Void's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

The shard sat quiet in Void's palm, but the work still waited. He had named what he wanted. He had no way to build it. The cure needed raw stock tied to soul-work, and nothing he owned could hold the shard's pull. He had tried. Clay cracked. Iron bent. A bone charm split down its length when he brought the shard near. He needed material that would not break, and he knew only one place to ask. He climbed to the black cave where Gotim waited. Gotim sat deep in the obsidian hollow, playing a slow line on a dark guitar. He did not look up. Void had come to him twice before, afraid both times. Gotim had warned him then: choose, or the iron stops mattering. Now Void stood at the mouth of the cave with that choice made and nothing to show for it. "I named what I want," Void said. "The binding holds. But everything I touch to it breaks." Gotim set the guitar down. "Then you brought weak things." He stood and crossed to a cabinet cut from shadow. Four bottles waited on its shelf. "Weak things crack. The right ones do not." Void looked at the four. The first held dark energy, purple and swirling, crystals sunk at its base. It pulled at the shard the moment he neared it. "That one is me," he said. "My own essence." Gotim nodded once. "Choose the rest," Gotim said. "The dark alone will eat itself." Void reached for the vial of white-hot light. It burned clean, the same clean flame he had named in the mirror. He set it beside the dark. Then the bottle of packed earth, brown and solid, something to root against. Last, the round bottle with the night sky inside and the word for soul inked across the glass. He lined all four on the stone. "The dark is what I am," Void said. "The light is what I want to be. The earth holds me down. The soul keeps me here." He looked at Gotim. "If I mix them, the shard has something to pull on that will not crack." "Then mix," Gotim said. Void uncorked the dark first and poured it into a wide black bowl. He added the light. The two did not fight. They turned slow and gray, then settled. He poured the earth, and the mix thickened and held its shape. Last the soul, sky and crystal sliding in. The whole thing went still and warm. He lowered his shard-hand toward it. The pull came hard. The mix did not crack. It drank the pull and held, steady under his palm. Void let out a long breath. He had his material at last. But the bowl was raw stock, not a cure. He had the thing that would hold the shard. Now he had to learn the shaping that would end the hunger before the thaw broke the leash.