched his fingers to my head.
Normally, getting switched into frequency by somebody else was kind of like having a tiny bug buzz through your brain. Not this time. It was like a fucking electric spike driving through my head. It only lasted a second, but it was enough to make me jerk and dig my fingers into Rhet. “Shit, ow, fuck! Goddamn it.”
Rhet snorted. “Clearly you’re fine.”
Right now I didn’t actually care why that’d hurt when it never had before. Now that I could stand and talk to people again and see a little further than two feet ahead of me, I had other things to worry about. Keyd. And Rysa too. But she was already moving towards the bed, breaking away from Ansa and Damao and leaving them standing there uselessly. Akyo was in between me and the bed, leaning over Keyd, so I couldn’t see much of anything.
Rysa said something to Akyo and he stepped out of the way, and out of my range of attention. I shook Rhet off my arm-I mostly had my balance again-and edged over to the bed, close to Rysa’s side. Our shoulders bumped, and her hand patted blindly down my wrist until she found my hand, and grabbed it. A burned bitter smell hung in the air, kind of like charred hair and something else. It was strong and really fucking awful and I had to swallow against it a couple of times. It took me a few seconds before I could even make myself look down at Keyd.
He was greyish and damp, his hair matted down against his face. His veins looked too dark beneath his skin and there were way too many of them spiderwebbing down his arms and up his shoulders and neck. His mouth was cracked open, his lips dried out and colorless. His eyes were shut now, but it didn’t make anything better. There were shadows like bruises around them, and dried grey tear tracks streaked down the sides of his face. He looked like he was dying, or already dead. And I’d done it to him.
There was something else, too. Patches of black kept appearing and disappearing on him, cloudy under his skin like millions of little dark pinheads rolling up in waves from inside him. They’d prickle up over parts of his arms and face and chest and then fade away again. It was fucking creepy and awful to look at, like something alive was trapped and squirming around inside his body. And I guess it kind of was.
It took everything I had to stay standing there, not to run the fuck out of the room or even just look away. But Keyd deserved better than that, so I didn’t. Somehow.
“What happened,” Rysa said flatly. Her voice was hoarse and her grip on my hand was starting to hurt. She was shaking, or I was-I honestly couldn’t tell.
“I don’t...know.” I only had guesses, and I didn’t know how to share them. Keyd’s oen hated me-wanted to kill me. Had seriously just tried to. Would she laugh at that, or take it seriously? “I don’t think I did anything good at all.” Another little patch of cloudy black speckled up across Keyd’s cheekbone and then disappeared again. “I just...made it angry.”
“You’re trying to destroy it,” Rysa said. “Of course it is.”
“It just wasn’t like this with Ahieel,” I said. “Nothing fucking like it.”
Rysa didn’t reply. She was squeezing my hand so hard I could feel all the bones in my fingers grating together, and her arm was pressing harder against my shoulder. When I looked over at her, she had her head bowed down and the fingers of her other hand clenched into her palm.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “You probably don’t want to think about that right now-”
“Ahieel lived through this,” she said. “That, I do want to think about.”
I couldn’t say anything to that. After another few seconds, Rysa pressed a hand to her forehead. “I need to...lie down,” she said, and reeled slightly to the side before snapping back upright. “I can’t...”
“Okay,” I said. She really looked like she was about to keel over on the spot. “Yeah. Do what you need to.”
Rysa reached out, wrapped her arm around my shoulder and tilted me against her. She rested her face against the top of my head and let out a long breath. I closed my eyes. It was fine, touching her. Her energy, our half of the bond, was perfectly normal. Maybe a little more revved up than usual, but that was it.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I said automatically. It wasn’t anywhere close to true. But I wasn’t gonna leave this room. Being near Keyd and seeing him like this was awful, but I couldn’t leave him either. What if something even worse happened to him while I wasn’t here, while I wasn’t paying attention? I’d done this to him. I had to stay.
Rysa stood next to me for another quiet second, then slipped away from my side. From the corner of my eye I saw Damao head after her, catch up to her side and just offer his arm to her. She hesitated, her hand drifting toward him but not touching. Damao said a couple quiet words, she said something back, and then linked her arm around his and gripped it. They left the room together, moving slow and careful.
Once the door closed behind them, there was no one else in here. Even Akyo was gone. It was just me and Keyd, who was barely alive.
It took a couple minutes before I could get myself to move. Even then it was only two tiny steps to the chair that was still by the bed. I got a hand on the back of it, leaned there. Keyd hadn’t moved at all, not once, not even a twitch.
“You’re gonna be okay,” I said. Keyd’s hand was on the sheets at his side, palm-up and fingers curled limply in. I almost reached for him, then couldn’t. Touching him was...I just didn’t think I should. “You have to be okay.”
No response; nothing at all. Like talking to somebody asleep. Worse than asleep. There weren’t any of the little signs of someone sleeping, no shifting or little noises. The only thing that let me know he was still alive were the breaths he took every so often, which were slow and weak and awful.
“Fuck,” I said. I groped at the chair and got it under me just before I collapsed. Actually collapsed, like my body’d just fucking given up. The chair legs tipped a little and shrieked on the stone, and I clutched at the arm for balance. Tingling lines ran up and down my skin and my breath burned in my chest and came out in gulps.
“I’m so sorry. So fucking sorry.” I reached for his hand again and still couldn’t do it. Keyd took another thin little breath and suddenly, fuck, no, I couldn’t handle it. I had to get out of here, just needed to be somewhere else.
I was out of the chair, across the room, and at the doors about a second later. I shouldered one of them open and nearly ran down Ansa and Rhet, who were standing right outside. They staggered apart as I pushed between them. Rhet said something and started after me but Ansa snapped out a word and grabbed him back. Their voices echoed down the landing after me, but no one followed me.
There was less light in this part of the wing-the closer I got to the main area of the rhun the darker it got. Only about one of every three or four lamps was lit, and I vaguely remembered someone doing that as we’d first come through here, what felt like years ago. Enough light to see by, but not so much to draw attention to the building, to us. We weren’t supposed to be here doing this, after all.
The sky outside the tall windows was the same ugly grey gloom it always was, and little white flakes spun through it. Lumps of snow tried to pile up against the glass outside, and the air got colder around me. I moved along mostly by feel and luck. Just moving, not thinking. Needing to keep going, focusing on nothing else.
But I did stop, eventually. Only because I’d pushed myself too hard too quickly, and was so dizzy and shaky that I had to stop, lean on a wall, catch my breath, and wait until the world stopped swinging. When I was...better-ish...I raised my head, looked blearily around.
I was in a different wing of the rhun, nowhere near the healers’ rooms. This hallway wasn’t even lit up at all; the only light was coming in through the windows, from the dull metal grey of the featureless sky. It was barely enough to see by, just a handful of shades brighter than inside. And I was standing in front of a pair of doors that I knew, even in the near dark. They went to the rooms that were Keyd’s and mine.
My hand looked a lot further away than it normally did when I reached out, pressed my palm to the wood. It was cool against my fingers, carved patterns pressing into my skin. My other hand fumbled for the door handle, managed to grab it, twist. I pushed forward. The door gave a tiny groaning creak, and then swung open easily. The room inside was even darker than the hall, a grainy blackness with even darker lumpy hints of the furniture in front of the windows. I took a breath, stepped inside.
There was a portable lamp by the door-or had been, last time I was here. I reached out and my fingers crashed into metal and glass, and I grabbed clumsily at the thing before it tipped off the little table. I got it steady in my hands and, after a few false starts, lit it. I’d never been good at these things in the first place, they had weird little knobs and levers to strike the flame on inside that had to be done in a certain order, and right now I could barely focus on even simple things.
The lamp glass was a blueish-green and the flickering glow that came out of it was a little sickly, kind of ugly. It didn’t even do much-I could see in maybe a five-foot circle around me if I held the lamp up higher, which I couldn’t manage for long. My arm started shaking too hard. But I could get a sense of the place, one thing at a time when the wobbly light swung over them.
The day Keyd had first brought me here felt like a thousand years ago, but I could still picture his face and how nervous he’d been, how much he’d wanted me to like it. How he’d watched me just walk around, looking it all over, before he’d even told me what was going on. That he was trying to make a place for us, something that was ours. Something like a home.
I drifted to the left, through the wide doorway that went to the bedroom, my feet just kind of taking me there. The circular bedframe at the far end of the room was a huge hulking shape, something I could barely see until I got closer with the lamp. When I did, I stumbled to a stop, staring. The blankets and sheets were messy and unmade. Pillows thrown everywhere. Even one of the ratty old t-shirts I usually slept in was crumpled up on the floor. This had to be left from the last time Keyd and I had been here together. I couldn’t even remember when that had been.
I was on my knees suddenly, the floor cold under my hands and a distant ache in my knees. Glass crunched, and the greeny-blue light disappeared from the room. The air that dragged into my lungs wasn’t doing me any good-my head swam and my chest burned and I tried to pull in more of it, faster and deeper, but that only made it worse. Colored spots clogged my eyes and my stomach rolled in hot threatening loops. I lowered myself to the floor, stretched out flat and pressed my face to the cool stone, closed my eyes. It helped, a little.
When I opened my eyes again, a vague amount of time later, I was looking right at the shattered remains of the lamp, less than a foot from my face. A dark puddle of oil seeped slowly over the floor. I stared at the cracked and broken glass for a couple long stupid seconds, watching tiny glints of light slide over sharp edges. The floor had warmed up under me and wasn’t doing me any good now; I dragged myself up to my knees and sat there, hands in my lap.
I really didn’t want to go back there. I didn’t want to do this anymore. It’d been a stupid hopeless goddamn idea in the first place. Everyone had told me that, and I hadn’t listened.
But there really wasn’t any going back. I’d really started this, and it was either keep going or-
Or nothing. There wasn’t any other fucking choice. I had to finish this. One way or the other.
What was I even doing right now? I’d fucking promised I wouldn’t leave him. And here I was, nowhere near him, hiding and whining and feeling sorry for myself. And Keyd was dying. I was the only person who could do anything about it. If I didn’t do something, no one else would. No one else could.
Jesus, Alan, get the fuck up. Get up and go back there, or the guy you love is gonna fucking die and it’ll be your goddamn fault. Get up.
I got one knee under me, grabbed the curved edge of the headboard, hoisted myself to my feet. That was a start.
Keep going! Don’t fucking stop!
Yelling at myself seemed to help. I was up now, taking clumsy but willful steps towards the door. My foot kicked into something that clattered and clanged and crunched across the floor-the lamp. Totally broken. Dark oil drops spattered across the floor, and some of it was slippery on the sole of my shoe. I ignored it, left it there, made my way back to the main room in the dark. Through it, out into the hallway again, still moving slow but with purpose.
Going back, right now. It didn’t matter what I felt, I had to be there. I had to finish this. That’s what Keyd had wanted, nearly the last fucking words he’d said to me. That he wanted it to be over. So that’s what I was gonna do. Whatever it took.
#
It took forever to get back to the healer’s rooms, and not just because it was nearly impossible to see. My head was pounding and it still hurt to breathe and I had to stop and wait every couple of yards until I could move without thinking I was gonna throw up. I finally got back to the landing of the wing, and could see the lights way down at the end. But the hall itself was empty; Rhet and Ansa weren’t there anymore.
I made my way carefully down the hall to the healers’ room. The door was open a crack, and yellow light sliced out across the stone floor. I sucked in a hard breath, pushed the door open. And stopped, leaning on the handle.
Keyd wasn’t in the bed. The mushy snow had turned into rain, and the dark glass behind the curtains wiggled with water trails. Nothing else moved. All I could do was stare at the empty bed, my heart throbbing in my throat.
“Alan.”
Rysa’s voice. I looked around and found her in a corner of the room next to that big bathtub. She’d pulled a stool up next to it.
“Keyd-“ I started, and then couldn’t get anything else out.
“Here,” she said. She leaned over the tub, over something that was inside. I had a pretty good idea of what that was.
I eased myself over to her; still going slow and careful and pausing every few feet when the room spun and swayed. I got close enough to see the angle of a shoulder and curve of an arm, shining wetly in the low lights. Not moving.
“He’s-is he-“
“He’s breathing and his heart is beating.” Her voice sounded thin and rough, like she hadn’t used it for weeks. “That’s all.”
I forced myself to get closer. Keyd was lying on his side in the bottom of the tub, which was about half-full of water. Like Rysa had said; he was breathing, but not doing much else. He looked so fragile and small in there, curled up with his eyes closed and his wet hair stuck against his face. Rysa moved a wet cloth over him carefully, scrubbing him clean. Her hands were shaking, and I figured she had to be feeling a hell of a lot worse than she was letting on. I wasn’t great either, but I seemed to be doing the best out of the three of us.
Neither of us said anything. She didn’t ask where I’d been and I didn’t want to bring it up. For a few minutes I just watched her finish washing Keyd, and then she let the water drain out of the tub. She patted him dry with a bigger cloth and then leaned down, got her arms under him, and lifted him out. For a second I was afraid it was gonna be too much for her right now-she just looked so tired and worn out and she hadn’t stopped shaking-but she got him hefted up into her arms. Keyd just looked like a broken toy, collapsed and dangling against her.
Rysa carried him back over to the bed and set him down carefully. Keyd rolled out in a boneless heap in the middle of it and didn’t move. Rysa sat on the bed next to him and took his hand, but I still couldn’t make myself touch him. I sat in the chair instead and balled up one hand against my mouth. I could barely look at him.
“It’s not over,” I said, after a couple of awful minutes of just sitting there, staring at anything but him. “I think I have to try again. It’s not-I don’t think he’s even gonna wake up otherwise.”
“Do it, then,” Rysa said. She sounded so tired, and she didn’t take her eyes off Keyd. “You have to finish it either way.”
“It might hurt you again.”
“I’ll be ready this time,” she said, with something that was almost not exactly a smile.
I finally made myself look down at Keyd. He was so fucking pale and washed out, and the shadows under his eyes made him look even worse than he had hours ago. His lips were dry and colorless and his skin looked like it’d been sucked in too close against his skull; every angle in his face was too sharp and obvious. Those black patches weren’t coming up under his skin anymore, but there was a grey color to his whole body that made him look like some kind of goddamn zombie, and his veins were still dark and obvious. The oen mark on his chest was warped and kind of blurred across his skin, like it’d been melted. All I could think of was Oredaiken, rolling up his sleeves to show me his oen marks and how ruined they’d been.
“Shit,” I said, sitting back. My hands were shaking, and I shoved them under my arms and clamped down on them. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I can’t-I’m gonna fucking kill him.”
Rysa looked at me from across Keyd’s nearly lifeless body. “Better death than this,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“We don’t know what’s happening to him now,” Rysa said. “I can’t feel him at all, you must not be able to either. He could be in pain, he could be suffering. He could be trapped in himself with nothing but pain.”
“He probably is,” I muttered. Nothing about this entity shit was ever fucking painless, why would that change now? And Rysa was right; trying to feel Keyd through the bond was like trying to hear someone yelling underwater. He was there, just....muted and faint and far away. No real sense of him, or what was happening to him.
“And,” Rysa went on, “what if this doesn’t stop with him? What if degoen moves to us-hurts you or me next? We can’t know what it will do, especially now that you’ve done something to affect it. This could spread through the bond; we don’t know.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. We were all connected, after all. The three of us. I’d only been thinking about how to keep Rysa out of it the best I could, how to keep her from getting hurt or pulled into this. Exactly what she was talking about now. But that was really only one way of looking at it. From what I’d felt, how much sudden power there’d been right at the end…
I found myself remembering the lamp I’d dropped and smashed in the bedroom, all the broken pieces of it glinting across the floor in a puddle of oil and soaked wick. The wick and the oil that were the source for the fire, the power of light. The power that went out when the source was gone. The entities needed a source too-they didn’t just create energy from nowhere. They took it; from their hosts, from forces in nature, from anything that had natural forces they could use. It all had to have a source. What had pushed me away from Keyd at the end...it’d come from somewhere else. Someone else.
“Hey. Rysa,” I said. She made a soft sound but didn’t look away from Keyd. “I think I need your help.”
She glanced at me again. “How so?”
“I’m not exactly sure. But I’m thinking a lot of this-the way it fought me, I mean-is the bond. Not just between me and him, but it has your energy as sort of this...source, like a backup, to use against me. It had way too much power to fight me the way it did, to actually be only Keyd’s. I think it came from you.”
Rysa rubbed at her eyes. “Possible,” she said. “It did seem as though I was being...drained, somehow.”
“I’m really fucking winging this, but it makes sense, right?” I said. “We’re connected, and part of what I’m doing here is killing the bond, and the entities aren’t real happy about that. I think they’re trying to save each other, or-yours are, even if you aren’t meaning them to. Keyd’s care more about staying the fuck in him no matter what, and I’m just-you know, I have some of them in me but not the same way they’re in you. I think it was yours that threw me out, at the end.”
It made more and more sense as I was trying to explain it, and maybe that was enough to sound like I knew what the hell I was talking about. Because Rysa said, “all right,” and reached across the bed and put her hand on my shoulder, which seemed like her way of telling me I could stop trying to sell her on it. “What do you want me to do?”
That was the problem. It was like this whole goddamn thing, really. I had all these theories and ideas I’d collected from everywhere or just made up on my own, but how to actually do it was just pure fucking guesswork. How did we make this three-way bond-which nobody really had anymore because they’d gone out of style and ours was weird as fuck anyway because I wasn’t full-on hitched up to the entities-work in a completely different way than it naturally wanted to, to help beat a disease nobody’d ever survived?
All I could think of was that Rysa’s entities didn’t hate me, and we could touch each other and use our half of the bond with nothing bad happening to either of us. That was the one solid thing I knew, and it was at least something to work with.
“Okay,” I said, and went around the bed to her. “I don’t know the best way to do this, but I think we should probably be touching.”
“How about this. “ Rysa moved behind me and got close up against my back. She folded her arms around my sides, leaving my arms free, and overlapped the palms of her hands in the middle of my chest. I didn’t have one of their marks there, but I did have entities floating around in me, and this was the spot where important shit happened. And I could feel the one she had on her stomach, thrumming lightly right against the middle of my spine, even though my shirt.
“Good?” Rysa asked. Her chin bumped against the top of my head, and I felt her breath in my hair.
“Yeah,” I said. There was a real light vibration coming from the marks on her hands, too. Maybe we should have been skin-to-skin, but this felt fine. Strong. “Just...focus on me. Our bond. Keep Keyd’s part closed as much as you can. Just don’t let it use you.”
“All right,” she said. I heard her take a firm breath in and out. “I’m ready.”
“Okay,” I said, and put my hand on top of hers for a second. “You’re gonna be okay too. We’re going to do this, and we’re all gonna be okay.”
Her arms tightened around me. I took a deep breath of my own, and put my hands out over Keyd. Both of them this time.
A couple inches away from his chest, something resisted me. Like the wrong ends of magnets being pushed together. My hands wanted to go in different directions and slide away without touching him. Opposite of before, when something had basically reached out and grabbed me and dragged me in.
Rysa’s energy was a calm steady force around me. I focused on that, on our part of the bond, on the energy that was going between us. Used it to bolster myself, an extra jolt of strength and willpower and force. Something gave way, collapsed and broke against the pressure. And my hands slapped down on Keyd’s chest.
His eyes snapped wide open. They were completely black: solid and shiny and sightless. A sensation welled up around me, bubbling and spreading out from where my hands burned against his skin. For a second, the narrow tunnel that I’d felt the first time was back-the pulling, the sense of being helplessly dragged in and crushed at the same time-and then, it was gone.
Instead, it was pushing. Fighting against me, repelling me, even stronger than before.
It wanted to keep me away.
Goddammit, no. This fucking stuff, these entities, this thing that was curled up and cowering inside Keyd, draining the life out of him just because its instinct was to stay in him no matter what...it wasn’t gonna win. This time I knew what I was in for. And it knew that I wasn’t giving up without a fight, and that I wasn’t totally powerless against it. I was on the offensive this time; I was coming to it.
Rysa’s arms were cinched so tight around me that my bones were starting to ache, but it all seemed kind of far away and unimportant. I felt it, knew it was harder to breathe and that her grip hurt, but...it didn’t matter. All my focus was on pushing past the resistance coming from Keyd, the bubble of pressure that wouldn’t give. Grey spots blobbed into my eyes; weird sparkles rippled over everything. A low ringing built up in the distance. Keyd’s eyes were fixed open, still solid glassy black, not blinking in his colorless face. His chest heaved up and down with fast shallow breaths under my hands, his mouth half-open.
My hands burned, roared with heat, spreading in fans of fire up my arms. But I could feel something relenting; giving up, giving in. Just had to keep this up, a little longer, just hold on. I knew I was shaking, sweating, gasping for air, but it was happening to a body that was far away and only connected to me by a thin line of awareness. I had to keep that line, I couldn’t lose it.
Then suddenly. The wall of resistance bent, and snapped. Shattered. The tunnel opened. Dark fingers reached up around me, slid around my consciousness. I tumbled in.
#
A feeling of rushing down; falling endlessly into nothing. Or more like...I was hovering in place, and the blackness was hurtling past me. Sometimes it felt like both. Then-
The arches were back, the long hallway of pillars, the still water and the dim sourceless light. Only now the water wasn’t so still-little dark waves licked up against the columns and ripples plinked across the surface, like invisible things were dropping in. The entire place was tense, on edge, paused right before something intense. Power suspended, locked in a standstill. A breath taken in, and held.
It seemed like...it was waiting for me. For me to do something, make a move. An electric charge was dry and sharp around me, a feeling almost like static pulling hairs up from skin. And also with me, strong and humming with an even cool pulse, was Rysa’s energy. Clinging close and wrapped around me, just like she was back in the real world. That alone gave me more courage, more confidence. I wasn’t on my own this time.
And I knew what I was doing, where I was headed. I aimed right for that hallway, the two rows of pillars that stretched back into some unknown place. I had to get into this thing, right in the heart of it, where I could really do damage. And that meant getting down that dark hallway, where it’d come from before, where it seemed to live. It was the best strategy I had, the one that made the most sense.
But I was gonna have to fucking fight to get there. This thing’s collective will, or whatever, was here with me, didn’t want me anywhere near there. Pushing my non-body forward was like wading neck-deep through thick heavy mud, slogging endlessly through it. Every inch I moved was a constant straining effort. It felt like heavy fingers were sinking into my skin and dragging it off me, dragging me back, and I didn’t even have skin right now; this was still in my fucking head or something.
But I could still feel Rysa’s energy behind me like a reassuring wave, rolling against my back. If it wasn’t actually helping me go forward, it was keeping me from being pushed back. And at least I knew I wasn’t alone.
The gloom of this place was getting darker and murkier around me. I couldn’t tell if I was still moving straight forward, or even moving at all. And even trying to move was so fucking hard; I couldn’t keep it up forever. I had to accomplish something before the effort wore me down. The pillars to either side of me wavered in and out, flickering with black jagged lines, pulling away and then fluxing back towards me. There was a light drag against me from far away, tugging at me-not from Keyd, but from my own body. I was losing touch with this place; it was gonna slide out of my grip before I even did anything.
I needed some help getting through this suffocating blackness. If I came on too strong and too fast it might just attack me again, Rysa or no, but I had to fucking risk it. I wasn’t gonna get anywhere at all if I didn’t.
I reached down that thin line of connection I still had, my tether line back to the real world and my real self. There was a pause, a delay, the message getting slowed down somewhere. And then, finally; a spark. A fizzly pop of bright energy, rushing down that long stretched connection from my physical body. It crackled out white-gold in front of me and swerved off into the blackness ahead. Everything around it recoiled. For a quick second, there was a sense of clear space all around the trail of light. And then the glow went out, and the dark rushed back in.
Again. Do it again.
More effort. A harder push. The same hesitating lag, and then-a whole cluster of white sparks this time, shining in bright little arcs as they shot away from me.
The blackness stopped pressing in on me, let go, broke apart to cower away from the light and left narrow empty tunnels through the thick darkness. I picked one and dove into it, swooping down the open channel, following the faint glimmer of brightness up ahead of me. Upset ripples shook in the dark around me, angry and frantic but not enough to come closer. Maybe...it was even a little scared.
Then the dark closed in on me again, the open path collapsing. Things brushed by me in the dark, slithery mental nudges and touches. More aggressive now, and threatening. I didn’t think it was gonna grab me and crush me like the first time, but it was watching my every move and not liking any of it. It was experimenting, testing me, trying to figure me out.
But I was starting to think it didn’t understand much of what was happening here. And that maybe its ability to think and comprehend was more simple than I’d thought. It understood direct threats, reacted right away to them with blind aggression. But right now it was unsure; it’d been unsure since I shoved my way in here. Maybe Rysa’s energy being with me, all around me, was confusing it. It had to recognize her as something definitely friendly and not a threat.
I probably didn’t have long before it decided what to do about it. The dark around me was vibrating with tensed energy by now, rippling and strumming through me in hard waves. But I was there, I’d made it, I was in the middle of it now. I almost thought I could see a ring of the same pillars and arches here, a mirror of the place I’d just left, only dimmer and grey and more like a faded impression than anything. It wasn’t important-what was here and real was. The consciousness inside Keyd.
And it was everywhere. A sense of huge, vast, filling being. It took up every space, every inch of existence, stretched past what this place was and beyond. Endless. Against it I felt unimaginably small. What’d grabbed me before, the first time...it’d only been a fraction of what this thing was.
And it had Keyd, owned him, and didn’t want anybody getting close. And I was too close. I’d always been too close. Maybe it had known, in its simple way, that I’d always had the ability to hurt it. Not that I’d ever wanted to until now, until I had a reason, but it hadn’t mattered. It’d still seen me as a threat. The first-the only-sense of that I’d ever gotten was during the kre ismaret, when I’d skimmed near it for a fast second, and the thing had been so fucking hostile. I hadn’t understood what’d been going on then, only that it’d seriously unsettled me. Because it had seemed like a part of Keyd was actively rejecting me. And it had been...to protect itself.
Back then, I hadn’t wanted any part of Keyd to dislike me, even the weird alien magical parasite that just lived in his body and wasn’t actually him. But now, it was my enemy. I only wanted it to do one thing-get out of him.
And it’d only do that if it was dead.
The first sense of pressure and blackness started to close in on me, curling close and surrounding me and Rysa’s energy together. Digging in, trying to slither itself between us, prying me away. Trying to pull us completely apart, get me alone. It’d finally decided what to do. It didn’t want her; just me.
Couldn’t let that happen.
I pulled on the connection to my body, reached down it like before. Only this time I didn’t just pull a little energy through-I opened the connection as far as I could. Tapped into everything I had in me, dragged all of it forward. There was a rush, a bright burning, and then a flood of pure power hurtled down the connection at me, bursting it wide open and exploding into me.
I let it. I let it be everything, take up all of me, expand out in every direction except into the solid sense of Rysa that still wrapped close against me. I didn’t want to hurt her with this. This was what I’d planned-pull as much light energy into Keyd as I could. Shove it right up against the dark energy that was in him; let them fucking take each other out. Destroy this thing from the inside. The two kinds of energy were naturally at odds, already conflicted against each other without any encouragement. They repelled each other, and when they couldn’t do that-
They destroyed each other.
Already the pressure around me was peeling itself away, reeling back from the energy I was flooding into it. Gold-white rays spiked into the darkness, crackling into me, through me, and out again. Even though it was just cast-off energy and not the entities themselves, it seemed to be just as good. Doing what I’d hoped. It cut into the mass of the entities, striking and slicing and clawing against it.
And the mass had nowhere to go, nowhere to escape to. It had all of Keyd’s body but refused to leave it, so now it was trapped inside by its own choice. I could sense its heavy dark mass whirling and rushing in helpless circles, racing away from the light energy pouring in on it, trying to outrun it, avoid it, but it only had so much room to go. Sometimes it struck back uselessly, lashing out like a wounded animal. But there was always more light energy to replace what it destroyed, more and more of it every second.
I just hoped I had enough of it in me. And that I could hold on long enough to finish it. All of it had to die. There was no way I was leaving even one tiny scrap alive in him. Not taking any chances. So I kept on funneling energy, letting it use me, spike through me like lightning. I couldn’t control it anymore, or stop it even if I’d wanted to. It swelled into every empty space and tore into the wounded howling mass of the entities, a swarm of relentless power.
Around me the world turned white and screaming-everything was a vibration, burning and ringing with whiney shrieks and a thick rumble that tore underneath everything. I couldn’t feel Rysa anymore. I couldn’t feel myself. No sense of myself, of Keyd, of anything. There was nothing but the noise, the heat, the shaking.
Suddenly. Everything tunneled, greyed in, compressed down to a narrow point of awareness. And then collapsed into nothing.
part II