Light Dawning Read online

  With every building in the city searched more than once, he couldn't comprehend how the Knights of the Black Gauntlet had never come into this particular building before and discovered the blinking darkness. He shuddered again as the implication set in that it had a will of its own, that perhaps it had been hiding from the knights as well. He didn't know if it delighted in the mass death and chaos as the soldiers sought it, but for reasons unknown it seemed to prefer remaining out of their hands.

  Knowing what came next in the memory Myrr decided to fight back, violently, conjuring images of bloodstained boots marching across cobblestones. He tried to focus his thoughts on knights shouting out orders to more efficiently track down and kill the rebellious children of Cestia. Even the memory of that soldier's arms and legs tearing apart from his body while he called down curses of hellfire would be a comfort compared to what came next.

  Seeming to know when he turned his thoughts away from it, the thing inside him forced the black image into his mind, into a void where all light was dead and never existed to begin with. It didn't seem to have language of its own and couldn't whisper its desires to Myrr, but it could make its will known to him just as well with the sudden intense sensations that overcame all other feeling. Despite not knowing the thing's name, Myrr reflexively called it out before he could stop himself when that inky darkness spread across his mind's eye, shouting a sharp and painful word in an unfamiliar tongue.

  The pain was more in the place his thoughts occupied than in any physical location on his body, and it remained for a singular eternal instant that seemed to drag on far longer than it had any right to. All was silent after that awful word tore free of his mouth, hushed as though waiting for some response. Before it could come, the pain faded and time flowed back into its normal ceaseless stream forward as his surroundings snapped back into focus.

  All eyes in the cellar darted towards him and a deathly hush fell over the room, every muscle tensed and ready to spring into action as the refugees waited for long agonizing moments. Each lost soul in the cellar waited silently for the outer door to fling open and soldiers to come pouring in, death in hand. Silence reigned only briefly, and everyone was on their feet and ready to bolt at the sound of a sudden sharp creak from the old building above.

  He'd only seen the shop owner once, knowing him as a seller of goods that no longer flowed into Cestia. With threadbare shelves and a lack of customers, the middle-aged man tended to be the only one moving about in the store, so any creak or footstep set the fugitives below on edge, maddeningly unaware of what was occurring above and whether they were about to be discovered.

  Another creak groaned down, followed by another, moving across the ceiling. Their benefactor Otta slowly paced in a back and forth pattern down the length of the empty shop serving as a front for the hideout. With no harsh shouts or the sound of breaking boards following, it seemed likely the former merchant remained alone, simply continuing his pattern of pacing while muttering profanities against the forces beyond his control that saw his fortune lost.

  Myrr had no idea if the man had ever taken direct part in planning or executing attacks on the knights, but simply sheltering fugitives would be enough of a crime to see his home ransacked before he was executed, should the authorities discover what was occurring in the cellar below. Remaining silent and out of view was just as much about keeping the shopkeeper above alive as it was about saving themselves. Following the slaughter during the riot and the previous safe house burned to ashes, he knew too well the cost of drawing the knights' attention.

  After several long minutes, when no armed men came battering down the earthen steps with weapons drawn, the rebels went back to their business while casting occasional hateful glances towards Myrr. One of the wounded civilians stopped tending to his family members to slowly approach and quietly utter soothing words, thinking Myrr to finally be on the edge of losing his mind in the monotonous darkness. Perhaps he wasn't wrong.

  Those words of comfort couldn't overcome a sudden jab of revulsion when the man passed under one of the pale shafts of light, illuminating what the price of fighting back against Cestia's occupiers could truly look like. A partially caved-in skull, terribly misshapen like a cracked egg, looked out from under the light, with the right eye socket shockingly empty. Myrr vaguely remembered one of the others had called him Casterly, a man on the run after unmercifully surviving a beating from one of those spiked maces.

  Myrr tasted the name in his mouth, mulling it over to keep out the other thoughts and recalling the story he'd overheard in bits and pieces as his fellow hideaways had spoken to one another in the night. Casterly was the eldest son of Tammin, one of those fathers whose sense of familial duty had overcome his sense of self-preservation. The fool had decided to intervene when a squad of knights took an interest in his daughter. His bravery had only led to his death and his family's current flight from the authorities.

  Tammin's daughter now babbled softly and incoherently to herself, knees pressed up against her body as she rocked gently back and forth. Intentions aside, the father's intervention hadn't spared her from much. Myrr couldn't help but think she'd be better off if the soldiers had been allowed to put her out of her misery after they'd finished abusing her. Listening to her garbled words and the way she seemed oblivious to all around her, his pity turned to a twisted kind of jealousy. She, at least, wasn't aware of the hell they were living in.

  A sharp pain tore through that new place the blackness had excavated inside him. Apparently it didn't enjoy maudlin brooding on mercy killings or jealous thoughts of madness. Just to spite it, he wondered further if her brother would end up acting as the executioner in place of the soldiers, having to take the step of ending things if she deteriorated further.

  His own recent outburst had nearly doomed them, and there was no doubt the rebels hushed away in the corner would quiet her down permanently if her soft babbling ever rose to something greater. Anyone who looked at her could see a hysterical screaming that seemed to be hidden just behind her eyes, ready to be unleashed at the wrong provocation. Myrr again wondered who was in the better position, knowing something hidden within him had just been unleashed involuntarily, and might escape again at any time.

  Barely avoiding the clemency that would be offered by slipping into a comatose nothingness, she remained in a twilight state between either fully giving up her mind or fully accepting what had happened and returning to reality. In either case a mercifully swift death, whether delivered by stranger or cherished love one, seemed the inevitable outcome.

  While dreaming of deaths not yet come, Myrr noticed Casterly had been whispering to him for some time, but he had no idea what words had been spoken. Aware some response was needed to assure his companions he was still in control of his own faculties, Myrr awkwardly reached out to clasp the man's shoulder. He gently squeezed before grunting an affirmation. Keeping his eyes fixed on a point just to the side of the disfigured face staring back, he hoped the gesture might set the others at ease and convince them he wasn't a threat to their safety.

  The fugitive didn't trust a single other person hiding within the damp earthen walls, but he had no desire to be thrown out of the safe house, or to have his throat cut so he couldn't reveal its location to the knights. He'd seen what Cestian freedom fighters could do when given the opportunity, and abruptly the cellar felt much less safe than it had only a moment before. Even hidden away from the eyes of the authorities, his life was in danger of being violently snuffed out by those around him.

  To his surprise, Casterly squatted down in the dirt next to Myrr and hung his head in his hands, sighing deeply. With sound again returning as his mental stage cleared out to make room for reality, he couldn't help but notice the utterly resigned tone in the larger man's voice when he finally asked, “How long can we really stay down here before they find us and finish what they started?”

  A desire for contact with someone who wasn't directly in his head, rooting through his thought
s against his will, struggled against the quiet understanding deep within that neither of them were likely to be alive long enough to share a friendship.

  Better to keep a distance than to make the mistake of caring before some new horror born of Cestia's occupation inevitably cut Casterly down. Against his better judgment, the thought was set aside. When no new stabs of sensation were forthcoming from the thing inside him and all remained calm, Myrr slowly placed his arm around the other man, who began sobbing quietly in the darkness.

  Waiting for the disfigured man's tide of emotion to pass, he finally whispered back the awful truth hanging in the air unsaid, “Not long.”

  2 (Eastern Ward, Border District, Eventide)

  Beneath a squat, stone building not far away in the heart of the doomed city, another victim of the occupation also felt death nearing. The whispers in Tala's head were like tolling bells, and she knew the time was at hand.

  She felt their spidery presence across the dome of her skull more strongly than usual, while fighting off the panic and trying to bring about calm through force of will. The act itself of trying to enforce calm made the effort futile, the whispers gaining ground inch by inch as she tried and failed to stave off growing desperation. Something was coming that would bring her world to an end, and there was no way to stop its rapid approach.

  The surging fear wasn't for herself, but for the rest of the inhabitants of Cestia. She didn't know what would happen in that last final instant if she lost control. Every moment of her life was a struggle against a rising flood only barely contained and kept down with hard-earned focus. That battle was finally about to be lost for the first time. Shortly she would feel those things breach the gates and spill through, the long-overdue deluge about to consume everyone else along with her.

  She tried to keep the shield in place while the big one held her down, fixating on anything in her surroundings that might keep the calm from shattering. His breath was unpleasant and made gorge rise in her throat, distracting from the all-important task, and his rough hands only brought on pointed, piercing hate.

  It would have to be his eyes then, a detail to converge on that could be disassociated from the man himself. Unlike most of the invaders she'd seen out on patrols, his eyes were soft and multi-hued, one a dark blue and the other a light green.

  For a moment Tala slipped quietly back behind the shield, ignoring what was happening to her body and maintaining the balance that kept Cestia safe from what the whispers heralded.

  It was the laughter of the other two off to the side of the room, taunting that they'd be going next, that allowed the anger to slice through that carefully crafted defense. Those insistent whispers, there her whole life but never able to be heard clearly, finally found the one weak point and made just the tiniest crack.

  That single minute fracture was all it took.

  The sob that burst from her seemed to excite them, prompting the soldier holding her down to increase the urgency of his thrusts, which only made the anger inside grow further. The shield's crack widened and the constant dull roar finally came up to the forefront of her mind in a clear voice. It was all over for the soldiers, and they had no idea this particular act of inhumanity, one drop in a sea of violence, would be their last.

  She felt it all slow down in that moment and desperately tried to repair the breach, to return stability to her mind and force the crack closed somehow. Even while making the attempt, she knew it would be too late to stop something from reaching through. Like a waking night terror with no control, they would cavort and scream while she remained helpless. They would tell her all those secrets about reality she didn't want to know in that one agonizing eternal second it would take to re-establish the shield.

  The moment dragged on so long she didn't even realize her tormentor was nearly finished. The knight grunted twice in rapid succession, again forcing that stench into her nostrils, and it was over. He was spent and immediately uninterested in his conquest, not knowing what was already growing there under the maligned influence of the whispering voices.

  He had become a father through forces he couldn't possibly comprehend, and he'd terribly regret it until the moment he died.

  When the soldier took to his feet, not sparing even a look down at what damage he'd caused now that he was done, she softly begged them to leave while they still could. Tala pleaded for them to flee in quick, choking sobs through the tears now flowing freely. The knights ignored her appeals; having heard them delivered hundreds of ways in the preceding years of the occupation. Their ignorance was a fatal mistake, not realizing she was trying to save them from the repercussions of their actions.

  The soon-to-be father laughed while buckling his breeches, calling out to the other two to take their turns before they returned to the street above and finished off their patrol of this run-down ward. They shared in his mirth, conversing like old friends engaged in a cherished pastime, oblivious to whatever pain they might be causing or what horror was stirring unnoticed nearby. This area of the city was a slum no one wanted to be assigned to, but they could still find some fun with the locals before returning to tearing apart yet another home in a search that everyone knew was futile.

  Tala felt the whispers quiet down when the moment approached, all of the voices in rapt, silent attention for what was to come. The moment that would change everything was heralded by an unpleasant stirring sensation inside, dull at first and then sharp and violent as the first contraction rippled from within. Pain blossomed into full bloom while something was rapidly taking shape and gaining form, pressing against the thin breach of the wall.

  She tried to push back but couldn't stop its advance through where the crack had briefly appeared in that one moment when all her careful control had finally broken. In a last ditch effort to stave off the coming storm, Tala mercilessly berated herself, screaming every profanity and insult she could think of across the back of her skull.

  With no other means available, she hoped the force of her self-loathing could hold it off. She slipped back easily to all those years of screams and beatings when the cruel men in the robes had taught her never to slip up, not even for a single moment.

  She cried out in agony and clutched her stomach, rolling over and tightening into a ball as all those thoughts scattered and fled before the whispered onslaught. The second soldier struck her across the face without bothering to remove his gauntlet first, thinking she meant to deny him his prize. His desire was the last thing on her mind when she rolled back over and spread her legs apart, not even bothering to worry about the bleeding split in her lip or the bruise spreading across her cheek.

  The soldier's excitement rapidly turned to confusion and then disgust when the birthing began. From echoing silence to jubilant cries of exultation, the whispers spoke to her in their discordant miasma, feeding her the knowledge of how to bring her child from their realm to hers. Something jet black and dripping obsidian afterbirth struggled out from beneath her skirt, a single protruding limb of the thing that escaped when her lapse of control fractured the veil between here and there.

  Tala screamed again, more forcefully this time, when the first joint of the spidery leg worked its way out of her, followed by the sopping ovoid bulk of her bastard child. The whispers went from insane cavorting to soothing croons, warping the fabric of her form and allowing something that should not be. What should have torn her body in two instead contorted in lunatic ways that no physical thing should have been capable of achieving. A terrible kind of sense was found in those whispered ministrations, and she allowed herself to wrap around and through those secret truths denied to others, briefly accepting them for the first time.

  The final limb tore through, slipping in the pool of blood gathered around the exhausted new mother as it sought to acclimate itself to this alien reality. Four multi-jointed and barbed legs sprouted out from the thing, glistening with the dampness of its birth. Its center was a sagging mass of flesh barely formed; bearing a dissolved face that ran lik
e wax, crying out hideously to its mother.

  Looking closer, she saw it clearly cried out to its horrified father as well, seeing now that beneath all the moist viscera he too bore one eye shining a dark emerald and the other a dull, dark sapphire. From leg to leg her offspring was nearly as long across as a man was tall. She let her thoughts float above the recognition of the insanity of that realization, pushing down that part of her that screamed no such thing could have come from her.

  Tala should have been sickened, but couldn't bring herself to be, finding the whispers offered entirely new ways of viewing the world around her if she followed their calls. Looking at what she had brought out of nonexistence and into the meat of solid space, she recognized something of herself inside it, and knew then that she truly loved this thing, no matter how vile it appeared or how bizarre its inception.