Page 118 of In the Ravenous Dark
Like hundreds, thousands of the nameless, starving dead. So ravenous and held here unnaturally for so long that they caused the blight, their hunger so toxic and mindless that it can make bloodfiends out of bloodmages and drain the entire living world dry.
I stand and head for the doors with Ivrilos.
“Wait!” Athanatos’s blue eyes are now wild with fear as he flails, almost losing his balance. “You can’t just turn your backs on me.” His voice grows more desperate. “You can’t leave me like this! It’s a disgrace.”
“Enjoy your mausoleum,” Ivrilos says. “You built it, and in it you’ll lie.” He looks around, his dark eyes suddenly soft. Sad. “Farewell, Mother. Aeona.” His sister, I remember through our bond, though I never knew her name before. “Embrace this man like he embraced you, and then rest in peace.” He touches his fingers to his lips.
I turn to the city, blinking away sudden tears as Athanatos’s screams rise behind us.
Everything is melting around us. The entire city.
“We might want to run,” Ivrilos says, and a whole building comes down, suddenly liquid and thrashing and containing what look like hundreds of submerged, amorphous limbs, reaching blindly toward anything and everything. The walls of Athanatos’s keep begin to sag behind us.
Athanatos’s screams abruptly cut off.
We run. The liquid darkness parts around us, though it strains against my shield like nothing I’ve felt before, not even Athanatos’s attacks. Such is the force, the sheermassbehind this unfathomable amount of essence, now unleashed. We pass other shades, flailing in the black muck, crying out, and we ignore them. They helped build this. Now they’re reaping what they sowed.
And what they sowed is reapingthem.
It’s when the street beneath us begins to soften, slurping at ourfeet like mud, slowing our progress despite my shield, that I really begin to worry.
“Almost… there,” Ivrilos pants, his hand at my lower back, propelling me forward.
The city gates practically burp us out in a shower of slippery darkness, though thankfully it only sluices off my shield. We scramble our way up the side of the first wave of dunes, not stopping until we’ve reached a safe height. And then we turn to watch the city walls and towers collapse into churning, clawing, slithering waves.
Eventually, everything falls quiet. And Ivrilos and I are looking out over a black lake where a city once stood.
Even now the lake isn’t entirely still. It ripples like there are gargantuan creatures swimming beneath the surface. Horrors. But they’re just the shapeless remains ofpeople, finally finding their rest. As we watch, the lake begins evaporating, just like the dunes are dissolving. The strange drips that once fell upward into the sky now lift off from the lake like reverse rain.
My knees give out, and I sit none too gracefully in the sand along the dune’s side. Ivrilos drops down next to me. We stay that way for a long time, watching the weight of all those souls finally relax and drift, eventually rising to find some measure of peace.
Hours, or maybe days later, Ivrilos looks at me sitting next to him, and he smiles.
He’s strangely bright, even all dressed in black. Maybe it’s that the landscape is somehow darker. Maybe it’s that he almost looks…happy.
I take his hand. “You look young, Ivril.”
Ivril. His childhood nickname. A look so wistful crosses his face that I touch his cheek.
“Sorry,” he says. “You… all of this… I don’t know quite what I feel. I don’t know if I want to sprint or lie down or…”
“You did it,” I say. “Finally.”
He sighs. “And yet I’m more aware than ever of everything I’ve lost.”
It’s hard not to be, sitting at the side of a lake at what looks like the end of the world. It’s certainly the end of life. Andlives. Maybe ours, and so many others.
My father. My mother. Lydea. Japha. I’ve also lost so much. My grief feels as deep and dark as that lake, with things swimming in it that I don’t want to think about.
So I won’t think about it, because this might be one of the last moments I have in any realm, the living or the dead.
“You haven’t losteverything.” I grin and nudge his shoulder. I even give him a suggestive wink. If anything, it might distract us both.
But he looks at me in a strange way. One that isn’t awkward or startled, but open and… new. “No, I haven’t.”
I can’t take the intensity of his look.Isuddenly feel awkward. But as I try to turn, he catches my cheek and gently guides my face back toward his. His eyes pore over me, and his expression is one of wonder.
“You are so beautiful,” he breathes. “Body, mind, and spirit. And sometimes I can’t believe my blessed fortune that I’ve met you after so long. That I’ve found one bright, glorious thing toward the end of this long bleak existence that makes it worth continuing.”
