Realm Wraith (25 page)

His feet moved towards it unbidden, until he stood right at the edge of the shore, the water lapping at the very tips of his toes. He placed a hesitant foot on the surface of the water. His foot did not pass through, rather it rested on top like solid ground. He moved the other foot forward with identical results. His steps continued in this manner, one after the other, strolling over the water’s surface. Not for one instant did he sink. He left the shore far behind him, eyes scanning the entire expanse of the lake around him. He could see icy land to the right and the left of him, and the shore he had departed from behind him. But he could not make out a far shore, for blackness covered the distant horizon.

He felt the water with his hand. It felt like ordinary water, with no thickness to the surface, and his hand passed through cleanly. It was cold and wet, like any normal fluid. He could see nothing below his feet, only black, and that strange aqua light. But he could see his reflection, and he curiously stared at it. It did not seem that much different from before, only with no twisted hallucinations by masquerading demons to mock him. Rayne saw only himself, his face, his skin, pallid and cold. He reached up with one hand and felt his cheek, watching his reflection do the same. His white hair fluttered every so often, drifting strands waving in the air despite there being no wind, an odd phenomenon to watch.

His flesh felt just as cold as the ice he had traveled across moments ago. A strange notion occurred to him then, and focusing on that intense feeling of cold, he moved his hand back down, brushing it once more against the water’s surface. Crystalline patterns appeared around it as the cold of his hand spread in a circle, followed by a thick crackling sound as the water chilled and turned solid. Shocked, he yanked his hand back up. A small disk of ice floated there still, continuing to spread until the spot in the center solidified. It rippled outward, slowed, and finally stopped, leaving behind a patch of ice the size of a dinner plate. He pressed his finger against it. There was no doubt, the water had frozen by his own hand. He pushed harder, and the ice cracked beneath his fingertips, shattering as the growing crevices fanned outwards from his touch, leaving broken chunks that slipped beneath the water’s surface, sinking from sight.

He continued to stare down at the water’s surface as he tried to discern the source of that light. The water beneath him rippled, and a dim shadow reflected in the water’s surface as a solid black form. He froze, realizing he was no longer alone out here on the lake. Trying to be as silent and still as possible, he turned his head to glimpse the source of the shadow. There was nothing before him, save a black, towering mass of unrecognizable shape. It was enormous, as if a mountain had followed him into the water and now sat behind him, waiting. A sickening familiarity stirred, and his sense of placid calm evaporated like mist. The water beneath his feet became just as ordinary water, and his entire body plunged through the cold surface into its infinite depths. Like a stone he dropped deeper towards the light that illuminated the watery world around him. Off in the corner of his vision, he saw two thin, black tentacles torpedo through the water, seizing him with choking tightness, and dragging him back upwards, back above the lake, before the great black mass.

He clenched his eyes shut, knowing full well what would happen next, but it was too late. Before him the great violet eye opened, piercing his soul, and even blinding himself to it did not save him from its intensity. He screamed and struggled against the two limbs that bound him, but failed to free himself. Around the monstrous eye, two more now opened, equally maddening with an unfathomable power burning inside each one. Mindless desperation seized Rayne, and he screamed.

The foremost eye widened, expressing a sense of surprise.

“You again?” a haunting voice sent waves across the top of the lake. “That’s far too many times you’ve encroached on my lord’s domain!”

Rayne couldn’t calm his terror. The energy shining in those eyes affected him far too intensely, and just being near to them pulled his mind into deep, horrifying madness. Even in the wake of everything else that threatened him, only here did he feel a very real fear. He clenched his teeth, struggling to find his voice again.

“Speak, mortal,” threatened the voice. “Speak, or I shall eat you right now.”

“Ahh, ahh, h-hello,” Rayne stammered.

Before him another gap appeared in the black mountain, ripping open with an overwhelming roar. As it split, it revealed long, jagged blades, infinitely sharp fangs surrounded by smaller pointed forms. A swirling void of nothingness loomed behind them, ready to erase Rayne’s very existence.

“W-wait! Can’t we be more civilized about this?!”

The mouth paused, only partway open, and the tentacles continued to suspend him. All three eyes burned through him, their slit pupils arbitrarily widening and contracting.

“No.”

The three eyes blinked open and closed in rapid succession. In these brief moments, Rayne experienced slight reprieve, the ability to think returning for the smallest instances, before they opened again and sent his soul numb with horror. When they blinked closed again, he didn’t waste any time, and focused his spirit elsewhere, anywhere that wasn’t here. The world slipped away, and he felt the welcome numbness spreading through him as he changed location, free from the demon’s hateful clutches.

But to his shock, when his eyes focused again, howling winds surrounded him, blowing shards that tore across his flesh as he lay on the peak of a frozen mountain, overlooking an endless drop.

“More ice? I’m still here!” he cried out. Before he could try again, another black appendage burst from the snow and grabbed him again, and he heard the voice of the beast once more.

“What,” it demanded, “was that?”

Rayne searched the white storm for the creature’s body, unable to fathom how it had found him so quickly. His captor lifted him into the air. “You must be pleased with yourself, being able to travel through the Abyss so easily.”

Without being able to see the eyes of the beast, Rayne found it much easier to speak. He felt the slightest bit of added confidence.

“Can’t we talk about this?” he yelled out, his voice swept up within the winds. “I didn’t mean to trespass!”

“Are you trying to bargain with me, mortal? You think others haven’t tried that in the past?” the voice hissed, broken into many voices by the severing winds. “You have nothing that I want!”

Though he could not see it, Rayne could hear the sound of that immense mouth creaking open.

“Oh—Oh yeah? Well you don’t have anything I want either!” he yelled out into the air.

“Don’t gibber nonsense. I have your existence in my grasp. Fairly certain you want that.”

“Go on!” Rayne hissed. “If you want it so badly, take it!”

The beast froze. “What was that?”

“Go on and take it! What’s the matter? Are you afraid?”

“Are you mad? You care nothing about being devoured?”

“If it means getting away from you forever, I welcome it!” Rayne wasn’t quite sure what he was saying at this point, in his maddened desperation the words poured from his mouth on their own. But his apparent insanity had confused his captor just a bit, and as he continued to yell his strange threats, he grasped the tentacle binding him in his hand. He tried to recall the feeling on the lake, spreading the coldness in his soul outwards. He felt the slimy surface of the rough, wet tentacle, and the cold flowed from his hands across the slithering form, freezing it. Though superficial at first, to his surprise the ice spread deeper into the appendage, solidifying it into a crystallized chunk at the point where he touched it. He drew his hand back and struck at the frozen portion, shattering it. A howl cut through the wind around him, shrieking cries of pain, and he dropped into a snowbank. He got up and ran straight off the edge of the mountainside into the endless void below it, not caring what he’d find at the bottom.

He planned to use the time spent falling to pull himself somewhere safer, somewhere not in this domain of ice and water, where the monster couldn’t reach him. But his scheme came to a screeching halt as he found himself falling beside a massive black form, with a great eye that burst open, leveled upon him, burning him with the full intensity of unholy fury. It eradicated Rayne’s brief confidence, and fear overtook him again, his ability to clearly think vanishing into the winds that flew past his soul. The air around him filled with menacing laughter.

“I see. You’re only cocky when you’re not making eye contact, is that it? Tell me, mortal, who gave you that power?”

Rayne gulped, finding it very difficult to speak again. “Nobody.”

Another tentacle wrapped around him, and stopped his fall. They now stood back by the turquoise lake, where Rayne hung suspended in the air, shaking before the violet orbs of fire that stared through him.

He heard a decisive voice speak. “Answer me, and I’ll make your death quick! Who gave you that power?!”

Rayne still had trouble speaking. He tried to force himself to calm down.

“Well? Spit it out.”

“E-eyes,” he choked.

“Very well.” The three great orbs snapped closed. A tidal wave of relief washed over Rayne as his emotions settled back under his control. “Now answer me!”

“Answer what?”

“Who taught you to control the power of this place?”

“I control the what now?”

“That ice!”

“I—it’s the degeneration. I’ve just been getting colder since I started coming here.”

“So you’re a lost soul meant to be frozen here in my god’s realm?”

“Your god?” Rayne suddenly understood. “You must be Tomordred?”

“Who told you that name?!”

“I, uh—” The tentacle rattled him. “It was another demon! A reaper! He said you stalk this place and eat intruders!”

The voice spoke, thick with disgust. “A reaper. Betrayers.”

“He’s not such a bad fellow. Though he warned me I shouldn’t come here again.”

“You should have listened to him,” Tomordred replied after a short silence. “Wanderers do not come here. You escaped me. Then you returned, and escaped a second time. And now here you are again. You have a death wish, mortal.”

“Is it really that bad, having one mortal showing up here for a few short hours?”

“You antagonized the souls in the endless oceans. You even had the audacity to freeze the lake of my god’s throne. Your presence is a disruption here!”

“I didn’t mean to! I mean I—it was an accident, really!”

The foremost eye snapped open, exposing Rayne to its full intensity. He stiffened up in terror, reason lost once more to fear. The eye closed shut again.

“Stop doing that!” he stammered, composing himself once more.

“My eyes truly frighten you, don’t they, mortal?” Tomordred’s voice taunted him. He was like a cat playing with its food. “That is the power of Nen’kai. You would crumble in his presence.”

“Who?”

“My god!” Tomordred roared.

“Never heard of him. I know about Tyris, and Kaledris, and Othgar, and Azaznir—”

“
Do not say that name here!
Who told you those names?! Was it the reaper?!”

“Y-yes!”

Tomordred shook itself. Though he appeared as a black mountain to Rayne, he could see it did have something resembling heads, several of them at least. Their alien motions had an unnatural rhythm.

“Tell me, which reaper was it? I want to find him.”

“I-I don’t know his name,” Rayne lied.

“Then I have no more use for you.” The creature leaned close to Rayne, and the great eye burst open, startling him and almost knocking him from his perch. His flesh felt as if it were being pierced by thousands of needles, his nerves crawled, and his mind screamed. “We’ve had our little conversation,” the beast continued. “I can eat you now.”

“Can’t we work this out?” Rayne stammered. He tried to clear his mind of the overwhelming fear that ate away at him, and failed. In those eyes he could see everything, as if the emotions of every horrible experience he’d ever had in his life came rushing back to him with crystal clarity, though they came with no accompanying vision, or rational recollection of what could have happened to make him feel so overwhelmed.

One fear stood out to him the strongest. That horrible feeling of being trapped, that his physical form was some kind of monstrous apparition. The memory of his broken body pulling him back, with its empty, twisted look invaded his thoughts and dominated him, until he couldn’t think of anything else, and as he thought, he felt himself fading, pulled towards that same entity. He slipped through the tentacle supporting him, falling though the air as the Abyss faded around him. He had never felt this sensation inside the Abyss before, and as much as it unsettled him, he welcomed the escape from the angry demon’s mouth. He could hear Tomordred roar as he lost his prey once again and he laughed, a lingering cackle that echoed throughout the frozen realm, the only remaining evidence that he had even been there at all.

Chapter 9

Rayne sat up in bed dripping with sweat. For the first time since the accident, he had become aware of the very instant he returned back to his world, back into his physical body. He preferred the vague sense of shifting between sleep and awake, and found this new sensation incredibly unpleasant. But he was glad to have escaped. He resolved that from now on, he’d be more attentive to Darrigan’s warnings; his heedlessness had almost cost him his soul. No matter what happened, in the future he’d stay away from any realm of ice and water.