But he had them, too.
In the murky depths of the Lord of Hunger’s mind, Jacen glimpsed it at last: a flicker of extradimensional energy, the barest glimmer of a living consciousness not so different from Jacen’s own. After millennia under the demon’s crushing weight, enslaved to something not remotely human, it was no longer aware of much.
Urien had said these hosts were young when the archdemons took them. Children, raised to see this as an honor. Did they even know what they had lost?
No time to consider that, nor the waking nightmare of such an existence. Jacen could only add it to the list of crimes for which Tharanoth was about to pay.
He navigated the buried consciousness like a map. He couldn’t target vital functions without Tharanoth noticing—the god would doubtless fight back if his host stopped breathing. Sight and hearing were also too risky. But while Tharanoth sat there, talking to Jacen, he had no need of his arms and legs.
Just as Jacen had done to the scavenger in Avram Semira’s audience chamber, he paralyzed the Lord of Hunger’s limbs. His hold on Ileth was tenuous. He could only affect her through her connection to Tharanoth. But he held fast and waited.
“You’ve been an interesting diversion,” said Tharanoth, “but we’re finished here.”
Jacen grasped for something else to say, anything that would keep these creatures from destroying him for a few moments longer. “Wait.”
Tharanoth chuckled. “It’s a bit late for that.” Then they heard it.
A deep groan echoed from outside Tharanoth’s consciousness, somewhere in the structure around him. Jacen held his breath. There was no telling how long they had been there. With extradimensional communion, it could have been seconds or hours outside. Was this the sound of those cannons, preparing to fire? Or had Neri finally succeeded?
Gravity shifted—and Jacen had his answer.
Tharanoth opened his eyes, revealing brilliant green irises in seas of inky black. He tried to stand—and realized he could not.
Jacen watched Tharanoth’s face, so strangely like his own, as the chamber tilted. Even the motes of dust, glittering and drifting through the starlight, changed direction. Time slowed and shuddered in its tracks.
At long last, Jacen beheld fear in the eyes of a god.
With sudden, desperate strength, Ileth broke free. Her consciousness dropped away, scuttling into the shadows.
But Tharanoth was trapped. As he realized his fatal mistake, his lip curled. “Perhaps you’re more like me than I realized.”
The Lord of Hunger fought him, but Jacen held on with everything he had. Tharanoth’s body was wrenched sideways, then down, by the inexorable force beyond the station. He was falling, and Jacen with him.
The universe turned inside out, and suddenly everything was red.
Constellations painted sanguine, arrayed into a bright, dense mosaic on the wheeling horizon. But Jacen kept a stranglehold on Tharanoth’s motor functions until he knew, as though Naxal had whispered it to him, that they’d reached a point of no return.An impossible gravity, from which light itself could not escape. Instead of crashing into solid ground they fell faster,faster,caught in eternity’s grasp—into the maw of the demon star.
Tharanoth’s limbs shredded to ribbons. His skull splintered. Jacen caught a glimpse of a many-legged creature, flailing from where it crouched in the mutated husk of a brain it inhabited. At last, he reached deep, grasping the tether that connected Tharanoth to Turil to Seth, andpulled.
He let go.
Jacen dragged Turil’s consciousness with him, catapulting them both back to physical reality through an unfolding cosmic storm.
He had never felt so small. Even Tharanoth was so small, a speck in the face of the omnipotent void. The farther Jacen fell, the faster the destruction around him raged. He lost sight of Tharanoth’s shattering, dying mind in a sea of heat and shadow.
46
ARMAGEDDON
JACEN
It was dark between the spires of Zal Fel, darker than the eclipse should have made it. Seth lay before Jacen on the obsidian platform, his breathing so shallow, it was almost imperceptible.
Turil cowered inside Seth’s mind like a termite in a hive. But she was exposed, stunned, and now she had no support. She had also made an error.
She clung to Tharanoth until the very moment of his death, and she felteverything—everything Jacen had learned to block out because it would drive any mortal to madness. He did not know what manner of eternity awaited these false gods, but they had never been taught to fear it. Turil had been too arrogant to consider the prospect of her own annihilation until it was upon her, and in the end, the Lady of Pain was indeed only mortal.
Jacen took advantage. He did not let her dissolve back into hiding. He dredged her presence up,upthrough the depths of Seth’s consciousness.
