Page 35 of Unholy Bond
Now, the Void said, and this time the word was real, a sound in the room, not just in my head.
I withdrew my hand, and the black spiral on my arm remained, pulsing with the echo of my heartbeat. The pain was gone, replaced by a cool clarity, a sense of distance that let me see the whole chamber at once. Every vein, every bone, every drip of ooze mapped out before me, a perfect system.
I laughed, short and ugly. “You just wanted to show off,” I said, to the room, to the Void, to myself.
Yes, it agreed, purring with satisfaction.
I rolled my shoulders, shook my hand until the black faded to its usual state, then picked up the torch and pressed on.
The next stretch of tunnel was even tighter. My hair caught on the ceiling, my hips scraped the sides. In some places, the wall had collapsed, and I crawled on my hands and knees through mud slicked with more of the black ooze. The stuff clung to my skin, but I no longer cared.
At the third turn, I found what I hadn’t known I was looking for.
The tunnel ended in a circular chamber, twice the diameter of the last, the floor sunk in a shallow bowl. At the center: a perfect disc of obsidian, cracked through with black veins, each crack leading back to the walls. The ceiling rose high, lost in darkness, and above me, the veins webbed together until I couldn’t tell where they started or ended.
I stepped to the center, my boots sliding on the glassy floor. The obsidian reflected me, but not perfectly. The face that looked back was older, and the black veins in its arms were thicker, more pronounced. Its eyes glimmered with something I recognized and feared.
The Void inside me stiffened. For a moment, I thought it might retreat, but then it surged, filling my head with a new kind of light. Not black, but blue, so bright it hurt.
I reeled, staggered, then dropped to my knees on the obsidian disc. My palms slapped the surface, and the reflection warped, splitting into a thousand shards that each showed a different version of me. One wore a crown, surrounded by kneeling figures, the Void pouring from her hands in a show of brutal majesty. Another sat alone in the dark, body crumbling to ash as the black consumed her from within. Others wailed, or laughed, or simply stared with eyes gone empty.
The light intensified, and the images flickered, merging and splitting, faster and faster until I couldn’t tell which was real.
“Enough,” I said, jaw tight. I pressed my hands into the cracks, letting the black ooze bite my skin. “Show me what you want.”
The Void obliged. In a rush, it poured visions into me.
The palace, shattered. Lucifer on his knees, horns broken, the throne room a storm of Void and light.
Then my body, suspended in a cocoon of black, tendrils writhing from my mouth, my cunt, my eyes, while the world outside wept and burned.
Then the three men, Aziz, Levi, Ian, bowing before me, naked and marked, mouths pressed to my skin as they licked theblack from every inch of my body. Their worship was agony and pleasure; their tongues were knives and honey.
A child, not born of flesh but of pure Void, growing in my belly, its heartbeat a siren song that called the entire world to heel.
Oblivion. The total, perfect silence of a world eaten by black. No pain, no yearning, just peace.
The visions snapped off, leaving me breathless, nipples hard, cunt soaked and aching. The Void was hungry, but not for sex, not in the way of demons or men. It wanted ownership. It wanted me to be not a vessel, but a weapon.
I pushed back, grinding my teeth, nails digging into my thighs. “You need me,” I said. “You can’t make anything alone. You never could.”
The blue light faded, replaced by the slow, familiar throb of black. The tension in my chest loosened. The Void didn’t answer, but it listened. We had reached an understanding.
I stood, wiped sweat from my brow, and traced the cracks on the floor with my toe. The obsidian was warm where the veins converged, and as I touched the center, I thought of the visions again. Not with terror, but with a curious excitement. Both futures were possible. The only difference was who held the leash.
I left the chamber, and as I walked the catacombs back toward the world above, I practiced the new thing the Void had given me.
In the next junction, where the black veins crossed in a tangle, I placed my hand flat on the wall and willed the tendrils to move. They responded, shifting under the surface, weaving together into a new pattern. A spiral inside a triangle, the mark of bothmy old life and my new. I pulled my hand away and watched as the pattern glowed, just for a moment, before fading.
I did it again at the next turn, and the next, leaving a trail of marks behind me. Each time, the power answered more readily, the pain less sharp, the pleasure more vivid. The deeper I went, the more the black in my veins felt not foreign, but mine.
By the time I reached the top of the stairs, the torch was dead, and I navigated by the faint, hungry shimmer of Void under my skin.
I stepped into the corridor, and the air there tasted sweeter. The world above was the same as ever—bickering, bleeding, pretending at order—but I was new, and the thing inside me purred with anticipation.
When I passed the old tapestry, I paused, traced the outline of the war scene, and smiled at the zero stitched at the edge.
Everything returned to zero, eventually.
