(High View — Character — Display — Roof — Trial — Futility)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
~~~
There.
The Shade Lord pointed. The Knight found her by weight and direction. Discovery had never been a joy to them.
The Nursery endures, it said.
This was true. Amid the ruin of the realm, drowned beneath the Void's black inundation, the Nursery alone had not wholly yielded. Its pillars were cracked and bowed, their gilded surfaces eaten through with creeping dark, yet they stood. Something inside those walls pressed back against the Void.
The Knight regarded it from above.
The Shade Lord's eight pale eyes moved across the structure, patiently accounting for every outcome and finding all of them acceptable.
We know this scent, it said. Sweet as marrow split beneath stone. Foul as the breath of graves long sealed. It calleth unto hunger and unto memory alike. And though it resembleth our own nature, it remaineth separate.
The Knight said nothing.
What thing fashioned of darkness willingly suffereth another darkness beside itself?
Below, on the broad platforms of the Proving Grounds, the goldwork had corrupted and blackened. Long roots of Void had burst through the sacred metals and wrapped the old halls, and thin rivulets of water fell from shattered heights and pooled in stagnant basins where golden reflections trembled and stilled and trembled again. Gathered beneath it all: hundreds of them.
The congregation. Dense. Shoulder to shoulder, the way things gather before the start of a storm. They had abandoned their solitary wanderings, their meditations, their rites, and stood clustered now on the Void-stained stone, whispering. Their voices moved through the air like dry parchment rustling in a locked chamber.
The Knight looked down at them.
They had masks. Under the masks they had faces, and under the faces they had whatever it was that drove shapes to gather in dark places and give their bodies to things larger than themselves. The Knight had seen this before, in one form or another. It did not change much across its variations.
Godseekers, the Shade Lord said. Mark the word. Seekers. The title is the confession. Reaching is a hunger without satisfaction, and they have built an architecture of devotion on the act of reaching and called the architecture faith.
We understand hunger.
The Knight did not respond.
We invented it.
The congregation had noticed them by now. Terror came, but it came second. First came the older thing. That fixed, wide-eyed stillness the Knight had seen before in creatures brought face to face with something too large for the mind's first response to be flight. They strained toward it instead of away.
Carapaces glowed from within, heat dampening bindings at crotch and back. Antennae twitched to the Knight's presence, legs shook, thighs clamping to hold the leaking warmth. Men with their claws clenched, breath ragged on Void-polluted air. Bulges strained against bindings. Mandibles clicking in primal stridulation.
Then the terror arrived in full and completed itself and they went down, all of them, foreheads to the Void-stained floor, hands spread wide, limbs bent beneath them. From their throats poured recitation upon recitation until the words dissolved into each other and what remained was only noise. And not one of them believed it would save them, though some of them pissed themselves in their attempts to hold it.
They prayed regardless.
The Knight watched this without particular feeling. There was, perhaps, the recognition of a fact: that this was the most honest thing any of them had done in some time. Faces to the floor, the Void running through the cracks around their splayed hands
Useful, the Shade Lord said, or they were. There shall come others to guide them, to indulge their thirst and lead them unto fresh calamities. We need not concern ourselves.
The chamber, it said, its voice sharpening at the edge. She is within.
The Knight descended.
It folded its vastness inward, the horns of its shell catching no light as it moved, the eyes dim and fixed. The air around its passage made a sound the ear received before the mind could name it. Below, the congregation recoiled. Black motes scattered from the Knight's body and fell over them like soot from a pyre, and those already prostrate pressed themselves flatter, and those still standing went down.
The Knight came to rest above the Nursery. It set its claws against the stone.
And tore.
Stone shrieked. Marble split. Gold screamed against itself as the roof came free. Removed, like how a lid is removed. Fragments crashed downward in clouds of dust and black motes, the sound crossing the platform and the realm beyond it, returning from the far walls diminished, returning again fainter still, and at last not returning at all.
Below, the Godseeker.
She stood within the ruined chamber, her mask crooked on her face, her garments thrown about her in haste, the thin black substance still issuing from her eyes at the Knight's presence. She looked up. Her claw moved toward the folds of her garment.
The Knight's claw came down before the movement finished.
The walls cracked. The stone burst where the claw connected and the Godseeker went down beneath it, the flat sound of a body meeting a hard surface under something considerably more substantial. The claw covered most of her torso. Its edges found cloth, found the flesh beneath the cloth, found the floor beneath that, and the stone indented under the combined weight.
She struggled beneath it.
The Knight pressed a finger against her throat and the sound she was making stopped.
The Shade Lord watched from where its fog-bound lower body had spread across the floor, its eight eyes arrayed across face and shoulders and wrists, catching no light, casting no reflection. It watched.
She knew we were coming, it said. She dressed herself in haste. Had we arrived sooner we might have seen what she keeps from her followers. The face beneath the face beneath the mask.
The Knight increased the pressure by degrees.
Beneath its grip her bones registered the change. Tendons stretched. The vessels near the surface of her skin swelled and darkened with the Void's advance. The Void rose under her epidermis like a tide seeking a shore. Her breath came in thin damaged intervals, hitching. Her limbs trembled against the floor, claws tearing shallow grooves into the stone as she strained against a weight that would not be strained against. Her hips jerked instinctively upward.
The Knight held the pressure at the point just short of the point with no return from it. It knew this place well.
The Void continued through the broken chamber, running down every cracked surface, spreading across the floor, finding the Godseeker where she lay and finding the two others nearby.
One bled from her temple. Her back was against the wall, one claw pressed to the wound before letting go, the other continued gripping her bindings. The Void moved across and into her carapace. It entered through the wound at her temple and filled whatever lay behind it. Her vision went grey. The Void moved behind her eyes.
The other stood in the doorframe. Her mask sat straight. Her posture held. The Void was filling her tracheae, turning her breath into a rattling choke. Only the ragged interval of her breath gave anything away, the sound of air bubbling through fluid that wasn't there a moment ago. And her claws had scored into the doorframe, holding herself upright against the weight of the thing expanding in her thorax. A hollow reed, played by the wind of the Void.
The Knight did not look at them. The Shade Lord did.
Then, from within the chamber, came sound.
Song.
Not from the congregation outside. From within. One Seeker near the wall had begun to sing, her voice trembling, the notes coming apart at their edges and holding their shape regardless. A second voice joined from the doorway, smaller, eyes fixed on the claw and what lay beneath it. Their hymn moved through the broken space in thin defiance—a funeral chorus delivered before the corpse had finished moving.
The Shade Lord was quiet a moment.
Still they love her, it said, with the flatness of something noting a species' behavior. They risk themselves for her sake though the outcome stands certain. This is not faith. It is the specific persistence of creatures who have chosen a centre for themselves and will not let the centre go, even once the centre is already gone.
Hence, the orifices are offered.
The Godseeker beneath the claw added her own sound to theirs. Choking breath, muffled, rhythmic. The three together became a trinity in song, composing nothing and rehearsing nothing, yet carrying more truth than anything they had.
The Knight looked at the two singers. It did not yet know what it was looking for in their faces. The Shade Lord's eyes moved from them back to the Knight and stayed there, already knowing what would be said.
They are not wrong, it said at last. They are only too late. Love correctly timed is navigation. Love too late is only weight.
The Knight returned its attention to the woman beneath its claw.
She had stopped struggling. Her hands lay flat on the floor. Her breathing had settled into the damaged regularity of something that had stopped fighting its terms. Her eyes were open, fixed upward and afraid.
The Knight knew the expression. It had no name for what moved through it in response. It tightened its grip.
Crack.