Vah’mor was known not only as the General of Evadia, the saviour and protector of all the gods, as one of the First Five and the most powerful kinesiologist—the same aspect of the mahee like D’Argen—but they were also known among the Never Born for their unique mahee as the consumer.
There were not many Never Born who did not have to take care of their containers. D’Argen was one of the few and he could consume sound instead of water or food. It was rarely enough to fill up his mahee, but as a kinesiologist, his mahee replenished much faster than the other aspects. Cana was another one, she did not have to consume food or drink, though she enjoyed it. Her body could function completely only off of the scent of sex. There were a few more and all of them were in the same physical aspect as Vah’mor; those that had power over their containers.
The reason why D’Argen was thinking of them, and Vah’mor in particular, was because long ago, when Vah’mor consumed the mahee of each of them in order to gain the strength to fight the demons by themselves, they were not the only one to do so. D’Argen was still a minor god at that point, with no title or lands, and known only as the messenger. Years later, Vah’mor took him under their wing and the two became friends.
Many more years after that, Vah’mor considered D’Argen their closest confidant. They shared their feelings and thoughts and worries with D’Argen. They also shared the experience of consuming the mahee. D’Argen had done it from Vah’mor, taking their pain as his own on one occasion, their joy on another, and their cravings yet another time. He never enjoyed it much, having something else swirling inside him, but it did bring the two closer.
It also gave D’Argen an idea as he stared at Thar’s unmoving body. Thar’s breath was so shallow that if D’Argen did not have a hand on the man’s chest, he probably never would have felt it.
One of the things he noticed when he consumed from Vah’mor, when he took their mahee into himself, was that it became his. Unlike Vah’mor, D’Argen’s scent did not change and his mahee remained his own. He was unable to consume everything, as Vah’mor did, but he was able to replenish his mahee completely with the little he took from their general.
His own mahee was weak when he prodded at it, tired and constricted, the deep waters of the ocean too far down to be touched by the currents. It was calm. He needed a storm and there was not enough in him to create one. More importantly, those depths were cold. Extremely so.
D’Argen used the little light around them to rearrange their bodies. He shifted to sit against the formation Thar had used to help him down. He moved the other’s body around until Thar was lying between his legs with his head of long white hair on D’Argen’s chest. With how much he was touching the other, D’Argen could only hope that Thar did not wake up. Or that he woke up and was too grateful that D’Argen’s idea worked to be annoyed at being touched so intimately.
He opened his mahee once more and felt Thar on him. The other man’s mahee was so faint and still that it was worrying. But D’Argen reached for it anyway.
Thar and his mahee were made to create, the cold ice of the world and beyond it, a natural phenomenon that could freeze a living thing in a single breath or turn gentle flakes into an infinite number of patterns and combinations. Thar used the cold around him to replenish his mahee in a way that was too similar to the physical aspect and those like D’Argen, Vah’mor, and Cana.
Not the same. But close enough.
When D’Argen reached inside Thar, he had to fight that initial tug he felt to melt that giant iceberg into the ocean. He focused past the fragile ice, the first layer, and pushed deeper inside… gently… carefully…
It felt like it took him centuries to reach inside where Thar held the core of his mahee protected, though it must have been only a few hours.
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As soon as their mahee connected, he felt his own try to turn around to consume the ice. It was not a natural reaction for him, but his thoughts had been wandering too much and his mahee knew it.
It felt so wrong, like trying to use his eyes to see the inside of his skull. It was so unnatural and impossible, but he at least knew how to control his mahee so it would not consume what little was left of the other man’s. And there was so little. The space around him was infinite, reaching into that abyss where all Never Born were connected as one through the mahee, where all of them drew out the powers that only they had access to and brought them forth, churning them to create their own. That space was too far for him to reach, but he could feel how much there was for Thar.
The naturalists were the strongest of all aspects in the mahee. They could hold the most, use the most, and their spells could literally change the shape of the earth around them. But they had their limits. Delcaus had broken a mountain in half and fallen into a coma for centuries. Thar was chained down.
As D’Argen reached further inside Thar’s mahee, he felt those chains. They were there. The thought surprised him because Thar had used up so much already since they left the known shores of the White Cliffs and started this adventure. But there was room for so much more.
Instead of focusing on the vastness of Thar’s potential power, D’Argen forced his mahee deeper into the other man and let everything out in the physical world fade away. His leg was no longer throbbing with every pulse of blood around the broken bone, his ribs were no longer a cage that tried to keep everything in place, and his head was no longer pounding with the cold outside and pain inside. The cold and stale air of the cavern and tunnels faded away into a more natural, clean and sharp scent – the cold of the mahee. It was a different type that sank deeper than flesh and bones.
Nothing mattered anymore but that connection as he became one with his mahee so completely that it was like he did not exist in the mortal realm at all.
Along with him, was Thar.
It was a rare form of meditation D’Argen had learned millennia ago that had helped him better understand himself and how his mahee worked. Too often it felt like the mahee was a separate entity inside him that he was both at the whim of and in full control of. But it was a part of him the same way as his eyes, his fingers, and his heart. In this state though, he became it completely.
Then came an unimaginable pain.
The mahee was hurting.
Just as suddenly as the pain came—something so deep inside that he had nothing to compare it to—he felt ice surround him. The pain faded away into nothing at all and the ice became so familiar that it felt like it faded away too.
The mahee that felt like ocean waves started churning. They found the wall of ice and started crashing into it. It was so cold and droplets from the ocean waves froze even as the ice started chipping away and fell into the waters where it melted. Much more of the ice was cracking and breaking than was freezing over.
The ocean waves calmed, still churning but with less force behind them.
More of the salty ocean stuck to the wall of the ice and slowly, so slowly that it was painful, those drops froze as they started to slide down.
D’Argen realized what his mahee was doing and then remembered something else; the saltier the water was, the harder it was to freeze. He dug into the ocean waves of his own mahee and tried to suppress only the scent that made him feel like the ocean rather than a lake. The more he suppressed it, the colder he felt, until ice crystals started forming inside the waves of who he was.
The drops of water froze into tiny ledges against the ice for more and more drops until the churning waves once more attacked strong, splashing higher and higher and freezing over in seconds. They filled the cracks in the thin ice, strengthened the fragile substance, and then covered the surface that was once like warped glass, hiding the outside world.
But the glacier now had salt in it, as compressed as it was, and the waves felt like a part of it. They belonged together.
D’Argen realized that more and more of his mahee was freezing over, transferring into Thar in a way that should not have been possible. The problem was, even as he calmed the waves, the ice reached out to them until the surface of the water was starting to freeze. And then it reached down and down and down and the glacier grew as it froze more and more of the water around it.
The ocean waves tried to pull back, to churn harder, to break the ice and the connection, but the ice forming on their surface and the crystals that grew inside it latched on so strongly that all of the ocean itself felt the cold rush through it even if it was not touching the glacier.
Thar’s mahee was consuming all of D’Argen and the ocean waves had nowhere to escape.