Endless Knight (Darkling Mage 9)

I walked. For how long, I couldn’t be sure, but if this was the Dark Room, then a pinpoint was supposed to appear sooner rather than later, a place I could use to reenter reality. But as my footsteps rebounded throughout the vastness of the dimension, it finally hit me. This was the Dark Room, only with one crucial difference. This time, there was no escaping.

My heart pounded faster. I’d agreed to this – I thought I was prepared for it, too. But suddenly I was no longer so sure. Worse, I was afraid. How long had I been there? How long had I walked? And as I moved I noticed, gradually, that my sight was returning, that I could vaguely see in the dimness. Yet the bizarre topography of the old Dark Room I knew was gone. I called on its shadows from deep in my heart, summoned on the soulfires I once stoked, fierce as the throat of a dragon, but nothing. No response.

Instead, I saw five shapes moving in the darkness.

I ran. Who knows how far, and how long, but I ran, away from the things that pursued me with relentless stamina, humanoid silhouettes that hounded me with the same pace and speed. When my energy flagged, so did theirs. When I stumbled, my shoe squeaking as it struck the ground wrong and sent me staggering, so did they. I slowed and came to a stop. The shadows followed. My mouth fell open as I took them in. These were my shades, actual manifestations of my self, formed out of the darkness. This was the consequence of the Apotheosis. My shadow had been split into five pieces.

It felt like the ultimate mockery, knowing that I had companions in that black dimension, only those that had no faces, no features, and no voice. I couldn’t rightly decide just then whether is was better that they were completely silent, or whether hearing five shadows speak in my same voice would have driven me insane faster than the simplicity of maddening solitude.

But I didn’t have to find an answer just then. Not just yet, as a familiar white face drifted from out of the darkness. Hecate. She was the last thing I expected in the Dark, and I told her as much, this time barely holding back my frustration.

“I thought I could handle this,” I muttered. “I’m going insane on my own in here.”

“This is your cross to bear,” she said, standing comfortably in the emptiness of the Dark. “To remain within these walls, simmering and stewing until such time that you gather enough power to step out on your own.”

“How long has it been?” I said. “At least tell me that.”

She looked down at her nails, gazing first at the backs of her fingers, then at her palm. “Days. Weeks. Perhaps months. What is time to you now that you are made immortal? How does it matter?”

I looked at my hands. Months? But I only just died. How could I have been out for months?

The shades watched her in rapt silence, unmoving, but showing her the kind of quiet reverence I might have reserved for her in the old days, when I still feared her, when I still understood the interplay of power between humans and entities. But what was left now that I was something else in between? What did I have to lose?

“It matters because the people I still love are out there,” I said, unable to contain the anger in my body. “I know that you care for nothing but magic and power and the politics of gods. But I still have those that I love, and every passing moment I stay here means I don’t know if they’re hurting, or sick, or dying.”

She blinked at me, and though her features kept shifting, I could sense her mock innocence, her sarcasm. “Why, of course they are hurting. They long for your companionship, but you left them.”

I tore my fingers through my hair. “Why are you taunting me? Why are you mocking me when you’re all that I have left?”

Hecate swept her great midnight robe about her, the edges of it swirling like tendrils of shadow at her feet. She seemed to grow taller, more menacing. “Because we mean to impress upon you the gravity of what you have done. Your tenure here is necessary. This is your second birthing. Is that not something to celebrate?”

I looked down at my hands. “So this is my gestation period.” I looked around. “And the Dark Room is my womb.”

“And your prison, as you clearly think of it. But it is also your home. We left you for so long on your own, and yet you have done nothing to change your conditions.” She swept her hand along the ground, as if to highlight the utter emptiness of the dimension. “We expected more from you.”

I threw my hands up. “I died a second time to get here, and in case you’ve forgotten, this is a temporary situation for me. Why should I bother doing anything to this place if I’m going to be out of here soon enough anyway?”

Hecate stared at me coolly, somehow seeming to grow even taller still. “We had such high hopes for you, Dustin Graves. This is the situation to which you must adjust. Until you understand it, nothing will improve. Nothing will change. Your lot is to remain within the Dark Room, forever and ever. You choose which doors to close, which to keep shut, and which to open so that you may go wherever you choose. This is your fate, to stand guard at the gates, to watch and to ensure that the agents of the Old Ones will never infiltrate your reality ever again. You are the keeper of the Dark Room’s many, many doors, godling. And until you embrace it, until you understand the fullest extent of your responsibility, you will always be a husk. Fallible. Worthless.” Hecate’s lips turned up as she threw me a withering look. “A god of nothing.”

I fell to my knees, my palms slamming into the ground, the solid darkness cold against my skin. I was very much aware that it appeared to Hecate as if I was kneeling to her, praying, worshipping, prostrate on the floor. “I don’t know what to do. I’m going crazy, Hecate, and I don’t know what to do.”

“You have always been resourceful, godling. We offered you this solution to your grand cosmic conundrum because we believed that you, of all people, would find a way. Look within yourself. Look to your friends.” I caught a glimpse of her face as she knelt to join me on the floor, as she cupped my chin in one warm hand. I shivered at the touch of another person, inhuman as it was. She smiled at me, her lips filled with the rarest traces of kindness. “Trust in Dustin.”

Then she v

anished. I fell to the floor, laying there, staring at the starless sky of my prison. Hecate had always loved her puzzles, her mysteries, but this was the worst possible time for them.

What resources did I have? What friends? It almost felt cruel for her to mention them, when I had nothing and no one left. A god of nothing, saddled with five unspeaking, unthinking copies of his incorporeal self, trapped within a dimension with no walls, but no exits. My knees came up to my face, and I felt for my shins, staring into darkness, into nothing.

Maybe madness would take me in time. Or I would fall asleep, then never wake again. That would be a mercy. Perhaps my five shades would rise up to throttle me, reaching for my throat with fingers like black talons, to tear what was left of my body into shreds.

I’d saved the world, killed Agatha Black, and sealed away the Eldest forever. But at what cost? I wasn’t ready for the Apotheosis. I wasn’t ready for so much silence, so much isolation. So much darkness.

Can you hear me? I wasn’t ready to go. I shouldn’t have ascended. I didn’t know what I was doing. The Apotheosis came too soon. I miss my friends. I miss the sun. I miss the air.

Can you hear me? Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Please, not you too. Don’t leave me. Don’t

Chapter 33