Bereft: Foretold

44 | A Prideful Man

There was no sense of urgency or time in that place, but the spirit felt its passage with keen attention. The one called Veleph explained how time flowed in both directions here, a river with tides wholly of its own discretion. Hours coursed into days, days coursed into hours, and sometimes it held still. The spirit felt the river wind its waters through that place of nothingness, and knew she had been there too long and yet not long enough.

The one called Veleph grew weary after many days—or hours—of travel through the static dark of the void. He answered the spirit's questions in his patient manner, ever ready with a word to urge her onward, and confessed to a certain lassitude of his own spirit. The spirit understood he was not as she was and that he did not belong in this place. She didn't belong in this place either, but his exclusion was different. He explained the idea of a projection, a thought made corporeal in the void where being and unbeing could be interchangeable, and expressed how their travels here exhausted him.

When she asked why, he simpered and said, "Too thin, little one. I've stretched myself too thin pushing my thoughts into the void while giving my attention elsewhere. A realm must be led, even one so disorderly as the Pit, and my voice must be given to my agent in the real. Many roads with many destinations, and I must walk them all."

The spirit contemplated his meaning and remembered the words. Though she kept dropping threads, she remembered more of his words. The spirit remembered more of herself.

'Ere they journeyed too long into the nothing and lost themselves to its malicious ministrations, the one called Veleph led the spirit to a place where the void was not as prevalent, where its existence and nonexistence were thrown into questionable disarray. A world became visible beyond their own, a world of bruised shadow and wavering light, but a world of substance all the same.

The spirit stood on a blackened mountaintop, separated from the real by a thin membrane at the void's end. They were there, but not there, only looking, like fish coming to the shallows of murky waters without actually touching the surface. The mountaintop was ringed in tall stones like fingers of the ascending dead poking through the upturned earth, each fingertip set alight with immense, roiling energy.

One among the fingers was calm, its energy harmonized into a single, shimmering thread that parted the void and disappeared to somewhere else. The others were not in settled states, clutching and twisting far too many threads about themselves until they appeared as a tangled web that frazzled the void's corners. Each finger plucked and plied its threads, sorting through them, searching for a melody like a jaded musician seeking to sooth its unquenchable need.

The spirit did not much like this place. The fingers pulled at her—yanked and pinched, pried and scratched. They attempted to change her song to fit their own, and she did not like that.

A man appeared at the mouth of the path leading down from the mountaintop. He was a man and yet not a man: he was a spirit like her, walking on the other side of the void, in the real. He was a tall creature with dark hair and a strained expression, a tiny spark of something silver clutched in his fist. As the spirit and the one called Veleph watched, he ran to one of the fingers, mountain the crooked steps, and came to where the rock was depressed and contoured into repose, the place where the energy pooled the most.

The other spirit—the man—thrust the silver object into the energy and shouted a name.

The one called Veleph stirred, a twisted wing curling about the spirit to draw her closer to his side. He laid a hand against her back and bent nearer her ear, his eyes still on the man. "He's going to die."

"He is?" The spirit frowned as a curious sensation gripped her middle.

Veleph nodded and continued to speak in a conversational tone. "Yes."