Bereft: Demise

11 | Of Languishing Madmen

The dinner was not like any I had ever attended before. I knew I would remember it for the rest of my days—as numbered as they were.

I couldn't recall what I ate, only that a plate was shoved before me and I held the tarnished silver of a fork in my hand. The werewolves ate as you would expect werewolves to eat: loudly, and in great quantities. Different sects of the Aos Sí seemed to enjoy the company of the wolves. They laughed when Thomas banged the bottom of the table and set off a chorus of drunken howls. Those Aos Sí had meat in their bowls, sharp teeth flashing between their lips as they gnawed on bones.

The other Aos Sí didn't approve of Thomas, Gavin, or their buffoonery. They scoffed and dabbed their napkins to their mouths in a show of sophisticated solidarity, their plates bearing a selection of herbs and dark, hearty greens without a single scrap of meat between them. Their slender ears glittered with precious cuffs of metal and gems.

The witches got along well with the wolves, eating and drinking their fill while adding to the general volume of the rabble. Through gathered bits of their conversations, I learned the two witches were Mattie's daughters, Melissa and Matilda, both in the Aradia Coven with their mother acting as the coven's leader, or Mistress.

Anzel ate nothing. He drank wine and only touched his food to artfully move it about the plate as if he were eating, but the fork never rose to his mouth. He watched me, watched Darius. Once, he leaned back, beckoning to Elias standing at the wall behind him so he could whisper something in the other Vytian's ear.

While the wolves howled, the Vytian schemed, and the Aos Sí simpered, the monster in the guise of a teenage boy stared at Pride and me.

I knew I'd never forget the dinner because of how keenly aware I was of Gluttony's attention centered upon me. His black eyes never blinked, never flickered. He watched like a fox watches a rabbit holding still in the bush, praying the fox would overlook it.

"Why is he staring?" I murmured as I ripped a piece of sourdough into crumbs, purposefully looking anywhere but at Anzel or Berour.

Darius didn't answer. He drank from his stolen carafe as the muscles twitched in his jaw.

"Why is he here if he's not supposed to be?"

"Because he's mad," he grumbled. "Madder than the rest of us, at least." 

"Peroth doesn't seem to mind," I replied, eyeing my empty cup. Peroth never turned to speak with Berour, but he was obviously aware of the other Sin's presence. It was impossible not to be.

"He can do nothing to keep him out."

"What do you mean?"

The Sin took my glass and promptly filled it. "The ward isn't physical. If it was, it would keep out all creatures and not just my kind. It acts upon the complexity of the soul. It...sifts people. The runes poured into the ward read a soul's intricacies. It listens.

"I told you the ward is comprised of a thin veil of the void. The void has no mass, no material. It is not something we can physically grasp. It is made of the utter absence of sound and motion."

"I don't understand."

Darius muttered something under his breath but nonetheless continued. "Think of a dark room. You may say the room is filled by darkness, when—in truth—the room is filled with nothing. There is no such thing as darkness, only an absence of light. The same can be said of heat. There is no such thing as cold, only an absence of heat. That absence is so complete it becomes. The void is the utter absence of motion, of energy, of sound. And so it, too, becomes."