When All is Null and Void

Chapter Forty-Two

Really, it was as if she'd wanted him to waltz in here and take a look at her private documents.

Titus scrolled and scrolled, until he couldn't make sense of the information he went past. After a few minutes he realized each file had been named for a date, not only a random stream of numbers and, feeling rather stupid, he scrolled back toward the top. His mom had collected nearly ten years' worth of video footage from the lab.

It was on the second time through the data Titus saw the file named Carter. He'd been scrolling too quickly the first time to notice the difference between the letters and the numbers, but he tapped on it before he'd even finished reading the word. Anything named after his own father was a file he wanted to see.

Titus glanced at the door before letting the video play. Biting his cheek, he stood from the desk chair and wedged the trash can in front of the door, if only to give himself an extra moment to close out any data should his mom walk in unannounced. Back in the desk chair, he leaned over the footage.

It began mid-moment, as if his mom had chosen to delete anything leading up to it. The lab was just as familiar to Titus, though the lights were lower than they normally were. When Titus noticed the two identical archways of darkness facing each other from opposite sides of the room, he understood that the lights weren't lowered at all, but nearly blotted out. Like black flames, skeins of darkness filtered across the room. Titus used his pointer fingers to expand the footage so he wouldn't have to squint to make out the details of the scene. The entire desk filled with the footage, and specifics he couldn't see before came to clarity.

Titus hadn't seen his dad since he was little, and seeing him now deadened his senses. The concept of a father was a distant thing to him, and though Titus had always dreamed that his dad wasn't actually dead, he'd grown so accustomed to only having his mom that he couldn't bring himself to feel anything of particular note. Raising the volume of the footage, Titus focused on what his mom was saying. "Once you're done, you should return on the other side of the room."

Carter cast his mom a look that Titus knew he made often. "We've done this before, Rhea." His smile was radiant, and he immediately turned toward the archway of darkness. "I'll be back with the gold in a minute." He strode into the furthest archway, and Titus' stomach clenched into a ball. The ice-cold darkness that always filled Titus when he only reached into the Void was enough to buckle his knees. The thought that his own father had just walked in without a second thought...Titus shivered for him.

"Rhea..." Carter's voice was muffled in the monitors.

Titus watched as his mom's eyes widened and a grin spread out over her face. "Keep going, Carter," she called.

"I think this will have to be the last time we do this," came Carter's voice over the speakers. Somehow it sounded younger, the older baritone replaced with a more lyrical sound--eerily similar to Titus' own.

"What do you mean?" Rhea put a finger to her chin. She was staring toward the archways of the Void, glancing between them every other second.

"It's a...it's not..." but Carter couldn't seem to find the words to describe.

"Carter, keep going and come through the other side."

"I don't see the other doorway. I can see the gold, can see it, but something isn't right."

Rhea walked across the room to the opposite archway. Her eyes narrowed, and then Titus saw what she saw. Tiny fragments of light had spider-webbed across the portal and was slowly disintegrating. "Carter," Rhea said. "Turn around and come back. Right now."

"You don't understand. This is--" the audio cut off.

"Carter?" Rhea turned back to the first archway. "Carter, answer me."

Both doorways were falling apart. Light was tearing away large sections of the darkness. Until one was gone, and the other was only a single, solitary frame of black. Rhea ran to it, but when she moved to reach into the Void, her hand stopped, as if her fingers had touched nothing more than mirrored glass. In the depths of that darkness, her reflection stared back at her.

"All of time will fall to the reign of Loss."

The voice that spoke was horrible. Glass shattering and metal grinding against metal.

Rhea had frozen, her hand against the looking glass of black. It pooled under her hand until a single skein of darkness escaped from beneath and grew along the far wall. It formed and morphed until the shadow of a beast reared up and screeched. "You have stolen from me and the door has been cracked. You have released darkness into time. And it will feed and it will grow."

Titus slammed against the exit button. The voice reached into him and scraped against his ears, setting a trembling in his gut. Shutting his eyes, Titus bit his lip hard enough to illicit a stream of blood. He shoved back from the desk and stumbled out of the office, the trash bin falling over in his haste.

"What's wrong?" His mom's voice brought Titus from the stupor that had cascaded over him

"Dad died because..."

Rhea glanced toward her office. "It wasn't purposeful. Your dad and I...we were working together."

"I understand that," Titus said, breaking free from her hug. "I don't understand why you had to do it in the first place. Why can't you just be satisfied with what you have?"

"I am. We were. But we needed to make new rings."

Titus wasn't listening. He could only think about the times he'd reached into the Void, because his mom had wanted to improve the rings. The fact that his dad was dead because the rings needed something they didn't have. He walked off, down the hallway. His mom didn't follow him.