“The Priest!” stammered Shen in a nervous hue of yellow, “The High Priest of the Elucian Way...is...is...one of the Dark Three!”
Kai sank against the cold wall as the light faded from his wide eyes. Breathing hard, with Shen looking on, Kai dug his fingernails deep into his left arm.
it’s wrong
“It’s all right, Salvator,” whispered Shen as his shade brushed over to soothe.
all wrong
“We couldn’t have known.”
my way is lost...again
“The Way must be corrupt from the core. We have to escape!”
the sighing grey-haired queen in flow
“But I’m here. I will help you, my friend.”
“Kai is not the One alone!”
“You are not just one boy alone anymore, Salvator. We are two.”
Shen smiled proudly orange, and touched Kai lightly on his left hand. Kai flinched, looked at Shen with terrified eyes, then took hold of himself and peered down at the seeping light. He thrust his hand over the shrinking pool and pulled it back into translucent, shimmering order —
Lúez stepped through the soup of organic debris below. As he went, turning over and examining festering limbs and decomposing faces with his sceptre, he peeled off the metal strips from the handle and gouged them into his bloody cheeks, pulling the torn flesh taut again with a gasp of relief.
With the stick, he twisted round the lifeless neck of a young man, whispering, “Fight as One with me until Light’s end is...”
Suddenly, he cast his sceptre away, shrieking furiously, “Where is He?!”
The staff cracked heavily off the head of a monk, who did not react but simply continued dragging away a ravaged corpse, as another tall figure cloaked in white drifted furtively through the shadows into the chamber. Lúez spun round in surprise, then leered as he hissed through guttural clicks and wails that pierced Kai’s eyes —
“Sister.”
It was spoken as an insult.
The remaining monks moved respectfully out of the way and bowed as she drifted in, tall and threatening, and came up close to Lúez, looking down at him from a half-concealed visage of lightless, shapeless dark.
“Brother,” she spat down at him with icy superiority.
“Ephaïl save us!” cried Shen suddenly, and crept around the pool of light as though it would drag him under at any moment, “Another! Two of them, here! We have to go, boy! You cannot even imagine the danger this represents!”
She turned and hissed with piercing wrath, and the monks shuffled obediently away. Immediately, she turned back to Lúez and they began to spit and snap, their heads jerking back and forth, almost tearing at each other’s flesh as their words thrust deeper into Kai’s skull.
“Working hard to please,” she screeched with condescending contempt.
“Menial tasks,” spat Lúez in reply, “Loathe this age! Before we reigned. But now...?”
“Respect! The end of age will come. Do as He decrees! I and Túra take such chores without complaint. Our Father will not bear your mortal flaws again, Lúez.”
“Father does not know such endless tedium, Sílb,” seethed Lúez, and dug the metal further into the ragged, pallid flesh of his cheeks.
Sílb simply peered at him in revulsion: “Weakness, sibling! You think I whine and bleat as you?”
“Pain, this constant pain, it...”
“I endure,” she snapped in disgust, and wove her sable matter down into an effortless copy of the SYS-officer before him, “I suffer my incessant, hateful form and so must you...despite your shameful flaws.”
He spat humiliated wrath; she lashed out an adamantine claw and sliced a fresh gash across his face. He struck back at once in sable rage and stabbed a point up at her eye. Her SYS-officer’s glare did not flinch. He stayed his onyx blade. She laughed.
“Coward! Live in fear, not pain!” she hissed.
Lúez drew away his claw.
“Did you take him?” she said.
Lúez stared blankly down at the residue, and breathed heavily, “No. He was not here,” then turned away and licked at the seeping wounds on his face.
His sister’s identical SYS-officer form grinned through glassy grey teeth, and as she pressed her claw into his back, she whispered coldly, “Lúez! Weak...arrogant...brother — Father’s pride will never...”
He spun back round at once, and slashed down at her arm, gashing through the black to red as he scowled a mortal warning. She flinched in pain — then grinned.
“Suffering is my lot and pride. But you?” she hissed through cackling laughs, “You are just His errand boy!”
Lúez spun away in wrath and dragged himself across the floor of stiffening blood and bile towards the altar, where he stopped and held his clawed hand out over a dark red flame. His flesh began to singe and crackle and sear, sending up a hideous pall as Sílb shifted in beside him. Lúez showed no sign of pain, only reluctant duty as he gazed down into rising, shaping smoke that swelled and spawned a hideous silhouette of blackest seething, wreathing filth whose name they uttered all as one — Lúez, Sílb and Shen above — within the sputtering, burning hate —
“Déhath.”
Next chapter — Father
Sunday 17 April 2011
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