Void's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

Void left the obsidian guardian's hollow with a deadline sunk into his palm. He did not go home. He walked east until the frost gave way to bare stone and the stone gave way to a stair he had found once by accident and never spoken of. The portal stood at the top of it, a tall arch of dark rock set with cracked mirrors. Its center held a slow black wheel. He had come here before to think. Tonight he needed more than thinking. He climbed the steps and sat cross-legged on the last one. The shard on his palm was quiet. Gotim's work still held. Void set his hand flat on the cold stone and looked into the wheel. The mirrors around it caught pieces of him and gave them back wrong. In one he had no horns. In one his hand was clean. He made himself stare at the clean one until it hurt. "Cured or quiet," he said aloud. His breath showed. The wheel did not answer. He had expected that. He had come to ask himself. A shape drifted out of the wheel. Small, many-limbed, colors moving under its skin like water under ice. Its eyes were two yellow lamps. It settled on the step beside him without weight. He had seen creatures spill from this gate before. They did not usually stay. "Do you want it gone," the creature said. Its voice was his own, thinned. "Yes." "Say the rest." He could not. He thought of Mary in the pentagram, and the bones under her feet. He thought of the hunger easing in him after it fed, the shame of that ease. Quiet would mean he kept the shape of it inside him, sealed and useful. Cured would mean cutting out a thing he had lived inside since he was born. He did not know what would be left. "I want it quiet," he said. "Because I am afraid of who I am without it." The creature tilted its head. "Then the leash breaks at the thaw." "I know." He drew the black knife from his belt. Obsidian, veined with pale swirls. He had carried it a long time and never used it. He set the edge to his palm beside the shard and cut a thin line. Blood ran onto the iron. He spoke the choice again, plainly this time. "Cured. Not quiet. Even if there is nothing under it." The shard went warm. Not hot. Warm the way a held hand is warm. The weight in it shifted, no lighter, but his to carry. The creature stood. It walked into the wheel and was gone. Void closed his hand around the knife and the shard together. The leash would hold to the thaw now. After that he would need a cure, and he had just promised himself he would find one.