The Night

Night swallows the world.

The darkness, utter darkness, is all Renard registers before a tempest of winds batters him like the lashes of a whip. Renard gasps — and cannot breathe, for the ferocity of the whirling gale, each buffet as disorienting and cruel and purposeful as the lunging of a great black beast, is so great that his throat cannot catch it.

As if biting, and eating, and sucking up the flesh of that beast, Renard forces the air down his gullet. It is like swallowing gelatin, on every effortful suck of breath, sliding thick down his windpipe, but it does keep him conscious.

A metallic scream and ‘ping!’ then sound out from beside him, as three witchbane segments of Fidel’s leg brace shoot like shrapnel into black. Then is a sick shlorping and glorping, of the calf unlacing into a sinuous, interwoven mass of slick tentacles, with such a speed and smoothness it is like the appendage is saying: ‘Finally!’.

Renard’s gaze remains frozen on the eels, blossoming out like a flower, as Fidel quickly grabs him and presses himself to Renard’s side. Congealed sweat rolls down Renard’s forehead as though he were a wet toad in the tropics. Fidel’s brace is screaming — but the corruption isn’t spreading further up his thigh, as what witchbane remains is strong enough to, for now, suitably ward off the rot-pressure.

Renard still automatically reaches for Kingslayer to apply it to Fidel’s calf. As the blade slides out of its scabbard, movement slow by the cloying air, Renard is shocked to realise that the whole sword is humming in his palms, and not minutely.

But if Kingslayer is strained — Renard looks to Verdan.

Verdan is wincing a smile with his hand cupped over his witchbane pendant. Could it already be broken, hidden under his fist? Verdan gives a wry grin and carefully splays out his fingers. A run of foul-smelling ochre liquid oozes as a single droplet out of his cheek, and his brow, and his hand. The pendant is not broken, but its surface is covered in fractures, and it is screaming such a shrill note it is almost inaudible, like the screech of a murdered woman frozen at its highest pitch.

Verdan closes his fist again to shield the amulet. Renard yanks him to his side as well, and the light oozing of fluid from his skin peters out.

These immediate worries dealt with, Renard hucks a deep, slimy breath and braces for oncoming attackers.

But nothing comes.

The ferocious winds still batter the boat, but it is strangely not jostling at all.

They are in a place of total, utter blackness. Though there is absolutely no source of light, the forms of himself, his companions, the boat, and the river, all stand out visibly against the darkness, as though the very fact they exist demands them to be seen against the contrasting black. The suggestion of a riverbed rises in Renard’s mind, but one is not actually there. It is a bizarre kind of discordance, as though he is seeing not with his eyes but his soul, the scaffold of a creation not clothed with a solid skin of grass and mud, but left bare and hollow that it instead became host to tangible evil, which has compressed itself into the scaffold and filled it up to the brim.

It is even worse than if this darkness were simply a void. It is like the suggestion of form has allowed the darkness to fold in and over itself to compound its own virulence, the way an unwound intestine is longer than the man it resides inside. But when he does look with only his eyes, it truly is only a void.

The river twists through the blackness like a streak of paint. A subtle red glow still wafts over the water, more faded and fading the further out from the boat that it is, a signifier that this is the path from which the guiding flower drifted. To deviate from the river will send them plummeting into bottomless void. Renard once again takes the paddles, and rows.

The bottom of the boat crunches against the riverbed.

Renard curses. The water here is extremely shallow. They will not be able to proceed in the boat; they will have to walk… but if they reach a place where the river deepens again, it would be better to have it, and the scant little supplies left in it, than to swim.

With a light splashing of crystalline water over his ankles, Renard hops out of the boat. The water is frigid, rattling him from the butt to the crown of his spine upon contact, though on his left side, where is sheathed Kingslayer, it is a little more temperate. Recognizing that the iciness must be a corrupted effect, he draws his blade and dips it in the water — the water warms, and the blade shudders horribly.

Pursing his lips, Renard draws Kingslayer slightly out of the water and faces Verdan and Fidel, to guide them also out of the boat.

From this vantage, what is behind them is visible. It is simply the line of the river and then a black throat of nothing. Furious winds still beat at Renard as if reaming through his flesh, and apparently at Verdan and Fidel for how they alight as if bracing against the force, but again, there is no observable jostling to the boat or to anything else. Sensibly, beyond that throat must be the region from which they just came. But certainty wobbles in the back of Renard’s mind, that were he to try to return through the portal, he would find it was only one-way.

This black pit is hard to look away from. Anxiety claws like rats in his chest, and though he knows there must be the boat, and the river, and his companions in his periphery, they are becoming harder to see. It is like staring into the sun… both constricting his vision from the outside, and expanding it out from the middle as a suctioning effusion of darkness.

Splashes peal as his companions alight. “Ah," one of them moans at the cold.

Renard shakes off the pit and turns to Fidel, who is hobbling to balance on only one foot. Propping him up by the shoulder, Renard turns to the front.

The vision of the river, and the whole scene before him, fades quietly out into black.

Renard freezes in quiet alarm. Even though he can hear water splashing, and knows Fidel is right beside him, in this oppressive void of darkness, it does not feel like he is anywhere near his fellows at all. If he ventures forward, he is not sure where he’d go, but surely it would be a place very deep and very different from everyone else…

A dim red light fades into view. The now weak glow of the departed flower shimmers in like a landmark, that the water of the river resolves into sight beneath it, then his companions, and the scene returns to normal as it was before his vision was sucked into that pit. Though this blinding darkness was only a passing trouble, incredible relief washes over Renard. He clears his throat to speak.

“Don’t look behind us," Verdan announces first.

“How did you know, Verdan?"

But in his periphery, Verdan only grins while thumbing his pendant.

Deeming it unproductive, Renard shakes off his questions and grips the edge of the boat. Even with Verdan helping (though unenthusiastically), and even though Renard is strong, to drag the boat through this chilly water while shouldering Fidel and balancing Kingslayer is an extremely arduous task. They do not make it more than a few steps before Renard catches up to Verdan’s realisation that bringing the boat is probably fruitless. But the thought of the water deepening perilously, and them not having it, is too mortifying for Renard to stop.

He yanks the boat forward with a surge of furious strength. Its belly crunches against the riverbed, and it wedges with a ‘thunk’ in a narrow neck of the river.

Cursing, Renard reverses to climb backward over the boat and try pushing it. A suctioning force tickles at his back like slime the moment he does, and, though weak enough to easily resist, clings to him faintly even when he leans forward again. There must be a way to finangle his approach so that he…

“There’s plenty more boats back home in the shed," Verdan snaps. “Time to put our floaties to pasture."

Reprimanded, Renard flinches. But to be so criticised inflames the principle of the matter: “Should the waters open to sea, would you curse me then?" The cloying thickness of the air forces him to gobble down chunks of breath between every pause.

“It looks like it stays shallow, milord. For now, at least," Fidel interjects too, though not without a lilt of strong doubt. The water might be clear enough to make such an inference, but for things that look safe to stay consistent is not a trustworthy premise in Nix.

Fidel surely knows this. For his frustration, Renard’s companions have come to a consensus to proceed on foot regardless of what could come next.

Swallowing his reluctance, Renard alights from the boat and again props Fidel on his shoulder. That light but cloying slime of darkness sucks yet at his back as he proceeds forward, and it occurs to Renard that the wall of the dark throat behind them must be staying equidistant. It is not so much the feeling that it is following them, but rather the sense that, were he to walk ten steps, then look behind him, it would remain always looming at a fixed distance of ten steps. It it like it is anchored on a string to his position rather than existing of itself in the space.

Which is an invasive and unsettling prospect, but the panic that truly strikes him now is the recognition that proceeding any further means assuredly abandoning the boat. If they commit to just walking, the darkness will swallow it and they will not get it back, but if they do not commit—

A shudder rises out of his core so overwhelming that Fidel, on his shoulder, stumbles. Renard whips thoughtlessly around to run back to the boat—and freezes himself halfway, instead only facing a dispassionate Verdan.

For if Renard does not look, he can imagine the boat is still there. If he does not look, he can imagine it will always be there…

“Hk," he chokes, his face reddening as his knees buckle. He buries his face in his palms, not to hide his coming tears from his companions, but to have a blanket of warmth that could hide him away from the dark.

After it all! He is truly… truly, always, that stupid timid country boy who had no business holding a sword, and nothing but a cheap substitute, in a hollow shell of armour, of the man who could have conquered this darkness.

“Milord," Fidel calls.

He wrenches his hands off his face. Timid or not, phony or not, he cannot also drag down Verdan or Fidel… but the image persists in his mind of the boat, of Isen in his own shoes striding forth, yet this is the place where it matters most that he should not need to be Isen… and in the end…

Verdan watches with a quiet, cold glare. Fine! Castigate him too. Perhaps it was as much as Renard deserved, for dragging the two of them down here. But a surge of petulant anger flares as soon as he thinks that thought: you hate what I have done, well I will not let you have cause to, for watch me, I will charge forth!

Distracted, Verdan’s gaze soon softens with reconsideration.

“It’s good that you’re scared," he says. “Something that’s already dead can’t be afraid of dying."

Renard’s brow knits. It sounds like a riddle — but something about these words does resonate comfortingly, and sympathetically, enough for Renard to calm. Though he cannot explain how or why, the tempest striking at and through him, for that moment, eases.

Perhaps it is okay that he came here, after all.

Renard again shoulders Fidel, adjusts Kingslayer’s position over the water, and shores himself as encouragingly as he can manage. The pit of darkness before them, though sliced apart by the pristine light of the river, is exactly as oppressive as the maw behind them. To look into it is horrifying. With nervous sweat on his brow, and gaze averted down to the water, Renard begins the march forth.

The gentle sloshing of the river carries through the dark. If there is any vestige of tranquillity, and any sign of safety, that has been permanent here in Nix, then it would have to be the river, despite its lingering cold.

It surely leads to somewhere. It surely, surely does.

To push through this leaden air, so harsh and so heavy, is exhausting. The winds that rip still rip relentlessly, and the claws of it slice through the clothes and past the skin to fill the blood with black fumes, of misery, and weakness, and hopelessness, if such intangible things could be seen and weighed as a growing mound of grit upon a scales. It is like trudging through a sandstorm of evil, that would skin a man and shred his guts, and indeed, slowly, feels to be doing so, but what it assaults is his soul, and not his flesh.

There is no real escaping it. There is simply pushing through, one tiny step by the next.

The slimy weight of corruption, this humidity that is so thick, too permeates through his body. It is like he is sweating sludge inside his flesh, all of sickening, exhausting, and tangibly weighing him down. More than once the prospect of settling to sleep flits through his mind. All that stops him from doing so is the sight of his own feet, and the thought of, ‘well, I can take one more step…’, repeated, ultimately, what must be a thousand times over.

“Verdan," Renard calls, instantly regretful of spending the energy.

“Mm," Verdan hums from somewhere behind him.

“Keep pace," Renard says. It feels a foolish reminder when spoken without specific concerns. Be it only by a small span of footsteps, but Verdan is not pressed up to Kingslayer as himself and Fidel are, and so may not be getting the full benefits of its protection. If so, then the water, which is already chilly enough that Renard’s feet have gone numb, may be even colder and be exacting an even worse exhaustion for Verdan.

Slosh. Slosh. Slosh. Even though Renard slows his own pace, Verdan’s footfalls come so laggard that there is no way he will catch up, unless Renard stops.

Every second not moving is another second that the ripping wind and oozing sludge and hypothermic chill gain ground. To pause does not make one less tired. It just makes one closer to death.

I will shoulder him, too, Renard pledges. His pace for this moment slows even more as he adjusts his hold on Kingslayer, looping the sword around Fidel’s torso to keep a hand free for Verdan. Fidel’s body is warm, though he shudders with fear, and that is not true only of him. Kingslayer’s vibrating remains unshakeably constant. The crimson light that once wafted over the river, by now, has faded completely.

Slosh.

Slosh.

Verdan must be near now! Gritting his teeth in a surge of defiant resolve, Renard shoots his arm out behind him and gropes through the dark to yank Verdan forward. He reaches here, reaches there, but grasps only air, only air—

A short impact upon Renard’s back then shoves him forward. Unprepared for it, he, eyes bulging, stumbles several steps along before recapturing his footing, only barely not tripping into the water as Fidel shoots his good leg out with a yelp.

Verdan, that idiot! Renard curses, but collects his stride.

Slosh.

That idiot! Tears sting like hot needles. Renard does not need to look behind him to know that Verdan is weakening. But even for the growing infrequency of Verdan’s footfalls, and the fading heat of his very presence, and even though a fire rips inside Renard that screams for him to turn back and help him, Renard cannot slow his pace, and cannot turn himself away from procession down the river.

Though they have for weeks now travelled together, Verdan and Renard still do not really know each other. Before this venture, Renard could not say his impression of Verdan was positive — in fact, were he removed from such a dire environment, he would have, until this moment, still hesitated to say much of him that was positive.

But nobody should ever be left behind in such darkness. Nobody! It’s the principle of it!

The stinging tears overflow into burning trails on his cheeks, pain gushing straight out from his heart to the world.

‘Don’t slow down for me.’ How on earth is he supposed to not, Verdan, you brigand! Every sturdy step forward lands like a scalpel in his heart!

And yet, indeed, he can only listen, and cannot slow down.

Do you not have a family, a home, and a kingdom? For the people who love you! Fight! Can you not fight for them? But Verdan has already fought, more than most people ever will.

Fidel, holding a thin breath, freezes in his grip with the realisation they are not turning back for Verdan. For several long, excruciating seconds, the only sound from behind them as they trudge onwards is silence.

Then, a light: slosh…

Hope kindles in Renard’s heart. Yes, just keep going! He pleads, but just as soon as he thinks it, and lands the next step in his stride, the persistent screeching of Verdan’s amulet, which has been holding a single note so shrill it is like a woman suspended in the single moment that a knife plunges into her chest, abruptly shrieks even higher, as that knife, brutally, is ripped out.

For there peals a screeching from out of the darkness, a ‘tlink’ and then a loud ‘ping!’. Like the bursting of heated glass, Verdan’s pendant breaks — and not a second after the fact, there follows, the sound of sick sluicing, of the shedding of pounds of rotten sodden meat that drops off its own bones and splapps to the water, and the sound, distinctly, of a body thudding down.

After that is only the light tinkling of water. As though someone were pissing.

Renard’s throat and chest and eyes strain too tight for the tears to even escape. The trails that do dribble through do so painfully, squeezing against eyeballs like stone and pressing against a throat like a boulder. Renard readjusts his grip on Kingslayer and gulps a slimy breath.

With a mind mute but for the shrilling of stressed steel, and the memory of that shove to his back, Renard holds Fidel tighter, and does not look behind.

The darkness only thickens.

It would be convenient to say that he is fulfilling Verdan’s wishes. Or Orpheus’ wishes. The Queen’s wishes. Pleione’s, or even the Iron King’s — that the hearts of all these people, from different backgrounds and different creeds, but who all found a unity in their belief in Renard, and in their belief thought he could make the most important dream, and the most impossible dream, come true, are being venerated.

But what it truly feels like is that all he has done, in the end, is proceed down a stairway of corpses.

Of which he will be the last.

If before the humidity was cloying, now it is septic. If the winds before were harsh, now they are a hurricane. His feet are numb slabs of meat that he must lug, step by step, with weak boggy muscles, and for the delirious lightness of his mind, perch for these thoughts of failure, his head saws heavy on his neck like an iron ball on a string. Every breath must be wrestled in with strength Renard is finding, more and more, that he doesn’t have, and when his heart kicks in panicked protest of a missed breath, each time, it does so more, and more feebly, that it can be smoothly ignored.

Beyond that all is the claustrophobia: the feeling that the darkness is pressing in, and in, tighter, solid as the walls of a cave, yet utterly intangible, narrowing.

Though his vision tells him the river proceeds onwards as it always has, in the eye of his soul, there is all but a couple feet, then a curtain of impenetrable nothing.

There is no real question that Renard will die shortly. It is a strange division like he has been peeled in halves. His body, choking and sputtering, rattles with fear so profound his entire skin is an earthquake. Yet he has the detachment to be thinking of other things utterly, like the body of him is just a figure he can move like a pawn on a chessboard.

He will betray everyone with his failure. Hopes and aspirations he laid were no pedestal for the heart but a damning chain, and not things he really believed in, but quick bandages for a hurt pride. Indeed, that panic he felt, and those scathing words of virtue that shot from his heart like a geyser so long ago, at that inaugural party toward Orpheus, that started this mess: what were those but a keen, reflexive parry? He is not really much different from a thousand other men whose pious ambitions took them to die.

And what will become of his bones, will he wither to mist in this storm? Please, let it be, that he will never again have to wake, and that any who would find him, would find only the shards of a skeleton, that the only takeaway of his life and only thing to be said would be, here, this is a dead thing.

For, at the end of all this, the only one who will ‘survive’… in a sense, may be Fidel.

Renard refocuses minutely. Fidel is less held than cupped now in his arms, his body dangling in quivering coils. Vestiges of humanity peek sickeningly through a silhouette that is otherwise a near wholly inhuman tangle of… flesh. His leg-brace has shattered; the only thing preventing his complete transformation into a… thing… is proximity to Kingslayer so extreme that, given how violently the blade is shuddering, it is a miracle it has not sliced open his ‘torso’.

Is that the silver lining to this thundercloud? That Renard will fall, and then… Fidel will remember something of good, and slither out into the dark as a worm, and live happy, like that? That Renard took this boy from his home, and that so many people would die, so that he could… be a happy little worm…

Tears sheen and fall from his tired eyes. It is not his trembling hand that holds Kingslayer, but Kingslayer’s quaking that makes his hand tremble. Renard adjusts his hold on Fidel, coiled over his arms, to stop himself from accidentally cutting him — not that it would make a huge difference.

If it could all be so dismal, if it could all have been hopeless, if it could have been an endless string of misery and failure… then maybe, yes, he could have found solace at the thought of Fidel squirming into the dark.

But it wasn’t, was it?

The image of Colette, a child swaddled in her arms, beams into his mind with an intensity that is scalding. It’s not an image that makes him happy. It doesn’t give him strength. No, skulking around in this dark, half flirting with misery, such brightness is merely blinding and painful for the light it shines on his own stupidity. For it was Renard who knew that happiness existed, but chose not to have it. It was him that ultimately, trended back towards anger, and hatred, and pain, and revenge, and hideousness, as has always been his inclination since youth, no matter how much love or virtue or passion he tried to fashion as the wooden boards of his foundation, where others stood by birth on towering, sunlit, marble pedestals.

Even in this darkness, even at his most bitter, he cannot find it in him to hope or believe for even a moment that Colette has died. The stark brightness of her life in this vision against the suffocating, sweaty press of the night, burns, with the resignation that Renard is both exactly where he deserves to be, and the inner frustration that he ought to have seen and known better.

That he did know better. But that he was not good enough for that knowledge to matter.

Frankly, Fidel is disgusting now. Renard may as well let him go, or kill him to kill the implicit insult that a worm’s ‘happiness’ is towards real joy.

But Renard cannot, and instead only holds him tighter, for the prospect of dying alone is too terrifying.

And frankly, Renard could collapse now. His soul is weathered to shreds and his body is sick, heavy, aching, and freezing.

But Renard cannot, for the prospect of stopping at anything short of his actual limit is infuriating.

The darkness and the silence observe like a hall of black-robed judges. Fidel squelches. The water sloshes around his ankles.

Renard suddenly thinks, I don’t want to be a ghoul.

Kingslayer shrieks. It is the same murderous keening as Verdan’s amulet before it burst, and like Verdan, Renard will die the instant this happens. The sword ratchets back and forth in his grip like a weasel being strangled in his fist, though every muscle of every limb in him is also, trembling the same.

I don’t want anyone to be a ghoul. Renard squeezes his eyes closed, under the rain of sweat from his brow, and hugs Fidel so close it has to be crushing him. Any step, any second, will be the last, and in the end Renard cannot boldly face death in the eye, but only cry to himself. I don’t want to be a ghoul.

The darkness is so suffocating.

And on the next step—