The Darkness Enfleshed
Chapter 18:
“Move.” the guard at my side called.
I stumbled forward, my restraints tied to the next person in line. Agony, both mental and physical, imbued every step I took. The occasional jerk against my wrists from the next person, and tug around my waist added only more to my pain.
A haze of orange sunlight fell around me. Sweaty forms, of both the captive followers of Zealot and the cadre of armed airmen that goaded us along with bayonets, filtered in and out of my vision. The smell of sweat and dried blood overwhelmed me, suffusing every breath I took. There was no respite to be had from the march.
The city had become hostile. From darkened avenues at our sides, I saw the flitting forms of alien workers, now keeping their distance from us. Their evanescent glow appeared to be following us. Or perhaps surrounding us.
I had no more tears to cry. No more energy left to resist.
Di hadn’t deserved to die. The guilt over having contributed to his death gnawed at my soul, along with an unwanted hatred of Dr. Hennir. What callousness had infected her? What monster had she become that these kinds of ends justified her means?
Somewhere in the trail of captives, separated from me by an unknown distance, I knew at least Yuri and Dr. Ininsir were alive. Would they face the same fate? If so, when? No ideas percolated through my desperate and darkened mind over whether we could escape from the hell I’d plunged us into.
I bumped into the captive ahead of me. “Stop.” came the high-strung order from the guard at my side, who needled my side with a bayonet and drew blood with one prick.
I froze.
One of the guards ran down the line, communicating something in a whispered tone to the others in the formation.
“Down.”
The guards forced the line of captives to their knees and took aim at something over our heads, tracking it with shaking hands on their rifles. I spared a glance at the one who had been at my side, and saw a look of fear cross his face. An involuntary shudder coursed through me.
My eyes swung to see what he was looking at and I didn’t comprehend what I saw at first.
In among the shattered boulevard to our left, a figure stood in the open, arms folded, quietly observing us. The stature was familiar, even if the abyssal black cloak marked with crimson swathes of color masked the face. I squinted through pain-filled lids.
The figure lifted its gaze to meet mine, and Tian’ Xi’s distinctive face revealed itself to me. Her eyes alternated gold and blue, much like Zealot. I knew then that she’d tried to access the city’s controls. How much success she had met was unknown to me. I felt sick to my stomach as I comprehended further changes. Tian’Xi held herself in a leaning, almost bored way that was entirely at odds with her previous personality. And she wore a blank expression that had no place on her face.
Behind her loomed the bulbous nothing-face. A mouth, several undulating voids of miserable anguish, opened at her ear and breathed out a noxious smoke. With rippling interchange, the membranous static that formed the negative space around nothingness spewed softly, almost caressing her face with its outgassing. She closed her eyes. Her unhallowed cloak shifted with the gentle force against it, while I heard a sound like bubbling death rattles echo off the walls of the avenue.
She nodded, turned to the creature, and leaned her head forward for it to lean down in turn and extend tendrils of white paleness to her head and search her forehead. This strange ritual completed, she turned down the street, and walked calmly away from us.
I wanted to cry out, to warn her, to help her, to somehow free her. But I had no idea what force had ensnared her. How could I fight the lies of an antediluvian horror I didn’t understand? How could I spit out one last gasp in her direction to save her.
The abomination shifted again, many-eyed vacuous holes spilling open in regard of our party. I knew it would feast.
“Open fire!” The order came from both ends of the line.
The recoil and report of the rifle above me sent shockwaves through my ribcage and teeth, and my eardrums rang. Bullets flew towards the nothing and disappeared into vortices of darkward absence.
Screams erupted from the people around me, both captive and captor, as the monstrosity took slow deliberate steps towards its prey.
I heard swears coming from someone in command of Hennir’s forces. Maybe it was Hennir herself. “Fuck’s sake, fall back!”
My legs wouldn’t stand. I felt the restraints around my hands snap taught as the captives ahead of me found their strength and began to strain at their ropes, tearing at my hands and limbs with the superhuman strength of multiple frightened airmen. I gasped in pain. My knees scraped themselves bloody against the city flagstones as I was ripped in two directions at once.
The screams grew louder.
I cried freely, tears rolling down my cheeks as the pain advanced through my entire system and the panic and anguish overwhelmed me.
My ropes snapped, cut by the force of ten human beings driven mad with the pain and horror. I fell to the floor.
Noxious fumes filled the air in front of me. My peripheral vision filled with the understanding that the thing had arrived in front of me, leering down on the poor sod who had been tied to my front.
I looked up, terror filling my being as I comprehended the nightmare enfleshed. That which never was, is not, and never will be. The negative of being. The absence of light. All writhing like a mass of festering maggots underneath a parody of humanoid form.
The Beast leaned down on the human who had got in its way, and extended grasping pseudopodia of anti-existence to the man, who screamed his head off as it was enveloped by carnivorous blackness.
I heard crunching. The man seizing. Falling. His limbs like rictus and then like a fish.
With all that was left in me I let out a scream.
The mass of nothing turned toward me and…
I saw.
On the surface of the abyss, rippling over the skin of static and unable to be sucked within the blackness, a glyph. Made of stone. An icon, willingly given to the creature… in the vain hope it would leave Dr. Hennir’s people alone. These were Yensir’s thoughts. The creature leaned into me, intending to devour me.
Now is the time to strike.
Unknown courage swelled within me. My hands seized at the Key around my neck, and pushed it towards the glyph in the creature, its mate. The two halves connected in a split second. Blue light suffused the air. And then darkness enveloped me.