“Hmm,” Marduk, Sage of the Deep, slayer of my father and mother, hummed.
Bemused, considering, but not at all happy about some aspect of our address. We’d said it perfectly in unison—you’d be surprised how easy it is to be one with those around you when the edge of looming death shaves the hairs at the back of your neck, but whatever camaraderie had been found dissipated beneath the ripples caused by Marduk’s single considered hum. It made us like the entities within the Menagerie, falling upon one another when weakness could be scented, as we sought to find whatever imperfection earned Marduk’s reaction.
I cast my eyes toward the executives—Marduk’s supposed chosen—to see, perhaps hoping, it would be them. Though doubt sprouted amongst my thoughts when I initiated my own investigation. They were of different heights, all men, and decked in chitinous plate accented by coral filigree. If there was a lack in them it was of grime, dishevelment, or any imperfection that could be physically perceived. A stark opposition to us—of which they no doubt noted though their faces were obscured by their helms—who were nothing but dishevelment and grime covered. Evidence to our hasty escape of the Menagerie, my own exchanged shirt for the killing of that boy whose name had faded fast, and of course our hair probably all askew from our flight and troubled landing. It’d be us. It had to be us. Yet, Marduk didn’t look at us…not once.
“Why are you here?” he asked his executives.
The five glanced to each other and quickly decided who’d be the sacrifice to answer their leader. Shuffling back once the unspoken negotiations had finished—of course to the tragedy of the one who’d fallen short, not shuffling back fast enough. A small man with a rotund silhouette.
He stammered, “My Sage, it’s the rules—your rules—that we attend to you when exit the Cathedral. We’ve come to fulfill our duty.”
Marduk’s head tilted one way. Back the other. He held a finger to the snarling lips of his mask.
“Heh,” he chuckled. “So then, what of your positions for tonight’s festivities? Were those not the duties I’d assigned you? Those that had been delineated days in advance? Who attends to them now when we’re at the edge of accomplishment yet still flirting with loss?”
The man was quiet as he considered the flurry of questions which slipped between the plates of his person. His breath grew ragged as his thoughts no doubt spun. He never considered that the answer didn’t matter. Marduk just wanted to stab something. Yet loyalty, however Marduk had instilled or come upon in it, was what girded this man’s spirit. He unsheathed his face—a bid toward sincerity or sympathy—daring to look up into the face of his ogrish leader.
“Our seconds, my Sage,” he answered. “We’d never leave our posts unmanned nor could we fail to show ourselves before you. What if you had new orders for us? What if you needed us?”
Marduk whispered, “Needed you?”
This cancrine sacrifice had misstepped. You could feel it in the air of the throne. See it in the shadows that snapped to attention, ignoring their usual interplay with shifting light. I heard it in Marduk’s voice, harsh as a cold snap, and fell heavy as the tumbling face of a shattered glacier.
“You think I needed you,” he all but sang. “For what?”
My knees creaked and groaned—on the verge of shattering beneath the barometric hammer that was Marduk’s aura. Far from a field-spell it was his existence; a truth made manifest into something realer than any of us and our lives might ever amount to. Though the man nominated as the voice of his fellows received the worse of it; faceplanting into the fine carpet, nose shattered, brow fractured, as he prostrated under duress before Marduk. I realize now, what I’d felt—what we all felt—was the afterwind of what laid that man low.
The man groaned, “The guest, my Sage. We felt their presence—”
“Of course you did,” Marduk said, “they were a Sovereign within our midst. Knowing this you came running to help me? Have you, dear ummanu of mine, discovered some hidden secrets within the links of Earl?”
“No, my sage,” the man cried—his tears, frothed with blood, trickled to my foot. Staining my shoe. “All I know is that which you’ve given me.”
“Of course, so then how could you possibly imagine I’d need you? How could any of you!”
Marduk ripped away his mask. With it went his armor—maybe it was conjuration of the mask, some secondary or tertiary function—replaced by the discovery of refined dress. High-waisted trousers, straight razored and voluminous to hide his hips. A sheer button-down left unbuttoned which left a clear view, not as if the button-down hid much, of scars underlining his pectorals. Encrusted by shards of glacial ice poking out from beneath. While his face was in opposition to the roaring masculinity of the mask—a jaw gently traced by a calligraphic hand, lips flush and pouting even when traced into a scowl, and eyes sleepy yet attentive with irises of a deep purple found only when the sun graces the water at sunset. Though all paled beside the blatant distance from humanity which marked Marduk, his hair. Wavy water tresses in lieu of keratin, a literal waterfall which hid an eye from view, highlighted by frontlines of seafoam.
He was an inhuman beauty. You couldn’t look away if you wanted to—he was the master of tides and all us mortals, for a soldier despite their Sorcery was just that, were forced to obey. However, Revelation Questing proved a fan of malicious compliance and teasing fun. Her fingers, which were my own, chased into my hair and made a slight adjustment of my view.
She said, “Nadia, quests are about symbols darling, and to miss one may as well be to miss them all.”
The symbol in question, an earring from which dangled a cloudy-red diamond…Dad. My father with his collection of records. My father whose nose I’d accidentally broken with a kick. My father who sang songs as he wove shrines to cool air. My father who may have been City Killer, but was also the one who listened to me cry as I told him my body felt like an enemy. Who carried me through the night and spoke with Melissa’s family so I could become Nadia. A whole life of love, of interests, and wisdom reduced to an earring.
It’s here that I think I should make a correction. I was new—this Nadia—was new. Born in bloodshed, hungry for love, and who felt cool on consideration of vengeance. This was how I characterized myself to you. I’d Divi*** what I was to part from the sorrow I’d inherited, the inhibitions that slowed my arms, and slumped my shoulders. Which kept me from joy and barred me from love. This, I told you, was my choice unstable as it might have been. Though it was on sight of that earring which taught me that while I was Divi*** that other half wasn’t gone to some unknown ether. It lurked beside me. Behind me. As a shadow. The face in every mirror I’d avoided looking in. The vision I couldn’t escape in the Palace of Ghosts. And it stretched over my shoulder, lips to ear, and for the first time, I heard it speak.
“We’re mad,” it said, and lo, I was. A being of fury aroused by an earring and two words. The coolness I thought I possessed was the calm of abstract consideration. No different than lighting an imaginary bonfire, and a world’s difference when the bonfire stood before you. Crackling, consumptive, bold that it’d never be doused…and wearing my fucking father as an earring.
That severed self—my sister-self if I’m to accept the memories I’d recovered, and apply them to then—spoke alongside Revelation Question. They said, “Focus.”
“...so in light of that correction,” Marduk shouted to his audience of shivering executives, “let me tell you what I know you wanted. You wanted this Sovereign to crush me. Maybe you imagined it was a Godtender coming to ‘save you’ despite it being me, your sage, who saved you from being forced into pitiful mediocrity or risked walking an unstable path toward power.”
“Never, my sage,” the man wailed.
“You wanted to see me broken and laid low.”
“I’d never wish it, my sage.”
He crooned, “You wanted to be the sage, didn’t you? To wield this cult of mine as a crude bludgeon. Gather some harem of sycophants and sluts. Feel like a king despite knowing you’d never touch the crown of Sovereignty.”
“I want for nothing but you rise, my sage.”
“In short, you Hoped,” Marduk hissed, the word all but sizzling on his tongue. A bright note forced out between umbral lips.
The man had no more ways to plead his innocence. As the pressure accumulated, he’d lost teeth. Shot forth pellet-like until they pinged with a fairy toll against the plinths which marked every person who’d thought many of these thoughts about Marduk. It was obvious he’d make another.
“Thrice you deny me, though now you fall silent,” Marduk said. “Relief spiraling out in your heart. So let me tell you the truth, my lovely ummanu, I know it’s not you.”
He flipped his hair over his shoulder, and it lashed out, a tsunami meant for one person. Wrapped around his largest executive, the one who was the least tense of them all, but now fear-stricken and stiff. His last act was to twitch his finger—likely intended to remove his helmet and beseech the mercy absent in his master’s heart. In a blink he was crushed, and in his stead, bobbing in Marduk’s ocean-hair, a small-clear diamond.
Marduk withdrew his hair. The diamond fell, rolled past the man who’d accepted his fate, and came to rest at the toe of Marduk’s black suede heeled boot. He tilted his foot, the diamond rolled, and then he crushed that too—Marduk was realer than any diamond. Then he pointed toward the ceiling with two fingers, rise, and we did. The man Marduk had interrogated was the slowest, but Marduk gripped his face once he rose. Thumbed away sweat from his brow, thorny and sharp, and kissed his temple.
“Attend to your original duties, and I shall join you after I’ve taken Nemesis’s head,” he said.
The man stammered out his thanks—loyalty reaffirmed despite being tested, and off he went with the others to see to whatever needed seeing to. Myself, Sinaya, Secretary, and Lupe waited for our own dismissal. Fury may have warmed my spiritual musculature, but I’d not abandoned reason yet. No matter what Revelation Questing and my sister-self dripped into my ears.
“Are these friends of yours, Sinaya?” Marduk inquired, his head not even turning to meet us.
Sinaya fumbled for an answer. I intercepted, “Well, some of us in fact—”
The words I’d planned spilled from my lips as water. It flowed back into my lungs and rained with each cough onto the floor. Marduk turned to us, looking at none of us in particular save Sinaya, but addressed me.
“Quiet,” he said. “For your own sake, it’s best to speak when spoken to. So, Sinaya, speak.”
Sinaya answered, “In the case of her, more than a friend. She’s—”
“A distraction,” Marduk said. “There’s no power in Love for your path. Post tonight you’ll discard her.”
“But she…” Sinaya trailed off as Marduk’s brow rose.
“She can keep her life,” Marduk groaned. “Just don’t see her again. And the others?”
“Sympathizers,” Sinaya said. “One’s a—”
“Secretary. The other’s your sister,” Marduk said, waving a hand through Sinaya’s words. With swaying steps, heels clacking, he loomed over Secretary. “The former is obvious. All of them have this gaping hole where a person should be. Really. How Nemesis so loves her dolls, pretty yet agency-less.”
Two more clacking steps, and he was in front of Lupe. “And you, so like your grandmother. I didn’t expect to see you anytime soon. Sinaya’s been such a good grandkid, doing everything I ask of him. How do you feel about that?”
Lupe hissed, “Happy he met your expectations.”
Marduk chuckled, “Oh, you are but you aren’t. I wouldn’t expect you to. You stink of Morning, but you are also mourning. I take it he let slip about the families. Only reason why you’d be lacking any conviction toward gripping your life.”
Sinaya asked, “Lupe, what’s he saying?”
“I’m implying, technically,” Marduk gloated. “Your sister here reached Baron, but she didn’t share with you her relationship to it. That her faith and confidence was Dying. Morning Dying, it sounds hilarious when you say it.”
Lupe’s knuckles popped. Her fists clenched tight around the desire to swing on Marduk, and crumple that arrogant aquiline nose of his. Marduk turned from them both and cast his eyes to the ceiling—staring into his own thoughts.
“What shameful strays my heir brings in,” he bemoaned.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Water, the last of it, dribbled down my chin as I snarled, “They’re not strays and it’s not your place to judge them!”
Marduk’s head snapped to mine. I froze. The taste of brine in my throat a fresh memory, and one I instantly feared would be overwritten by some worse punishment. Though there could be no punishment worse than Marduk’s fascination. In one moment he was contemplative, and the next was before me. His face all that I could see—I could count each bioluminescent eyelash that fluttered around his smiling eyes. He spoke again and I realized my mistake.
“Are you the one that was bargained for?” he asked, in perfect hybridae speech.
I said nothing, my thoughts spinning fast—he’d said a Sovereign was here. Were they who bargained for me? With what?
“Do you know how long I’ve searched?” Marduk asked. “Speak, become mine, and I’ll give you everything. The cult, Sinaya, and if you so want it, the valley. Just speak.”
It was a beautiful deal for anyone—Marduk being on the other side of it notwithstanding—however I was not anyone. His offer didn’t stir my heart or draw it into conflict. A knife once forged had a single purpose, and mine was engraved into the damascus patterns of my spirit flesh on the night he slew my father. If Marduk searched for someone like me, he could search in the Afterlife when I sent him off. So I stayed silent and denied him.
The shimmer of greed died in his eyes—the first death I’d deliver unto him. His pupils expanded, consuming the shimmering purple irises which encircled them, and devoured his sclera. What remained was Sorcerous Sight which looked every bit appropriate for Abyss.
He asked, this time in human speech, “You’re wrong—about it not being my place to judge them—and do you know why?”
“No,” I answered back with human speech, which earned me a furrowed brow.
“Then let me—much as I hate the word—enlighten you,” he said. “As you ascend the Chain you’ll come to realize things about yourself, your Court, and reality as a whole. One of them arrives at Earl, a joyful little link before you step into the shallows of true power. When I reached it I discovered a truth that made dealing with humans so much easier; Abyss Lurks in Every Heart.”
The words shimmered, a vibrato played on Marduk’s spirit but resonating with every strand of existence within the Underside—within myself. It let me, briefly, lay eyes on the black gash in my heart where my sister-self lurked. Sharp fingers waggling in lustful reverie as memories—scent and sight—played in her mind and my own; I would be due blood and gore, but how soon?
A sharp ring muted the resonant sound. The world became duller in absentia of this truth Marduk bestowed—though I consider it a poison pill of knowledge that should’ve never been listened to—yet there Marduk stood unaffected, or always affected, by what he’d stated. Underneath his clap was a gentle chirping. An alarm. With wan smile, Secretary claimed it.
“I wanted to know when the party would officially start,” Secretary answered, silencing their sorc-deck.
Marduk grinned, “When the doors would close.”
“That too,” they said. “Wouldn’t be good to be locked out.”
“That it wouldn’t,” he said, “so allow an old man to accompany you. Wouldn’t do for you to get lost—there are some hallways I don’t even know about.”
Grim-faced, we accepted—as if we could deny—Marduk’s escort. Sinaya walked a few steps behind him. I walked just behind Sinaya, having let go of his arm to instead clutch the detonator that burned in my pocket. On Marduk’s other side, about as far back as me, was Lupe and Secretary. Down staircases that appeared only by perspective shifting in the patterning of the throne’s floorboard. Down hallways that yawned into service where before were only walls. Each step and motion toward the ballroom was abetted through Marduk’s mastery of the throne. Light yet impactful like a thumb gliding through a man’s eyeball.
No one talked, save my now all too chatty sister-self and Revelation Questing. The former—appearing in the polished floors and shimmering sea glass windows—goaded me to push the button, to leap onto Marduk’s back and swing us over a handrail, or find some other way to end him. While the latter danced beside me, gleeful, and currently sliding down said handrail at an impossible speed which kept perfect pace with our marching cadence.
“If you think about it, this is rather convenient,” Revelation Questing said. “So many besmirch the beleaguered path, or, in the case of Unmaking, fetishize it. They’re all wrong. What’s a Canonical Path but the highest quest, and what quest can be sung of without troubles? Better to forge you here than see you fall when it matters most.”
My sister-self snarled, her reflection tenfold in the wall’s tiling, “We’ll never fall. We’ll sup’ on our foe’s blood. Consume them so they never leave us.”
“Oh the torment of being unnamed and unacknowledged,” Revelation Questing bemoaned. “So right in ways you couldn’t know, but so wrong you lovely, little brute.”
“What?” I asked, stopping in the hall we’d arrived at.
Marduk said, “Are you so beggared to not know what an umbrella is?”
Revelation Questing snickered, “Pay attention to words, Nadia. To scenes. To deeds. The Omensight can show you much, but you have to see. Though it also helps to not talk to yourself.”
I forced my attention to Marduk and away from the Baron that disappeared behind a column. He held an umbrella—hooked handle toward me—in offering. A quick glance in both directions told me everyone else had accepted theirs. It also showed me they were concerned; that I’d buckle beneath some unspoken burden, spoil everything, and steer us toward doom. I withdrew my hand, the heat of the detonator a memory for my palm, and accepted the umbrella.
“It didn’t rain much where I’m from,” I said, “but I know an umbrella.”
“Good,” Marduk said. “Now, umbrellas out, it’s time to party.”
He spun on his heels, and the doors—quick to show obeisance—opened under their own power. We followed inside, opening our umbrellas as we crossed the threshold into the ballroom. An action much-needed as water rained down and up in an infinite cycle around the numerous summoners—more than some of which were assets and handlers undercover—that chittered like farm hens. Circling around tables laden with seafood and drink, or clustered about a few notables which crowed like cocks—as existed at every party.
The four of us split from Marduk, taking to the ballroom floor. While Marduk, once again in a gaudy display of power, directed raindrops to flow beneath his feet to create a staircase for him alone to ascend into the air. When he stopped the water flowed into a platform whereupon he gracefully sat, legs swinging in the air like pendulums over the pit he’d created for us. However impressive his position or that of the pit, my attention stayed on the raindrops. They added to the ambiance, a song of endless crashing things and shattered tension—maybe to remind of cozy indoor memories. No, that wasn’t right, and I considered, examined, and excavated every memory down to my bones. Ah, there it was.
“Nadia!” Secretary hissed.
I blinked emerging into the present. “Hmm?” I hummed.
“We need to get out of here, little brute,” Secretary said. “You can’t keep disappearing like this.”
Lupe said, “At this point, it might be safer to wait things out.”
“You can wait,” Secretary said, “but I won’t.”
“None of us are waiting,” Sinaya said before addressing me. “Orchard, stay with us. We need you.”
I turned back, smiling, “Sorry, I realized something.”
“A way out?” Secretary asked.
“No,” I said, my thoughts hardly on anything that pragmatic.
Sinaya asked, “Then what, Orchard?”
“This was how—” I said.
The raindrops, dancers eager to follow their choreography, halted under Marduk’s power—it didn’t take the Omensight to know that. It was a repeat performance for me after all. All discussion settled into bobbing anticipation, their host was about to speak.
Marduk, voice magnified, said, “Well met, all who’ve decided that getting your best clothes a little wet was worth being here tonight.”
A gentle chuckle rippled through the crowd. So unaware.
“It’s important I think that I acknowledge the land we’re in,” he began. “This throne goes by many names, the most famous of which lived in the fictions of the Old World and political treatises of the Very Old World. Some of you might know it, many of the servers and security here…”
He gestured to the doors where Lurkers stood at attention. Stretching their spines for a few more inches if it meant looking impressive to their sage.
“...But for those who don’t,” he continued, “I am proud to say its name is Atlantis. Though, why bring up an old name you might ask, aren’t we in the New World? Shouldn’t we put aside such things? Queries that I’d answer with a simple statement, did we not all those decades back, slay the Old World because its masters suffocated our ability to dream; of other ways to live, of other people whose rule we might abide, of the simple desire to not feel a boot on our neck? City Killer thought so. I think so. Nemesis, regional Lodgemaster stationed here in Brightgate, would have you think otherwise.”
The detonator seared my flesh from within my pocket. Heated from the invocation of my father’s name and deeds being harnessed by a monster. Mine was a unique fury that stood in isolate to the jeers and boos that rose from the crowd at the utterance of Nemesis’s name. Marduk’s performance this time was interactive.
“From such sounds, I’m pleased to call you allies for you think as I do…that Nemesis’s reign should end,” Marduk declared to roaring applause. “No more blood running the streets in her wild hunts. No more assassinations of those who wish freedom to associate with whom they please. No more should that small cruel woman rule us who only hold the simple desire—as all men of the New World might—to rise above our born station of mortality and if fated, touch the crown of Sovereignty. Yet, she seeks to draw us low and keep us beneath her boot. Even now, when I would rather regale you of how I’d constructed a Menagerie to generate entities en masse across the phylum of Abyss…she attempts to undo us.”
The jeers at Nemesis’s name fall silent. I could see the thoughts lashing together as a rope across the crowd, did he just say he could generate entities? Marduk laid his head into his hand, wearing a melancholic expression that any painter would yearn to detail. Then, almost dismissively, he shaped the seal of a hand-spell. Crashing down from the shadowed ceiling—likely the access point of his storage-spell—was a glacial conglomeration of every bomb that had been planted throughout the throne. I know because Secretary wheezed, the discovery of the Lodge’s foiled plan a needle which punctured their lungs.
“It is, to my sorrow, that before I regale you with the details as to the Menagerie’s purpose, I must strain our numbers of the unfaithful,” Marduk said, shaping a seal I hadn’t seen since I left home. It caused the tide of the world to recede toward him and with it went every drop of rain within the room. All of them coalescing into seventy-two titanic arms of water.
His voice boomed, “Those who know themselves to be true to me, do not fear for my waters shall pass you by as pleasant streams. While those who have decided to be my enemy, gnash your teeth or fall silent, but know that the flood shall see you drown all the same.”
That was the herald to action for perhaps a third of the audience he’d amassed. Summoners who saw no reason to hide what they’d done or held as their true allegiance were the first to strike back at Marduk. A grimoire’s worth of hand-spells formed across Courts found in the Public Record and many that I’d never seen. They spawned spiraling black holes the size of marbles. Materialized gavels of spectral fire. Loosed psychedelic winds. Released tri-headed monstrosities which stretched up from deep shadow.
Marduk smiled at them. Parried them, quenched them, swallowed them, and drowned them. Every spell a failed weapon before his power. He was a Marquis that stood—well, sat—above the rabble of Barons and Viscounts that made up the audience. Each of these, hecklers of a sort, received for their uprising a hand meant just for them. Not a whole one—who needed the entirety of their arm to crush a fly, only a finger that gently but firmly pressed them down into a diamond. An existence erased by the gesture of a Marquis who desired it.
Others in the crowd stood stock still—that was his instruction after all—but as I knew from Marduk’s lesson, he could see the Abyss in their hearts. A natural place to hide shreds of seditious thought. They were still yet stiff when the hands of Marduk erased them as well. Which confirmed for all those that yet claimed breath, had little option but to fight and die—there was no “or” in that realization for them.
“Fuck,” Secretary screamed.
Lupe yelled, “Nadia, where are you going?”
Sinaya’s fingers grazed my arm. “Orchard.”
I walked through the chaos of dying assets and traitorous scum. Untouched by Marduk’s gleeful oceanic fingers. His were seventy-two weapons of death. So I arrived to my one, gathered by some distant hand, and kicked the explosive conglomeration across the ballroom. Its icy surface was rough, making it skip and hop like the twenty-sided dice Dad used to carve as he taught games of pretend to children still in the years of middle school. The glacial mass stopped just below Marduk, catching his attention.
“Someone’s confident,” he said.
“I have every reason to be,” I answered, my sister-self sneering at Marduk in the moist reflection of the ballroom floor.
“Which would be?” Marduk asked, bemused.
“That I’m my parents' daughter,” I said. “Inheritor to the legacy of City Killer, who ushered in the Changeover, and to my mother, Sovereign of Upheaval.”
“Oh,” Marduk said, stunned enough that thirty-one of his arms stilled. “So that’s what makes you valuable then. You know, you have your father’s eyes now that I think of it—they give me shivers at night, even now. Still, there’s little that confidence can do for you—a soldier is nothing before a Marquis.”
I sneered at the nothing that he was. “Noted, but what’s a Marquis to a princess’s fury?”
My friends knew what I was doing when I’d kicked the bombs beneath Marduk. They were charging across the battlefield of the ballroom, debris and diamonds all around them, and I didn’t spare them a glance. The detonator was already in my hand. Its lid popped. My thumb pressed down on the button to the quiet acknowledgment of a mechanical switch that controlled the sorcerous output.
The world was white. A bright nothing that consumed things until it fell into its maw. It was a tool I’d read about in school, a weapon that the Godtenders had kept from going off—a Paradox bomb. Composed of diametrically opposed Courts. Their isolate natures warring to exert influence or find resolution. They’d been banned as a part of the Thunder Declaration, I guess Nemesis didn’t care much for those rules.
I cried as I faced my death, but smiled as I knew it’d come by hand. I’d told everyone just as much. This was what I wanted—vengeance for my parents, though it was only one, and a justification to see them again. Whatever feelings I’d walled up between me and sister-self leaked out, or welled up on my side. I’d lost Mom and Dad. I never got to know Mom and Dad. Maybe I’d get to amend that when the nothing claimed me.
“Quaint,” Marduk said in hybridae speech. “Gathered, these are powerful, but gathered they’re not really effective against me, princess.”
Lives, furniture, architecture, all fell to the rapidly approaching nothing that consumed the throne. Yet shadows held firm on the frontlines, an ontological bulwark against the Conceptual explosion ongoing. Everyone who’d tried to fight or opted to piss themselves in fear, watched in reverence as Marduk granted us a glimpse of what could be achieved when humanity was abandoned.
In a voice quiet as the bottomless ocean and loving as a prayer, Marduk proclaimed, “From Abyss Comes The Lightless World.”
Those shadows so still were bid to motion. Every strand of Abyss woven throughout the throne, the broader domain, and exuded by Marduk’s spirit fell under his command. Reality became his hands, and with them, he cradled us so no light could enter and besmirch our eyes. Darkness defined not by the absence of light, but the presence of Abyssal nothing flooded the room, pressed down onto the Conceptual explosion. It was a messy bickering thing which fell into order beneath Marduk’s firm grip. I watched the explosion—my weapon to strike him down—shrink to the size of a grain of sand. Then smaller. Then banished because that explosive nothingness was illuminating, and we were in The Lightless World.
Reality opened its eyes, they were tight and smiling, and so like Marduk’s. They were Marduk’s. I looked around for a place to hide, but there was nothing to see. No one to see. My hands were gone. My arms. My body. No reflections, no sister-self. I fell to my knees, but I couldn’t see them. Were they even there? Was I anything? Just thoughts floating in a void? If there was anyone here besides myself, I hadn’t heard them yet. All I heard was the voice of Marduk, the ruler of this place of no light, no hope, and no love.
“So cute to see you on your knees, princess. Now run, struggle, for yours is a bargained life,” Marduk said, his voice just behind my shoulder, “and when you leave my throne. I want you to know, I’ll kill you and every last thing you love. As for the rest of you, I believe you were dying.”
And all around me, in distances unknowable, the screams of dying summoners resounded.