Chapter 8 — Two Monarchs, One Soul
Kael dreamed of the soul-room that night, and discovered that "dreamed" was no longer the right word for anything that happened inside his head.
He simply... arrived. One moment he was asleep in his bed; the next he was standing in the impossible space, under a sky of swirling grey, on a floor of dark glass. Spark's corner of the room crackled with violet storm-light and was decorated — because of course it was — with a small velvet cushion the rabbit had apparently manifested out of pure self-regard.
Void's corner was a throne.
"Ah," said Void. "The host arrives. Pyjamas and all. How domestic."
'Why am I here?' Kael thought — and his thought came out as speech here, because here, thought was speech.
"Because your soul is now a room with two doors," Void said, "and you sleepwalk through both. Sit, Kael Vance. We should talk, tenant to landlord."
"I'd rather stand."
"Stand, then. It changes nothing." The ink-face regarded him. "You have questions. Ask. I find your species' questions charming, in the way one finds an ant's concept of architecture charming."
Kael looked at him. At the throne. At the endless dark around it.
"Why me?" he said. "Everyone keeps saying the brand doesn't err. The Slyth said it. Dr. Krell's book said it. So why me? I'm nobody. I have no secret strength. I've checked. Repeatedly."
Void was quiet for a moment.
"Your soul," he said at last, "has a property I have encountered perhaps twice in ten thousand years. Most souls are houses with one room — one familiar, one bond, full. Yours..." The ink-face tilted. "Yours is a hallway with doors I cannot count. The Slyth branded you because your soul is one of the few in your species' history that could theoretically hold a monarch without tearing apart. I entered you because a soul that can hold one monarch—"
"Can hold two," Kael said slowly.
"Can hold more," Void said, and the words fell into the room like stones into a well. "What your ceiling is, boy, I do not know. That uncertainty is the only interesting thing that has happened to me in four hundred years. So I will sit on my throne, and watch, and wait, and one day you will either become the greatest tamer your world has ever produced—"
The ink-face smiled. It should not have been able to smile. It smiled anyway.
"—or you will burst, and I will catch what spills out."
"That's horrific."
"That's honest. You may find I am the only thing in either world that never lies to you." Void leaned back. "The bunny will lie to you constantly, by the way. He's already deciding which truths you're too fragile for. It's almost sweet."
'I heard that,' crackled Spark's corner.
"You were meant to," Void said.
---
He woke before dawn to screaming.
Not his mother's. Not his father's. It came through the brand — through the door — a sound from the other side of the world-wall, vast and furious and so deep that the windowpanes of the house buzzed in their frames.
Kael sat bolt upright.
'Spark. Spark, what is that.'
Spark's voice came back tight and fast, all humour stripped away. "The Slyth. He's testing the door. He's— Kael, listen to me very carefully. Whatever you feel in the next few minutes, do not panic, do not run outside, and whatever you do, do not—"
The world tore.
It didn't tear outside. It tore inside — the soul-room convulsed, the grey sky split like cloth, and through the split came fire and fury and twenty feet of bone-winged monarch, dragging himself into Kael's soul through the brand that was, forever, a door from his side.
The Slyth had entered the soul-room.
And Void was already standing.
"YOU," thundered the Slyth, and the whole room shook. "You carrion-bird. You throne-squatting scavenger. You DARE nest in MY vessel—"
"Your vessel," Void said, rising from his throne, unfolding to his full height, and Kael saw — felt — that inside the soul, where no law of flesh applied, the shadow monarch was every bit as vast as the dragon. "Funny. I was just telling the boy how generous you are with things you've already lost."
The two monarchs faced each other across the room of Kael's soul.
And Kael, standing between them in his pyjamas, understood with perfect clarity that he was about to be the battlefield in a war between gods.
"Oh good," said Spark, from under his cushion. "They're going to talk it out."