Sun's Heart

Chapter 13 - Within the Rift

Gale groaned and forced her eyes open. Her ears, ringing from battle seconds ago, now rang from grave silence. Grit coated her face and hid between her lips. She spat out a mouthful of sand. Faint trickling rained from her clothing with the stirring of sore muscles, dumping more sand on the ground. Scrubbing a scraped palm over her scalp, sand whispered from her short hair onto the stones beneath her.

Square-cut, smoothed and rounded. Too perfect for natural formation, not perfect enough to be carved with tools. Made of something she'd never seen before. Iridescent black, shimmering gray within. A pale light like a star captured within the tiles.

Stone scraped on stone, and she was scrambling back before she had time to think. With eyes like endless tunnels lit by a dying candle, a man made of living night hunched over his legs just feet away. Seeing her wide eyes and fearful apprehension, he stood to his full height with liquid motions and stepped once toward her. The scraping sound followed him. She lowered her brows and squinted at him. There wasn't any light to see by except that which pulsed within the hearts of the stones beneath her, but she saw him as clearly as if the sun was high above.

Ribcage and collarbones stuck out, edges and corners lining limbs while his hands dangled limp by his sides. Skeletal fingers hung akimbo, his feet appearing larger for the lack of fat anywhere else. For all the darkness and hollow eye sockets where dim starlight glowed from far away, he looked like a regular person, perhaps one who hadn't seen a full meal in weeks. Except he wasn't.

There was no life in that gaze. Nothing to indicate the thing in front of her was in any way conscious of her.

Her master had owned a painting, back in Ternsill. A drab and somber thing with little color. Whenever she was forced to walk past it, she hunched her shoulders and rushed past with uneasy footsteps as her heart raced. But its eyes would follow her.

Ridiculous, of course.

Even for one such as her, uneducated and illiterate, she'd known paintings could do nothing except decorate walls and elicit emotions. But more uncomfortable than a watcher's hostile stare, is the stare of something that holds neither life nor intention.

Her skin crawled more the longer she watched him watch her.

He was probably the same thing she'd felt grab her arm when the shadowbeasts attacked. On her way back to Wil, determined to be useful in some way, fingers like fire closed around her upper arm, pulling her into nothing as the air bent around her. The knife she'd borrowed was on the ground beside her. Smeared in black. She grabbed it and shoved it into the back of her belt, eyes on the shadow man.

The space she was in, not quite a place and not quite nothing, shivered like a leaf. She stumbled, caught herself on raw palms. The creature remained standing, a subtle shifting of stance following the tremor the only movement he'd made thus far. She lowered her brows and cautiously kept her eyes on him.

"Staring won't make it go away." A woman's voice, muffled like she was speaking into a pillow, came from all around. No echoes from the shadow-shrouded ceiling so high above she couldn't see it. A hand touched her shoulder, eliciting a gasp. It was a young woman, haggard and aged beyond her years. She didn't smile, or soften the coldness in her face. Across her forehead were pale blue and silver tattoos. "Why are you here?"

Gale blinked, looked back at the shadow man, and finally stood and faced her. "N-not sure. You?" Her voice sounded different. It was also stifled, though she didn't feel any kind of obstruction in front of her mouth.

The woman flicked eyes behind her, turned, and began striding away with arms crossed.

She quickly followed with footsteps as muffled as her words. "Wait!"