Engineer's Empire

Engineer's Empire: Aether and Abyss: Chapter 23

Chapter 23

It began with the sound of wet tearing, and a scream.

A hand emerged from sheer darkness. It dug into the ground until the nails tore and the fingers bled. Then it pulled a man through the membrane of liquid shadow. If the color spectrum of pitch black could dial down several shades darker, and radiate pure hatred, it would look and feel something like this. Even the figures in black stepped away as they could feel something angry and unnatural pulse from within the growing shadow.

As the man pulled through pure absence of light, it clung to him in sheets and tendrils as he wrenched free of its twisting grasp. Once through, he fell forward writhing on the ground in pain, his limbs and body shaking all over. His screams would haunt Slade's nightmares for years to come.

The man was covered in oozing tendrils of black sludge. Long greasy black hair hung about his head, obscuring his eyes. A wild, unkempt beard and mustache covered his face further. Everyone stared at the man as he stood, the liquid darkness dripping from his body. The big man in the brown and white stammered.

"Who... how?" he began to say. The man from the void looked up. From between the mangled, greasy clumps of black hair, two shiny black orbs glimmered in the dim light. He peered about the battlefield, his head tilted. It appeared as though he were listening for something rather than looking for it.

Then, he turned and ran.

"After him!" the one eyed man shouted.

"We need to withdraw and get help!" one of his companions yelled back.

"There isn't time," the one eyed man yelled back, already running. The dark clad figures blocked their path and the fighting resumed again. Runciman had made his way around the nearby walls and cut off the shadow man's retreat. Slade ran to keep up. Runciman held out his staff, the blue gem glowing.

"Halt! You're not activating any of these machines!" Runciman called out. The man dripped with liquid darkness from his eyes, ears, mouth and the rest of his body. Tatters of clothes hung beneath it, but every part of him oozed with oily liquid. The man's head tilted as he stared at Runciman with black, twinkling eyes.

"Runciman?" the man croaked. The ground shook with the force of the battle behind him.

"Alistair...?" Runciman asked, reeling in horror.

"Where have you been all this time?" Runciman asked once he had collected himself.

"Writhing in agony in the realm of desolation, where you all left me," Alistair growled, his voice like grating stone.

"We had no idea you survived. We would have come to find you," Runciman said, his voice quivering.

"And yet you didn't. Me nor Grainye. He killed her slowly, made me watch. That was... many years ago now... where were you?" Alistair demanded.

"We've been on the run. The emperor banished us," Runciman answered. Alistair laughed, a haunting, grating sound.

"So you left me, and your patron turned on you. What happens next will be sheer poetry," Alistair said, moving forward once more. Runciman held out his staff, the blue gem glowing bright.

"You will not unleash that place upon this world," Runciman warned.

"It's already begun," Alistair said. Alistair raises his hands before him and Runciman found himself engulfed in liquid darkness. He swung with the staff, knocking back the darkness, and firing blue light to make it recede. New tendrils and waves of the darkness would wash over him as he swung and fired, trying to keep it at bay. At last he pointed the staff at Alistair.