Chapter 3 — The Rite of Binding
The binding chamber was not a room.
This bothered Kael. He had spent seven days picturing a room — four walls, a ceiling, maybe a window to run screaming out of. What he got was a stone platform in the middle of the woodland, older than the settlement, older than the trees, carved with a rune-circle so wide that forty people could stand inside it and still have room for their regrets.
Forty people were standing outside it. The whole settlement had come. Because of course they had.
'Nothing like a public execution to bring a community together,' Kael thought.
The Gatewardens were waiting on the platform.
There were two of them, identical in their black-trimmed cloaks, hoods down over faces that looked like they had been carved out of wet newspaper. The settlement called them the Gloomy Guses, and standing this close, Kael felt the nickname was an act of charity. They looked like depression had been given a uniform.
"Kael Vance," said the first one.
"That's me," Kael said.
"You are branded Curse," said the second one.
"People keep saying that like I haven't noticed."
The two Gatewardens turned slowly and looked at each other. It was the first emotion either of them had shown, and it appeared to be shared exhaustion.
"Step into the circle," said the first.
Kael's parents stood at the crowd's edge. His mother had cried so much over seven days that she seemed to have run out — she just stood there, straight-backed, holding his father's hand hard enough to whiten both their knuckles. His father had his chin up. The pot belly was thrown out like a shield.
'Don't cry at them,' Kael told himself. 'Don't you dare. If you cry, they cry worse.'
So he did the bravest thing he had done in eighteen years of being afraid.
He grinned at them.
"Don't worry," he called. "I'm too stubborn to die. I get it from Dad's side."
"You get it from MY side!" his mother shouted back, voice cracking straight down the middle, and that was worse than crying, that was so much worse.
Kael stepped into the circle before his face could betray him.
The runes began to glow.
"Your soul will travel to the Shadowrealm," intoned the first Gatewarden, "to the sub-realm that matches your brand. Your body will remain here, and will kneel, and will not wake until your soul returns."
"Or does not," said the second.
"KYLE," hissed the first.
"He should know the stakes, Lucas."
"He KNOWS the stakes, you morbid—"
"Gentlemen," Kael said. "You're really selling the room."
The glow rose around him like a tide of light. The crowd blurred. The trees blurred. The last thing Kael saw of his world was his mother, straight-backed, one hand pressed flat against her own mouth, holding herself together with four fingers.
And the last thing he heard was his father's voice, booming over the hum of the circle, refusing to say goodbye:
"BREAK THEIR TEETH, SON!"
Then the world tore open, and Kael Vance fell out of the bottom of it.
---
The fall lasted forever and no time at all.
He had the strangest sensation of being folded — like a letter, like a map, like the universe was putting him away in a drawer — and then the folding stopped, and he landed.
WHUMP.
On his feet. On ground that was not ground, in a place that was not a place.
Kael stood very still and looked at where he was.
The sky was red. Not sunset-red — wound-red, deep and wrong, with clouds that hung like clotted smoke. The horizon was a dead grey line that went on forever. Skeletal trees clawed up out of black soil, bone-pale and leafless, and between them floated orbs — dark spheres the size of melons, drifting slowly through the air like the place was full of drowned planets.
Gravity felt... negotiable. Every step came back slightly later than it should have.
'Okay,' Kael thought. 'Okay. Okay okay okay.'
'I'm dead. I've died and this is hell and honestly it makes sense, I never once did the dishes without being asked—'
"You are not dead, little soul."
The voice came from everywhere. It came from the red sky and the black soil and inside his own teeth. It was so deep that the bone-trees rattled when it spoke, and the floating orbs drifted away from the sound of it, like even they were scared.
Kael turned around.
The thing behind him was twenty feet tall.
It crouched on a ridge of black stone like a gargoyle that had eaten a cathedral. Its wings were bone — actual bare bone, strung with smoke instead of membrane. Its throat glowed from inside, ember-orange, like a furnace with a mouth. And its eyes, four of them, arranged in two pairs, burned down at him with an intelligence so old it made the forest of his world look like a toddler's drawing.
Kael's legs stopped being legs. They became decorative.
'Don't let it see that you're afraid,' said Dr. Krell's four-hundred-year-old wisdom.
'IT'S TWENTY FEET TALL, DR. KRELL. IT CAN SEE EVERYTHING. IT CAN SEE WHAT I HAD FOR BREAKFAST.'
"Kael Vance," rumbled the monster, and it said his name like a course in a meal. "Bearer of my brand. At last."
It lowered its vast head until one furnace-eye was level with him, and its breath rolled over him, hot as an open oven, smelling of smoke and old thunder.
"I am the Slyth," it said. "And you, little soul... are mine."