Yelena
She could barely make out the figure of Amara amidst the whirling, unending storm that held her within its bowels.
Gone was the realm of the Shifting Sands. Gone was the world of carnage and the crumbling stronghold, the merriment and the moonlit chats. All she could see – all she could feel – was the fury of the living void that had been expelled from the dying Gnoll’s eviscerated black throat.
Her hand flew to her sword instinctively and she channeled her attack – the Searing Strike that could cut through even the sharpest steel, even the most viscious darkness.
She sliced her sword through the air.
Nothing. Not even the sound of her blade.
She looked at it – seeing it coated with the poison that was spreading all around her. The blackened tendrils of her Voidspawn patron that was clouding the light that tried to beam into existence on her blade.
Amara moved towards her as though she stepped through treacle – her body tense, her mouth moving as though in a silenced scream.
Then – gone. She’d been swallowed up by the dark just as Yelena’s sword had been.
“So shall I deal with all thieves and marauders.”
The voice was his. The voice of a scheming, thirsting hound.
“Under my gaze your light is rebuked.”
She saw him then, seething as he always had been at her in her dreams. A pair of eyes cast judgement from the oscillating waves of energy surrounding her. Deep, dark, red-rimmed like those of a man who had done nothing but cry away his existence. Then those eyes changed, morphing into a set of amber slits radiating hatred.
The face of Nils.
“Here he is,” the voice that was not his told her. “Your enemy. Here is your chance to strike him down.”
He sword gleamed with an energy beyond her ken. It’s light, she saw, was filled with crackling spears of stabbing black.
It was her weapon. She need only strike. She need only make the cut.
There – a deep gash she envisioned in his neck. A gash that she could follow through with, tearing through his jugular, tasting his Yok’ra blood just like Virtir’s and then, smeared with his viscera, tear his smirking head from his shoulders.
“No,” she said, letting the blade drop. “Haven’t I told you already? You don’t command me, fiend.”
It was that last word that brought back ‘daddy’s’ raucous laughter.
“You will let them burn this realm and watch those around you suffer,” he said. “Is that your intent?”
“I…”
“I told you already, did I not? If you refuse the gift I offer, there are others who shall take it from you.”
She blinked, hearing the faint sound of voices screaming from the outside but ignoring them all the same.
“That…that’s why you’ve been so quiet, isn’t it?” she asked the ever-changing face in the dark, smoky mirror that lined her vision. “The Don – the Blackbird – and his silent servant…”
An affirmation from the dark.
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“They mutilate and spread me around like scraps of meat!” the demon roared. “They mock my very nature with their ignorance, fumbling around, sinking deeper into their precious Shifting Sands!”
Fury again. Now, the screaming storm turned lambent red, bathing her in a crimson light that reflected all the blood she’d spilled to get here already, and all the blood she’d still have to spill.
She could see it in the oscillating darkness plain as day: there it was – a vision of the sands streaked with the blood of the dead. The limbs of Gnoll and human alike. Boys, men, women, creatures who had had nothing at all to do with the game of war they were playing…
“How do I stop it?” she asked, clutching at the bleeding bodies of the dying and the dead, watching as their blood and entrails merely slipped through her fingers.
“Stop it?” the beast chuckled. “You are the very catalyst for the end of this place. You – and the damned vessels that have been drawn to your side down here. What will be will be, Yelena of the Argents. You are powerless to halt the bloodshed. Your every action – your every thought – it is naught but a whisper in the storm of these dead winds.”
She saw the girl’s red hair beneath her hands – her freckled face buried in the sands besides Marius. All of them lay beneath her knees, and when she rose she did so with the weight of a world on her shoulders.
“Powerless…” the Voidspawn whispered. “Without me.”
She looked up to see what she knew she would. There she was – her own reflection staring back at her, wiping one bloodstained hand across her cheek as the crimson sky of the Sands rained down the blood of the fallen upon them both.
“I don’t need you,” she told her dark image. “I never did.”
A shake of her head. Who’s head? Somehow it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all.
“You need me to do exactly what you are here for. You need me to unlock the answers you so desperately crave. You need me to go below.”
Under her heaving chest she felt the sands harden and break apart, folding in on themselves like a puzzle being ripped to shreds by an angry child. She fell through formless void, seeing planes pop up from the dark and light upon her only momentarily. A dark swamp that stank of death. A range of mountains inverted and cloud-covered, a realm of machines moving on pre-programmed paths, and a dark box suspended in a plane of icy nothing, with the voices of a dread legion howling in its depths.
The Layers of the Everloft.
“You need me,” the formless voice of hatred seethed. “To accomplish exactly what you want: my expulsion from your soul and this wretched world both.”
She watched each layer gradually fade away to a ball of grease. Then they were crushed, and the dust of their being scattered into the stars above Averix. The world of the surface. The world where she would have to claw her way back to.
And she saw it then – like a lucid dream. She could find her way back. But first, she had to reach the depths.
She met the eyes of the haggard reflection with an altogether different resolve, now.
“You need me to let you back in,” she said.
A nod. It understood. It was desperate. She could see the flailing soul of Nils screaming behind it, trying to claw his way back to life through its power. She could see, too, that it paid him no heed. Like her wails of terror when she was first brought into the surface world, his screams were left to flutter into the dead winds.
This Voidspawn had eyes only for her.
“What are you?” she asked as she reached out her hand.
The thing did the same, and one set of twitching fingers reached towards those of the mirrored self.
“I am change,” it said. “I am adaptation. I am evolution from the slime of existence. I am potential. I am imagination. I am your immaterial sins made manifest. I am the unconsciousness of the ageless. I am all of these things, and yet nothing of consequence. Only one of your kind ever did give me a name. And it is a name he shared with only a few.”
Before their fingers touched, she felt the being bend forwards as though to whisper in her ear. But when the word reached her, it penetrated not her body, but her mind:
“Numinous.”
A label that branded evil. Something that defined what she thought was undefinable. A collar leashed to that which dwelt beneath her bosom.
“And what do you want?” she heard herself ask.
She asked; it answered. In the moment when the tips of their fingers finally met, and shadow wrapped itself around form once more, she heard its response echo through the last vestiges of departing dark:
“To die.”
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