A Vow of Vengeance and Silk

The silence was worse than the screaming. 

Seraphine's ears popped as the vacuum of sound pressed in around them, the absence of noise somehow more deafening than any explosion. Her heartbeat thundered in her skull, each pulse sending fresh waves of pain through her temples that made her vision swim. Beside her, Kaelan gasped like a drowning man breaking surface, his glowing scars flickering erratically across his bare chest like a guttering candle. Rook had rolled onto his side, his fingers digging into the strange, spongy ground that wasn't earth but felt disturbingly like living flesh beneath his nails. "Who disturbs the Devourer's slumber?" The voice wasn't a voice at all. It slithered through the air without sound, coming from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The words simply existed in their minds, vibrating in their bones and teeth like the aftershock of a colossal bell, leaving their eardrums intact but their sanity frayed. 

Before them, the impossible chasm exhaled. 

A wave of freezing mist rolled over the edge in slow motion, coalescing into a towering figure that defied all laws of anatomy. Its limbs had too many joints, bending in directions that made Seraphine's stomach revolt. Its face shifted like smoke trapped under glass—one moment a beautiful youth with golden curls, the next a wizened crone with hollow cheeks, then something entirely inhuman with too many eyes and a mouth that split vertically down its face in a grotesque parody of a smile. Kaelan staggered to his feet, using their still-joined hands to drag Seraphine up with him. His palm burned against hers, their combined glow forming a fragile bubble of golden light in the oppressive dark that pulsed in time with their racing heartbeats. "Show yourself," he demanded, though his voice shook with something deeper than fear. The figure laughed, a sound like glass shattering underwater, distant yet piercing. "I am." It gestured languidly to the field of Kaelan faced corpses around them, to the black sun above that bled dark rays, to the chasm yawning at its feet that seemed to breathe. "All of this is me. And none of it." Its form flickered like a candle in the wind. "I am the dream the universe forgot upon waking." 

A sudden jerk on Seraphine's other arm made her yelp. Rook was pulling her back with desperate strength, his remaining arrows clutched in a white-knuckled grip. The fletching trembled against his calloused fingers. "We need to run," he hissed, his voice raw with terror. "Now. Before it…." The figure's head rotated 180 degrees to regard Rook, its neck twisting like wet rope. "Run where, little hunter?" it asked with mock curiosity. "There is no where here. Only before," it gestured to their feet where the ground remembered their weight, "and after." It extended a hand that kept growing, elongating until its too long fingers brushed Rook's forehead with terrible gentleness. "Would you like to see your after?" Rook's scream tore through the silence as his body arched backward at an impossible angle, his boots leaving the ground as he floated in the air. Visions flashed across his skin like projected images, Seraphine saw herself in a dozen terrible futures, some armored in blackened bone, others rotting from the inside out; saw Kaelan crowned in living flames that ate his flesh as fast as it regenerated; saw cities reduced to screaming meat that still somehow lived and begged for death. "Stop!" Seraphine lunged forward without thought, her shadow blade forming in a burst of pain as it tore free from her scar. The weapon sliced through the figure's wrist with a sound like a thousand pages tearing simultaneously. The severed hand dissolved into smoke before hitting the ground. The figure examined its stump with detached curiosity, tilting its head as new fingers sprouted like worms from the maimed limb. "Interesting." Its shifting eyes locked onto Seraphine with terrifying focus. "You carry a piece of me inside you, little queen. A shard of the broken whole." Kaelan stepped between them, his free hand igniting with golden fire that cast long, dancing shadows across the corpse-field. "Enough games." His voice was steel wrapped in velvet. "What do you want?" The figure's shifting faces settled, briefly, into something resembling Lyrith's features, though twisted in ways no human face should bend. "Want?" It chuckled, the sound echoing inside their skulls. "I want what all prisoners want. Freedom." It gestured elegantly to the bone crown fragments embedded in Kaelan's scars that pulsed in time with its words. "Your ancestors were clever jailers. They divided my essence," it touched its chest, "locked it away in willing flesh." Its smile widened impossibly, splitting its head nearly in two. "But keys turn both ways." A tremor ran through the ground, making the corpses around them twitch as if remembering life. Their Kaelan-faced masks cracked like eggshells, revealing the same shifting darkness beneath that dripped like liquid night. Seraphine's shadow blade pulsed in time with the thing's words, vibrating in her grip like a living thing. The awful truth struck her like a physical blow, the weapon wasn't hers at all. It had always been a sliver of this creature's power, growing inside her like a parasite, feeding on her pain and anger. The figure leaned down until its ever-changing face hovered inches from hers. Its breath smelled of turned earth and rotting flowers, of opened graves and forgotten memories. "I can give you what you truly desire," it whispered, the words slithering into her ears like smoke. "Not just revenge. Not just power." Its finger, cold as a corpse and just as lifeless, touched her chest over her heart. "Wholeness." Memories flooded Seraphine's mind with brutal clarity, her mother's laugh before the plague took her, bright as sunlight on water; her father's strong hands teaching her to hold a sword, his calluses catching on her small fingers; the warmth of a home she'd thought lost forever, its hearth crackling with life. The ache of those losses struck her like a physical blow, nearly bringing her to her knees with their intensity. Kaelan's grip on her hand tightened painfully. "Don't listen" The figure straightened abruptly, its head snapping toward the chasm with predatory focus. "Ah." Its many eyes widened in something resembling delight. "She's waking." The ground heaved like a living thing. The black sun pulsed like a dying heart, its dark light stuttering. From the depths of the chasm came a sound that defied description, the scream of a universe being unmade, of time itself fracturing. Lyrith's voice suddenly echoed from all directions, fraying at the edges with panic: "You fools! You've triggered the" The figure smiled beatifically, spreading its arms wide as the world began to shake apart around them. "Too late." With a sound like a thousand mirrors shattering simultaneously, reality fractured. Seraphine had one last glimpse of Kaelan's terrified face reaching for her, his mouth forming her name

Then nothing.