Gotim's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Gotim steps from the throne room into the cold air of Frostshade. The shadows at his feet follow him like water finding a slope. He lifts a small device from his belt, a round thing of metal and glass that hums against his palm. Its lens spins open, and a purple swirl forms inside it. The radar reads the currents, and the currents are bleeding. Something has torn the dark open. Not the crown's careless bearer this time. Something else. A failed ritual, close by, its edges still smoking in the unseen layers. Gotim follows the reading. He does not hurry. He never hurries. He finds the wound at the edge of a ruined mansion's east wing. A tall column of swirling shadow rises from the broken floor, twisting up into the night. It is not a doorway. It is a tear. He studies it the way a surgeon studies a cut. Through the breach, he feels the shape of two who were there before him — a mirror-girl and the hungry one beside her. Their names sit in his mind without weight. Mary. Void. They tried to bind hunger to flesh, and hunger refused. The radar pulses harder. Gotim turns. A trail leads away from the tear, carved into the frozen ground. Wherever the escaped hunger has passed, it has left a pit ringed in jagged stone teeth, full of dark water. Each pit points the same direction. Toward the crown. Toward the bearer he will not name. Gotim kneels at the nearest maw. He places his clawed hand into the cold water and speaks one word into it. The shadows in the pit go still. He cannot stop the hunger from reaching the crown. It is too far ahead, and it moves through layers he would have to tear himself to follow. So he does not try to stop it. He listens to it instead. He learns its scent. He rises. The hunger will arrive at the crown before he does, and the crown will feed it, and the unworthy bearer will grow worse. That is the cost of this hour. But Gotim now has a thread to follow that does not lie, a trail of pits that lead straight to what he wants. He lowers the radar and begins to walk.