Void's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Void came back to the portal three nights later. The oath in his palm had gone quiet, but the shard stayed cold and dead. He had spoken the words. He had cut his hand. Still the work stayed theory on paper. Gotim had warned him the leash would hold only if his intent was true. The oath now demanded proof, and Void did not have it. He knew what he had said. He did not yet know what he wanted. He climbed the red steps and stood before the black wheel. Three mirrors leaned against the stone at its base. He had not brought them. Something had. The first was obsidian, veined green like cracked ice. The second held a red flame with a black core, painted onto the glass. The third was the same flame, drops of red running down from it like blood. "Ask them," said his own thinned voice, though no creature showed itself. "They know what you hide." Void did not trust them. Mirrors here gave him back wrong. One had shown him clean hands he did not have. He knelt before the obsidian glass. His fear rose in it. He saw himself hollow, a husk with nothing inside, the hunger cut out and no self left behind. He made himself look. "That is what I am afraid of," he said. "Not proof." He turned to the mirror with the running blood. The red flame pulsed, black at its center. He watched it feed and ease, the way his hunger eased after it took from someone. Shame turned in him. He knew this shape. He had lived inside it. He wanted to keep it because it was warm and it was his. "That is not a cure," he said to the glass. "That is wanting to be fed." He looked at the last mirror, the flame without the blood. It burned clean. And he understood what he wanted, plainly, for the first time. Not silence. Not the hollow husk. He wanted to feel desire and take nothing from it. He wanted the warmth without the harm. He wanted to sit with someone and hold only his own weight. "I want to stop feeding on people," he said. "That is all. Not to be empty. To be safe to touch." The shard on his palm woke. It went warm, then hot, then warm again. A thin line of light ran through it and settled. The oath had its proof. What had been theory on paper moved into his hand and held. The three mirrors cracked at once and fell to dust. The wheel turned slow and dark. Void stood. The cure was no longer an idea he read about. It was a thing he wanted, named and true, and the binding had accepted it. Now he needed the method to match the want, before the thaw came to break the leash.