When the Angels Fell

Chapter 23

It had been years since Abigail had possessed a physical form. Or minutes. Or maybe even centuries. Time mattered little here, no more than an abstract concept bound to the mercurial whims of the denizens who both ruled over this place and were irrefutably subject to its own capricious nature. Here she was free, all mortal constraints falling away like a cloud of ash in the wind. She could fly up into the limitless void above, or descend gracefully into the haunted abyss below. She was little more than a fleeting presence, as intangible as the wind that would periodically howl around her in a chorus of a thousand shrieking voices. She could go where she pleased, provided none of the larger denizens took more than passing notice of her presence and decided to crush her with the same ease most people swatted a fly.

At present, if such a word could be applied, she was hovering midway between the void and the basalt plains that stretched endlessly in all directions. Physically she was alone, but always she could hear whispers, fleeting and half-heard. They had begun the moment she had arrived and had not left her alone since, however long that may be. The constant noise had almost driven her mad initially, when she had been scared and confused, a stranger to this realm of infinite night. However, such human emotions had quickly been eclipsed by an overwhelming sense of freedom, of limitless possibility.

A shadow, impossibly black even against the omnipresent void, fell across her and she looked up. One of the larger beasts, formidable in its own right but still enslaved to another yet more powerful, was drifting languidly on invisible currents that seemed to propel it in the same way as the tides of the sea. The distance between them, which Abigail was careful to maintain, made rendering details impossible; she could make out a great mass of tentacles writhing blindly, amid which nestled the barest suggestion of a lumpen, spherical body. She blinked and when her eyes opened again the beast was gone, already drifting off towards the distant horizon, subject to the whims of a dimension where the conventional laws of space and time were mere playthings to a myriad of otherworldly influences.

The creature passed overhead without paying her the slightest bit of attention, and its vast shadow trailed over the horizon in pursuit. After floating indecisively for what could have been seconds or minutes, Abigail chose to follow the creature. It was drifting in what could, in any physical dimension, be described as northward, with Abigail floating just close enough to keep it within her line of sight. As the pair floated, the landscape beneath them began to change; flat basalt rising up to form jagged peaks that slanted upwards like the broken teeth of a long-forgotten god. They rose higher and higher, forcing Abigail to adjust her course in mid-air to avoid a painful collision. The creature she was following had no such difficulties, dissolving into a thick black mist every time it passed through one of the jagged spires and reforming a short distance away.

After what seemed like a long journey through this broken terrain, the creature began to descend, as slowly and gracefully as a whale in the deep ocean. Swerving to avoid another basalt peak, Abigail stopped dead at the sight in front of her. The rocky spires simply dropped away, forming a near-vertical slope that descended into a vast, perfectly smooth crater, which loomed like a bottomless void in the landscape.

It was towards this that the creature seemed to be moving, Abigail hovering motionless and watching as it sank lower and lower. Once it reached the rim of the abyss, it did not seem to simply descend into the darkness. Rather, it became the darkness, its formerly defined form running like hot wax, until it had been completely submerged into the pit.

Seized by a sudden irresistible urge to get a closer look, Abigail shook herself out of her momentary inactivity and began to descend. She had no intention of entering the pit itself, which seemed to radiate a malevolent aura that washed over her like a flood of icy water. Instead, she alighted on a protruding spar of rock that overlooked the abyss, and stood motionless on the edge, staring down into the blackness. The longer she looked, the more she was certain that the pit was staring back. Indeed, the cold that was washing over her suddenly sharpened, as though she had drawn the attention of whatever was beneath her.