Bereft: Demise

61 (pt. 1) | Of a Fallen Voice

Awareness returned in hesitant, trickling increments. It filled me with a pounding ache, as if the cup of my mind had been dry for so long it didn't know what to make of this new sensation. My eyes fluttered, open but unfocused, and I felt hard floor beneath my hands as I lifted myself up.

I sat within a hall of black marble, dressed in a gown of smooth, unrumpled silk. There were no windows but for the ones at the hall's end, and beyond those smoked panes I saw nothing but wavering blue flames. Twin pits flanked the walkway, and pillars raised the arched roof and dropped into oblivion in those untenable depths. Before me the hall stretched, and situated at its middle was a long table of thick, dark stone. There were two chairs. One of them was occupied.

I wouldn't have called his chair anything less than a throne. It, too, was comprised of that glossy, black material I didn't have a name for, a stone so dark it devoured light. The throne was situated upon a dais at the table's head, and when the Baal stood from its depths, the shadow of his warped, broken wings fell upon me.

"A dangerous gambit, little shadeborn," the King Below said as he descended the dais and those warped appendages disintegrated into the dark. I could see little of his countenance, silhouetted as he was against the windows bathed in flames. "Handing your mind over to a shade and expecting to get it back. Dangerous."

He lacked his usual cloak of night and chittering, half-mad things—but I sensed larger bodies moving unseen in the dark, trailing their master like well-tamed hounds.

Those rigid fractals of light and color roved through the air. This was a dream, but not a dream. A vision, of sorts. It had to be some kind of power of his to step into my nightmares with such ease.

My thoughts were raw and savaged, but my mind felt...whole. Sluggish, but whole.

"What...what is this place?" I asked as I managed to get my feet underneath myself. The floor was ice cold.

The Baal paused as he walked and tapped his talons along the length of the table. "Home."

Home? I looked at the ancient hall made of nothing but black stone and the yawning darkness surrounding us. The only light came from those fires outside and the dim braziers hanging from chains on the ceiling. Home. A throne fit for a king of shadows. "We're in the Pit."

"To be precise, you're still in that cell." He cocked his head and spoke as if commenting on the weather and not my certain doom. "I thought it kinder to bring your mind here, away from the pain. The loss. The devastation."

"As if you know anything about kindness." I touched my wounded side—but found nothing there. No wound, no ache. The Baal controlled every aspect of my being within this dream-like state.

"I beg to differ. I know much of kindness, and much of cruelty." Tap, tap, screech. His talons raked the table's surface. Those burning eyes of his glowed in the blackness.

Despite the unease pervading me, I allowed anger to infiltrate my voice. I had a lot of anger and rage boiling in my gut after what had happened to me. God, I prayed my parents were okay. I prayed I woke up soon.

"If you know so much about kindness, then fucking do something!" I snarled, stomping one bare foot onto the cold, cold floor. "Do something! Do something for Darius and Peroth! Stop Balthier!"

The Baal didn't react to my anger. He registered my words with the same permissive smirk upon his lips. "You mistake kindness for indulgence, and judge my children by the standards of your mortality. You think me cruel for not punishing or killing Balthazar, when he is but a small hurtle in what is to come. His behavior is that of a child compared to what I guard against."