The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty

He could feel it on his skin, even through the four hardened layers of his aged and battle-tested protective armor, he could feel it. The darkness. It was an entity in and of itself, an actual presence as opposed to merely being a condition of visual acuity or of optical luminance. It crept around them like an unfriendly feline, athletically balletic and predatory. It was cool and the touch did not linger, retreating quickly away to the recesses of sensation, but it was there, undeniable, and it was silken, seductive and somehow, on an unreasoning primitive level, reassuring. It wasn't the blackness of space nor was it the mysteriousness of extreme shadow. It was the hollow absence of Life. It was the touch of Nothingness, lazy waves of gray emptiness rolling in to lap at the shores of a forgotten beach.

D'Spayr didn't like it, he didn't trust it even though some dim part of his consciousness, some simple and uncritical part of his waking mind, found it to be appealing.

He knew it came from her, the partly cybernetic, partly mutant, partly alien, woman-thing that coiled in front of he and his comrades like a supine, passive constrictor snake. The darkness was a part of her. It was a very large and hungry, very malignant and antagonistic part.

Worse, it was a part of her that found him attractive, that established a communion with the murkiness in his own hidden depths, a kindred spirit. It wanted to join with him.

D'Spayr had been tested by the repugnant allure of the malevolent on other occasions in his life and he'd managed to never fall prey to that seductive corruption, but it was something that had always made him extremely uncomfortable. It was a rare man, especially in D'Spayr's line of work, who wasn't honest enough to admit to himself that his dark side was something akin to a caged beast waiting for release. There were memorable episodes in the Knight's past where he had momentarily descended into the depths of his own innate savagery and been forced into a fight to regain his moral equilibrium, but this feeling he was experiencing with the Lazulux was somehow different...

It was as if being in close proximity to her psychic mental influence was magnifying the violent beast that lurked within him. And that feeling, that realization, kept him from being totally sympathetic to her condition and her plight --- any being that could stir such wrathful and malicious passions simply through their physical proximity was not a creature to be trusted.

The Knight was also aware of the myriad collection of runny and molten, inky things lurking in the depths of the twilight murk surrounding him and his comrades, dread and dire sentient opacities that were watching their confrontation with the Laukenmass Lazulux. The shapeless stygian and aphotic things hiding behind the optical overlay of outer space that was the backdrop for their meeting were other aspects of the Lazulux's mentality ---

They were the part of her that had descended into madness.

Enemies, the dark things were enemies.

"This One has learned much in this life, and most of it was knowledge she had never dreamt This One would acquire while other of it was composed of things she never wanted to learn at all," she said, her voice at once dispassionate, on its surface, and yet painted with subtle colorations of bitterness and melancholy. There was an air of detachment about her as she spoke, as if she were more an observer than a participant in the strange sequence of events to which she related to the small band. They were surrounded by a shifting landscape of the mind, an island of both dream and memory, as, inside a fluidic blister in space, they drifted along the eddying, free-floating, bifurcated stream of UnTime in which the Lazulux had placed them. "These things This One experienced, they aren't logical nor are they linear. They happen again and again, with subtle changes, as if the events were still being written, or perhaps re-written, impacted by external stimuli or by colliding and intersecting parallel incidents. There are occasions when, she must admit, This One is not entirely able to guarantee that these are things that have happened to her, or because of her, or outside of her. The pain, though, This One can be absolutely sure about that. But that is because of you, isn't it, Rarbuji'i Koraevenus? It is because of the wounds you have given This One, because of the irreversible nature of the damage you caused her..."