The spears struck with brutal force, piercing him cleanly, their tips embedding into the stone floor before him. In an instant, he was gone, his execution too swift to comprehend. His once-mighty form crumpled, his head bowed low, obscuring his features from my view. Vidar Woelfson, the hunter, now lay before me, pinned by the twin spears, frozen in his time of death. The chamber was enveloped in silence, his familiar heartbeat now a distant echo. The essence of him slipped away, as though he had never been, leaving an emptiness I couldn't shake.
And I was destroyed. Utterly and completely destroyed like my soul had gone with him into the afterlife. My heart still beat, but it was not alive. It did not sing. And inside, there was a chasm that Vidar once occupied.
It was hollow.
The sons faded into the obsidian void that had swallowed the walls, their rhythmic breaths like laughter whispering across the air in their wake.
Fury. Hate. It was not enough to describe what I was feeling. Madness was not when Akareth haunted my dreams and twisted my thoughts. Madness was what I felt when I saw Vidar murdered before my eyes, bound and helpless and stripped of all that made him a terror. He’d been killed by cowards. Madness was the numbness threatening to eat away at my spirit when I realized there was nothing left for me to fight for.
I had come to Theloch to die.
My breath came and went in sobs that made my head spin. The hands released me, but no longer did I have anything to drive me to my feet. I pushed up on my elbows, hooking my fingers in the rough grooves in the stone and dragging myself toward Vidar, my body a burdensome sack of flesh now that he was gone.
I paused, my hand extended toward him, when something slithered across my bare leg. Slowly, I turned my head to see a black, thick tentacle pulsing around my ankle before it receded into the shadows. Another to my left coiled back from the light andanother on my right slid toward the wall, veiled by darkness. The chamber went silent save for my tormented cries, and even those no longer echoed against the confines. Someone—something—was now occupying the space that wasn’t there before.
Glowing eyes looked on from the watery mote like an audience awaiting a show, and then slowly turned to peer into the seemingly empty darkness in front of me, watching something I could not yet see. My skin tightened around me like salted hide that had been left in the heat. I wanted to tear out of it.
I watched the darkness bend and ripple and move independently of the walls like a creature all its own, pulling in toward a center like smoke through a vent. Fear whispered to me only to find that I had no room left for it to grow roots. The shadows coiled and bent and settled until they were not shadows at all, but a thin, silky cloak of fabric, tattered on the ends and dragging in the shallow puddles of water that littered the floor. I stared as those black tentacles slithered back from all around me, drawing into the base of the cloak like snakes into their burrows. As soon as they were gone, the cloak undulated, separating from the gloom, an entity all its own, born from the abyss. A pale foot, long and bony and tipped with untrimmed nails, slipped out from the fabric as the figure stepped forward into the column of moonlight.
Before me stood the uncanny visage of a man. Or something trying to resemble a man. The cloak drooped on him like water curved over stones. Long, thin arms sloped from sharp shoulders. Hands, equally stretched and reedy and pale as mist, teased the ends of the wide sleeves, his fingers moving like each one was a creature that had a mind of its own.
I dared to lift my eyes a little more and found myself staring into… nothing. There was a face with a mouth, a nose, and sharp features, but like his hands, the entity did not seem to know how to use it. The expression was blank as if it had been molded from clay and left to exist only one way. He peered into me with eyes that were not just black. They were pure, suffocating absence. Absence oflife. Of emotion. Of anything that would tell me he had a soul or a heartbeat for that matter. And I knew, in my gut and in what was left of the soul Vidar had left behind, that I was looking at the father himself. I was looking at Akareth.
Madness is the monster that devours thought
Wrath is what’s left in the rubble
~ Ingrid Salyer
I had one thing left to feel. Rage. A rage so vast, it hollowed me out, marrow first, until even my bones trembled beneath its weight.
My body was breaking, splintering under the pressure of a fury too immense for flesh to hold.
I stared at the monster before me with hatred sharp enough to flay the air between us. He had taken everything. What I loved. What I was. He’d left me a husk scraped clean by his cruelty.
I feared no death, no god, no shadow. There was nothing left to take.
And when his sons slipped from the darkness, their eyes glinting like the edges of knives, I did not flinch.
Let them come.
Let them see what they have made of me, a vessel of ruin, burning with the last light of my own undoing.
I tottered to my feet, staring unyieldingly into the figure’s bottomless gaze.
“Akareth,” I snarled.
He closed his eyes, the first sign of expression washing across his pallid features.
“It pleases me to hear my name on your lips,” he murmured.
His voice was soft. Too soft. And yet it struck me like a blade dragged across glass.
The sound lingered, a shrill, merciless ringing, burrowing deep behind my eyes, as if the air itself recoiled from the shape of his words.
I winced at the discomfort, my hand flexing, missing the weight of my cutlass.
“Why?” I hissed.
