Chapter 27: The Feast of Echoes
The second marker, a circle of petrified trees whose bark was etched with the Old Script, was a graveyard of thought-forms. Dozens of the iridescent carapaces littered the ground, shattered and still. The air hummed with the aftertaste of violent negation. The script on the trees was almost entirely dim.
"They're learning," Kaelen observed, his voice tight. "They're attacking in swarms. Overwhelming the defenses."
Elara placed a hand on the cold, dead bark. The echo was a faint, dying plea. Hold… hold… It was being drowned out by a static hiss of hunger. She could feel the breach here was wider, the cold draft from beyond the wards stronger. It leached the warmth from her skin and the certainty from her thoughts. For a fleeting second, she forgot why she was there, who the man beside her was.
She clenched her fist, focusing on the pulsing, golden symbol she'd drawn, now tucked over her heart. The memory of love, of identity, rushed back, pushing the alien numbness away.
"We need to move faster," she said, her breath fogging in the suddenly chill air.
They pushed on, the landscape growing more surreal. The ground became glassy and smooth. Strange, crystalline growths jutted from the earth, emitting low, discordant tones. The wind didn't blow; it breathed, carrying whispers that were almost words. …forget… cease… be unmade…
They found the third marker or what was left of it. It had been a archway of fused crystal. Now, it was a heap of glittering, silent rubble. Standing amidst the ruins, bathed in the sourceless purple light, were three of them.
The thought-forms.
Up close, they were nightmares of geometry. Their iridescent carapaces were not worn, but grown, forming sleek, insectoid shells around a core of shifting, condensed shadow. They had no eyes, no faces, but the front of each form tapered to a sharp, proboscis-like tip that glimmered with a light-eating darkness. They were perfectly still, as if listening.
Then, as one, they turned. Not toward Kaelen, who had drawn his sword, the steel ringing in the dead air. They turned toward Elara.
A wave of psychic pressure hit her. It was a vacuum, a demand to stop. To unravel. To surrender the coherent story of herself into their static hum. The golden symbol over her heart flared, hot against her skin. She gritted her teeth, holding onto the memory of Kaelen's hand in the dark, the taste of the bread he'd brought her, the triumph of her first honest word written in the tower.
"I AM HERE," she said, the words not spoken, but cast from her mind like a spear.
The thought-forms recoiled, their shells chiming with a sound like breaking glass. They didn't like that. Truth in the face of their negation was an irritant.
Kaelen moved. He didn't roar. He was silence and lethal motion. His sword, a tool of pure physicality, slammed into the lead form's carapace. The blow that would have felled a man merely skittered off the iridescent shell, leaving a white scar. The form ignored him, its focus locked on Elara.
It skittered forward, terrifyingly fast, its proboscis stabbing toward her not physically, but through the air, aiming at the space her magic occupied.
Elara didn't flinch. She raised her hand, the vial of blood-ink uncorked. She didn't write. She flicked a single drop into the air between her and the creature.
As the drop hung in the air, she poured into it the memory of the Imperial Archives. Not the fear, but the certainty. The absolute, unshakeable truth of those recorded histories. The weight of fact.
The drop of ink expanded, becoming a tiny, spinning disk of solid black scripture a microcosm of a binding. The thought-form's proboscis struck it.
There was no crash. A soundless, flashless negation occurred. The scripture-disk vanished. The thought-form shuddered, a crack spiderwebbing across its proboscis. It had consumed the truth, but the truth had been a stone in its throat.
It hesitated.
That was all Kaelen needed. He altered his attack. He didn't aim for the shell. Using a piece of the shattered crystal arch as a hammer, he drove his sword like a chisel into the existing crack on the proboscis.
The carapace didn't just break. It sublimated, turning instantly from solid matter to a puff of iridescent dust and a brief, silent scream in the mind. The core of shadow within winked out of existence.
The other two forms shifted their attention, a flicker of something like strategic awareness in their mindless hunger. One engaged Kaelen, harrying him with bursts of nullifying pressure, trying to disrupt the coherent story of his fighting form. The other lunged at Elara.
She was ready. This time, she drew the golden 'I AM' symbol in the air with her finger, trailing blood-ink. She fueled it with a simpler, sharper memory: the moment Kaelen chose her over Vorlan. A choice. A defining truth.
The symbol blazed in the air. The thought-form impaled itself upon it. There was a longer, more violent struggle. The symbol flickered, fraying at the edges as the entity tried to unmake the concept of choice, of loyalty. But the memory held. With a final, psychic shriek, the second form dissolved.
Kaelen, his movements slightly slowed and clumsy under the form's nullifying assault, finally found his opening and shattered the last one.
Silence returned, deeper than before. They stood panting amidst the dust of their enemies, the rubble of the third marker at their feet.
Elara looked toward the epicenter of the purple glow, now visibly pulsing on the horizon. The heart of the Blighted Wastes. The source of the whisper. The main Warding site or what was left of it.
The feeders were dealt with. Now, they had to face the thing that was hungry.