Vox hummed quietly at her, quirking his head to the side.
Though no longer smiling, the darkly handsome man’s true emotions were difficult to determine. Even for Alyss, who’d found herself at the mercy of sadists all her life. Vox wasn’t the same as them. Not quite.
He wasn’t smug. His golden eyes swept over her form smoothly, but strangely, his leer didn’t make her shudder. It was detached. Clinical. Even professional. Unlike her brother, he didn’t look at her like a toy. Unlike her father, he didn’t look at her like a tool.
In fact, she almost thought she could detect a hint of pity in his gaze.
Which made no sense. Was he proud his machinations had paid off? Was he eager to further abuse her? At least her family was unapologetic in their cruelty. How could such a man as this feel any amount of sorrow for their own actions?
How could a Master pity their victims?
He was vicious, yet empathetic. Composed one moment, frantic the next. His multitudinous demeanors came and went like waves on the tide, such that it was impossible to determine what the enigmatic Blessed was ever truly thinking at a given point in time. And yet, throughout all, there was some…undercurrent to him, some consistent character. Muddied by his eccentrism, yet present nevertheless.
Was it his true nature, or merely something buried long ago?
“Hmm,” Vox murmured, humming for a second time, deep in thought. His brow furrowed, then raised.
“What do you think I want?” He asked, evenly. His words sounded genuine. Genuinely curious.
Alyss frowned. Painfully, laboriously, she pulled herself to her feet, groaning and swallowing. It hurt terribly to do so, her throat parched to such a degree it might as well have been sandpaper grating against itself. Before responding to his query, she accessed her ring of holding.
How desperately she wished to retrieve from it any one of the runic weapons that were contained within. One of her soul bombs, perhaps. A personal gift from Father’s armory. How she’d have loved to hear Vox’s screams as his very ego was rent asunder. She would have savored them, sweeter than the choicest wines. But she felt the compulsion drive her, strong and clear as a clarion call.
Instead, she withdrew a light waterskin, and drank deeply from it, quenching her thirst and soothing the pain. The smooth, sweet, fresh liquid brought tears to her eyes.
All the while, her captor waited patiently.
Alyss closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and composed herself. She hated this. Vox could act as genial as he so pleased. It didn’t change the fact that he was toying with her. It didn’t change the fact that she was at his mercy. But she buried her fury deep. Revealing it now would serve nothing. The only thing she could do was attempt to build rapport, futile as such a thing might be.
“You aren’t here to kill me,” she stated first, hesitantly. Vox chuckled.
“What makes you say that?” he asked, grinning.
“You would have done so already,” Alyss quickly replied. “Clearly–,”
“Right now, you’re of far more use to me alive, than dead,” Vox interjected. “This delve, after all, is far from over. What if I require your aid? What if my aim is to kill our other ill-begotten companions, as well?” The well-dressed Master was still smiling broadly. He spoke quickly, and energetically, as he debated her.
He was enjoying himself.
“Surely,” Vox concluded, “I could simply be planning to kill you, later.”
Alyss frowned. A tiny tendril of fear crawled forth, from deep within her gut. She quickly squashed it.
“You know who I am…,” she started, slowly. “Which means you know what I’m worth, alive. You know what would happen to those that dare harm me.”
In an instant, Vox’s easygoing smile vanished. His shade loomed over them both, long grey fingers producing an ear-rending screech as they dragged across the ground, uncanny and inhuman noises of moaning goats barely audibly emanating from within its unnatural maw.
“Ah, yes,” the golden-eyed man said, all geniality abandoned. “The great and mighty Angmar. The Soultaker.” With slow, creeping strides, he began to stalk towards her.
“Your father’s reach,” Vox murmured, his eyes cold and deep. “Is not nearly so vast, or grand, as he imagines it, I’m afraid.” His voice was barely a whisper, yet it reverberated deafeningly about her mind, echoing endlessly within the confines of her skull.
“You Aristocrats,” he spat the word out like a curse, “think the whole world revolves around you.” Vox was so close now that his enthralling face was all she could behold, his shade’s sonorous drone making her vision swim.
“But,” he whispered, mere inches from her, “I have seen the truth. The true Soultaker. I have borne witness to powers that would make your august patriarch fall to his knees, weeping in fear…” His golden eyes flashed, and Broadcast keened from beside him.
“And madness.”
For a split second, Alyss’s mind shivered and thrummed, and the corners of her sight blackened, and the veil of reality creaked and groaned, and from between the cracks in the fabric she could see things.
Whispers in the night, susurrations from the void, snippets and glimpses of gargantuan monsters, of eldritch entities, of worms, giant and ancient and hungry, STARVING–
“…but you are correct, milady.”
Vox sighed and withdrew, his shade following suit, and the vision was gone as quickly and seamlessly as it had arrived, such that Alyss was unsure if she had ever even experienced it.
“I do not,” the man continued, apparently oblivious to her distress, “intend to kill you. In fact,” he paused, stroking the small, thin stubble that formed a goatee under his chin.
“Perhaps introductions are in order. I know who you are, after all.” Vox looked directly at her. “And it doesn’t really matter anymore. Confidentiality, that is,” he repeated his prior words, though they seemed to her a good deal more ominous this time.
“My name,” he said, with a graceful, sweeping bow, “is Desmond Dubois. I serve the Devoted.”
Alyss shrank back.
Distantly, she felt her hands grow clammy, and her throat dry. The anxiety and terror she’d so valiantly managed to repress now returned with a horrid vengeance, swelling up from deep beneath her gut and rising higher still.
The Devoted were radicals. Cultists with barely a hint of propriety, a threadbare sheen of humanity. Nihilists that idolized the Titans, and the destruction and devastation they levied upon the New World. They warred constantly with other factions. They couldn’t be bought, bartered, or bargained with. They didn’t care for material things, only power, and only power that came from their wrothful Gods.
The Master’s prior words fell into place. Her father’s reputation would mean nothing to a Devoted. They sought his death, too. They sought the death of all unaligned to their unholy crusade. The gut-wrenching terror reached all the way to her bosom, mercilessly squeezing at her frail, human heart.
Vox really would kill her.
“Or, more specifically,” he continued, “I work for the Mandibles of the Gentleman.”
A small measure of fear departed her, replaced by confusion. Alyss narrowed her eyes.
“I’ve…never heard of you,” she admitted, scarcely able to keep the trembling from infecting her voice. She was far from an expert, the faction never having made particular headway into the Cells, but even she knew the basics. The Devoted had three sects. Balmut’s Maul, the Silver Clergy, and the Fleshwarpers of Sothoth.
The group Vox referenced, to her knowledge, simply didn’t exist.
But the man himself grinned, enthused once more. He nodded encouragingly. “Of course not,” he agreed, to her surprise. “Naturally. After all, if you’d heard of us, well…” He tapped the side of his head, and chuckled.
“Well, then we wouldn’t be very good at our jobs.” Vox chuckled again, more deeply this time, one hand lightly slapping against the meat of his thigh. Then he straightened, adopting a posture not unlike one of the many tutors of Alyss’s childhood.
“Each of our sects, as you may know,” he explained, patiently, “was founded in reverence of a particular patron God. The Silver Clergy, for example, worships the Simurgh. Balmut’s Maul, the Fleshwarpers, well, they’re obvious.” He paused his lecture, and laughed again.
“I must admit,” Vox said, grinning broadly, “I can’t say that your people’s hesitance to adopt our creed exactly surprises me, hmm. Ah, if only the Fleshwarpers had seen fit to honor Chelm in lieu of Sothoth, we might have made considerably more inroads amongst your kind. But, I digress.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Vox raised a palm, one single pointer finger extended as he continued. “Unfortunately, our patrons were not chosen by accident.” He wagged the finger back and forth. “No, no. Far from it. You see, the Devoted believe that their reverence renders upon them the very most singular aspects of their chosen Titan, empowering them to better accomplish their goals–”
“You speak as though you’re not one of them,” Alyss murmured quietly. Surprisingly, though, Vox heard her, and stopped. “Oh no,” he crooned, with a particularly sickly smile. “No, never. No, I only mean to present our faith…impartially.”
Alyss frowned. She didn’t believe him, but struggled to discern the exact meaning behind his confusing, contradictory dialogue.
“As I was saying,” the loquacious Master continued, spreading his arms wide, “each of the sects pick a God in line with their role. The Maul serves as our militia, hence, Balmut. The Fleshwarpers, our research division, and much like the Birth Titan, their experiments delve ever-deeper into…ascending the flesh and form.”
Alyss shivered.
“The Silver Clergy lead us all, just as the Simurgh doth command her sibling Titans from on high.” Vox clasped his hands together, gazing reverentially upwards. “Praise be the Warrior!” He exalted, fervently. Alyss stared at the man. It was just as she feared.
Vox was mad.
He was insane, deranged, detached entirely from all vestiges of logic, of reality. Exactly how she’d imagined a Devoted to be. Exactly how she’d been taught that they were. He’d kill her without a second thought, for eldritch reasons and seeking no mortally comprehensible reward.
She was actually going to die.
Oblivious to, or perhaps deliberately ignoring her distress, Vox went on, his hands still locked together, fingers still intertwined. “But brute strength, alone, is not enough,” he said.
She’d never had to listen to him uninterrupted for this long before, and his words were fostering a soft but ever-growing buzz that drove her bones to itch.
“Nor science,” he preached, his voice low and powerful. “Nor an organized chain of command. The world cannot be changed by the light of day.” Vox’s golden eyes glimmered, and Broadcast wrapped its gangly arms tightly about his waist. “We must work in the dark, as well.” He spread his hands. “Hence, the Mandibles. We are the Devoted’s intelligence service. Their spies. Their informants. Their assassins.”
“We honor Beelzebub of the Masquerade.”
There was power, such terrible, terrible power in the way Vox said the name. As he invoked the dark God, that most damned spawn of all the Warrior’s repugnant children, Vox’s shade raised its grotesque, mutilated head high, and released a single note.
It was unlike any manner of sound Alyss had ever heard. It was pure and untainted, uncorrupted by fauna or flora, by life or the passage of time. Bearing witness to something so wholly lacking flaw or blemish brought tears to her eyes.
It was music without complexity, art without canvas, song without changes in pitch or tone. It was the peace of death, the tranquility of the void, the ultimate, endless simplicity of a heat-dead universe.
It was pure emptiness. It was the space between stars. It was the end of all things.
It was oblivion.
“We lie,” Vox drawled, creeping towards Alyss once more, this time causing far greater fear in her than before.
“We steal. We kidnap. We torture. We infiltrate. We interrogate. We kill.”
Behind the well-dressed man’s beautiful gold orbs, a hint of blackness, of oblivion began to show. Broadcast shivered in ecstasy, running its gangly, boney palms delightedly over the subtle folds and creases in its Master’s suit.
“Nothing is beneath us. No one is safe from us. Nowhere is outside of our grasp. Not a soul will ever know of our existence, for we would rather die than fail, or worse yet, risk discovery. And none will ever see us coming.” Vox smiled, but it wasn’t sickly this time.
It was happy. It was proud.
“Which brings us, my Lady Nycta, to us. Me,” he whispered, “and you.”
“You’re here to kill me,” Alyss whispered back.
Vox straightened, and chuckled deeply once more. “Again, you’re not wrong. But technically, my orders were to bring you back dead or alive. You see, the Devoted is well aware of your Necromancy, and…precisely what it represents. I’m afraid, milady, that you are a weapon we simply cannot afford to allow the Cells to possess.”
He shook his head, sadly. At this point, she was well beyond guessing if he really felt for her, or not. The man was so thoroughly twisted, it honestly could have been either.
“I was sent,” Vox explained, “to ensure that you do not fall into their hands, nor the hands of the Coterie.” He raised a finger. “But your death, itself, is unnecessary. Unideal, in fact. I assure you, we would far rather you serve us, than no one at all.”
“So you intend to kidnap me,” Alyss stated emptily.
She found herself unable to muster any more than a modicum of emotion. Distantly, it was ironic. She’d escaped one Hell, albeit temporarily, merely to find herself immersed within an even crueler one. She struggled to care. She was just, completely drained by the chaos and insanity of the whole affair.
Vox shrugged, tilting a palm back and forth. “More or less, you are correct, yes. Our Warpers will see to your obedience, and the Deathlands will do well to fuel your growth. You will mature into a fine weapon for the wars to come.”
His interest in her finally having seemed to diminish, Vox turned on his heel, stretched slightly, and began to examine their surroundings. As he did so, though, he continued to speak.
“Or at least,” he murmured, “such was my initial plan.”
The room they found themselves in was unsightly. Light grey, and apparently constructed from concrete, it absorbed the already dim and infrequent green lighting at every one of its nooks and crannies, shifting it into a stomach-churning melange the shade of puke.
“But then,” Vox continued, entrancing eyes still tracing the contours of their environment, “as it turned out, our intel was faulty.” At this, he paused his survey, whipping towards her with a grin.
“Difficult though it may be to believe, such things do happen sometimes,” he quipped. Alyss stared blankly back at him, but Vox’s grin only widened.
“You see, my dear Alyss,” he said, hissing the end of her name, “in my opinion, a mission, particularly one involving espionage, is much like a puzzle.” Vox contorted his thin, delicate fingers into complex shapes and gestures.
“In order to succeed, one must know the pieces. One must know their shape. Their form. One must know which places they fit into, and of course, how they fit together.” Finally, his hands smoothed, and all digits were locked into a complex spider’s web.
“Know each piece, understand each piece, and you cannot fail,” Vox declared, shaking his head definitely. “You simply cannot. This was taught to me by my master, the Red Queen, herself, and it has proven true time and time again.” The title meant nothing to Alyss, but the man continued undaunted.
“I was prepared for Quarrel,” he said. “I was prepared for Rover. I was even prepared for the legendary Immolator. And, obviously, I was prepared for you. In fact, some might say I was over-prepared. I studied you all for months, months and months. I daresay, I might even know each of you better than you know yourselves.”
Slowly, gradually, over a matter of painfully long, silent seconds, his broad smile faded away.
“And one more,” he said. “I prepared for one more.”
Vox fixed her with a strangely intense gaze. Despite her best efforts to ignore his words, to remain above his games, Alyss found herself drawn right back in. She knew what name he was about to say. It was the name of her savior, and her traitor. What secrets did the altruistic Hero hide?
“Wendigo,” he murmured. Alyss’s eyes widened, and Vox’s gaze sharpened upon her.
“Oh, that’s right, Lady Nycta. Wendigo. Attunement thirteen, Blessing Discretionary Mutation. A robust Brute power that allows one to rearrange and upgrade one’s own physiology at discretion.” He snorted.
“An exceptional Blessing in unexceptional hands. Wendigo, real name Kevan Lise, merely used the thing to give himself larger muscles. What a waste! A poor choice for him,” Vox’s lips twitched in a smile, “but not for me. No, he would prove a superb servant.” He sighed, dreamily. “Strong, and stupid. A perfect start.”
Then, for a second time, his smile faded.
“Imagine my surprise, Lady Nycta,” he growled, “when Wendigo, my Wendigo, my last piece of the puzzle, is not there.” Vox’s rage was a rare thing. Alyss had only seen it once before. The night of the swarming bugs.
“And in his place,” he spat through gritted teeth, “is that…fucking Hero.”
“And suddenly,” Vox ground out, Broadcast shaking with his fury, “my puzzle is incomplete. Suddenly, my plan is worthless. Suddenly, I am in the dark. We, work, in the dark, but we are never in the dark, NEVER!” He screamed at her all of a sudden, his shade wailing from behind. Alyss was frozen in place, paralyzed by fear and the alien notion that she might actually perish in this awful place.
“And there is something, something…” Vox seethed, pacing, almost racing, back and forth, “not right about that man.” He chewed on his thumb absently. Was he actually anxious?
Did Vox fear Hero?
From deep within Alyss, a microscopic spark of hope twinkled in the shadows.
“I can’t put my finger on it, not quite. Not sure, not sure,” he murmured. “Can he see me? Can he hear me? He knows too much, stymies me at every turn. Mark my words, miss Nycta, he knows…something, some things he shouldn’t…” The man was desperately muttering to himself, rage shifting into downright paranoia. Alyss didn’t understand much of the meaning behind his words. She wanted to interject, wanted to ask what he was saying, exactly, but she didn’t dare to interrupt him.
“My calibrations are all wrong. All wrong,” he chafed, still half-whispering. “I pushed you all too far in the beginning, much too far. You fell apart too early, and too inconveniently. I didn’t mean to. I am the Master, always the Master, but my strings were all…tangled.” Vox locked eyes with Alyss, his face contorted with a rage that made her quiver.
“Something was interfering with me,” he hissed. “But what? Hero? The Dungeon? Even now, I do not know. Exotic floors are scarcely cataloged. For a while, I even thought I might have him, might have him all to myself, a delectable mystery for me to unravel, but then…those FUCKING BUGS!” he screamed, again, and Broadcast screamed alongside him.
Alyss’s tender brain could take no more punishment. She shrank back, uselessly holding up a palm in front of her, as if mundane flesh could stem the otherworldly voice of the shade. Her ears and eyes leaked blood, and she retched upon cold, concrete ground.
Though he in no way acknowledged her suffering, Vox took a deep breath, and his rage seemed to quell somewhat.
“I lost my temper, then,” he admitted, grudgingly. “That night. I admit it. I lost my temper, and decided that Hero simply wasn’t worth the trouble. And then, then, right as I am about to have him…he escapes again!” Vox clenched a fist tightly, so tightly Alyss could hear the knuckles crack and pop.
“But, no matter.” The well-dressed Master drew himself up tall, Broadcast towering menacingly beside him. “All is not lost,” he muttered. “I have what I came for, and none know my true purpose here.” He glanced at her one last time.
“We leave together, milady, you and I, and kill all in our way, for the future waits for no one.”
Vox turned to examine the corridor leading away from them, leading them deeper into the Dungeon. It was devoid of any manner of marking, except three words, denoted in the same all-green lighting that colored the rest of the room.
THE SHAMBLING MAZE.