He plowed through shield walls of shadow thick as the morning mists that purled over High Salure before the sun burned them way. The sun didn't reach this unclean place to immolate its disease and never would. Mantle after mantle of convulsing darkness tore beneath his hands as he struggled to reach the voice of penultimate suffering. He stumbled, almost falling, when something firmer than shadow glanced off his side, leaving a burning sensation along the ladder of his ribs.
The tortured voice was louder now, closer, and where he'd heard only guttural screaming before, Serovek now made out words along with sobbing. Pleas for mercy, for surcease from the pain. Prayers not to many gods, but to one. Another tide of horror cascaded over him. He recognized the god's name and the voice of the man whose beseeching cries fell on a deity's deaf or uncaring ears.
“Megiddo!” he bellowed into the heavy gloom, and the gloom spasmed at the name before taking up the call in a venomous chant.
“Megiddo! Megiddo! Megiddo!”
The screaming halted just as Serovek burst through a drape of darkness into a pallid twilight. What greeted made him want to shriek as well. Megiddo hung before him, impaled at numerous points on a scaffolding of short spikes, a corona of blue light shimmering around him. He didn't bleed, but his skin bore the look of earth trapped in drought, fractured and fissured to reveal more of the cerulean luminescence.
Shadows spiraled around him, fluid and quick, revealing monstrous visages with gaping maws and glowing eyes that glittered with a twisted kind of glee. They capered through and around the scaffolding, a construction of polished blackness that reminded Serovek of obsidian and reflected the light spilling from Megiddo's eidolon. The shadows wrenched the structure one way and then the other, creating a torsion that wracked the captive monk's body in every direction until the snap of bone echoed amid the victorious squalls of cavorting galla. The monk groaned, the sound animalistic in its torture.
Serovek lunged for Megiddo, sprinting toward the scaffolding. But for every step he took, the distance between them tripled. And the galla laughed and laughed. He reached for his sword, enchanted by Kai sorcery, to hack through the foul creatures, but there was nothing at his hip to unsheathe and wield.
The galla didn't cease with their attentions. Unsatisfied with breaking bones, they turned to the fissures marking Megiddo's body. Serovek cursed them all, bellowing his rage and his torment as they peeled the monk like a grape, consuming his suffering as if it were a pleasure elixir. His wails filled the gloaming, and the blue light pouring from his exposed insides coruscated in a column that pulsed around him.
The galla ebbed away for a moment, not in fear but in anticipation, as if they knew what would happen next. The light around Megiddo contracted, knitting itself together in delicate filaments under the hands of an unseen weaver until it bound him in a tight shroud that flashed once, twice, brilliant and bright before fading back to a dull glow, leaving the monk hanging as before but whole again, his eidolon unbroken, his skin no longer flensed away. He raised his head slowly, as if the weight of all the world rested on it, and stared at Serovek with glowing blue eyes made abyssal by despair. “You shouldn't be here,” he whispered in thready voice. “You can't help me. Save yourself. Go.”
As if his warning sounded an alert, the hul-galla surrounding him suddenly turned its attention on Serovek, a malevolent scrutiny comprised of a thousand baleful stares. Serovek quashed the instinctive urge to run. There was nowhere to run, and he dared not turn his back on the horde. Megiddo begged him to leave, and in that moment Serovek wanted desperately to obey, but his nightmare held him in its grip, in this gods-forsaken place with a man whose spirit he couldn't help and whose torment clawed its way into Serovek's own soul.
From the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker of more light, white instead of blue. A meandering seam no wider than a strand of hair but bright as the sun. And clean. An antithesis to everything in this accursed domain. He sensed it down to his bones. It drew him like a lodestone, like Anhuset's rare and sultry laughter. The hul-galla set up a screeching to make his head throb. As one writhing, smoky mass, they surged toward the thread of brightness.
“Get out,” Megiddo commanded in a voice no longer thin but forceful, adamant. “Get out before they do!” He threw his head back against the scaffolding, driving one of the short spikes through the newly healed flesh of his neck, and roared.
The sound trumpeted above the hul-galla's screeching, a blast that buffeted them aside and away from the shining seam. The monk howled a second time, uttering words Serovek didn't know but that lifted him off his feet and flung him backwards, into the heart of the shadow, through it, to the edge of his nightmare where a voice waited to yank him across to the other side of consciousness.
“Wake up, margrave, before I punch you awake!”
Serovek hurtled out of sleep, Megiddo's tortured screams still ringing in his ears. He awakened to the sight of Anhuset's grim expression and her narrowed yellow eyes blazing brighter than a lamp. He clutched her arms, breathing as if he'd tried to outrun his horse on foot. “Megiddo,” he gasped, gaze sliding to the bier on which the monk's soulless body rested, enveloped in a shimmering blue corona.
The light pulsed in shallow rhythm as if mimicking a racing heartbeat. Unsettled neighing from the horses in their stalls and the hard crack of hooves against wood rails filled the stables. Anhuset stared at Serovek, silent and unflinching as his fingers burrowed into her muscular arms while he tried to rid his mind of the echoes of galla laughter and Megiddo's suffering. Cerulean luminescence played off her angular features, sculpting her high cheekbones into more pronounced relief and sharpening her jaw. A Kai under a blue sun. Beautiful. Deadly. Not human.
“A man caught between worlds strives to reach you in this one.” Her yellow eyes flared with a greenish tinge under the spectral haze. “Are you truly here with me?” At his nod, she pried his fingers off her arm, slid her hand up his forearm and pulled him to his feet. “Wake fully, Lord Pangion, and plant your spirit in the world where you now stand.”
Her command snuffed out the last of the echoes but not the memory of the monk crucified on a scaffold of black bones. He stared at Anhuset, concentrating on her features. “Can you hear them at all? The galla? I dreamed them, but I swear it was more than a dream.”
“I believe you.” She left him to rummage through one of her packs, returning with a small hand mirror. “Take a look,” she said, handing it to him.
He held the mirror up and swallowed back a gasp as horror flooded his veins. The blue luminescence hadn't confined itself to a corona surrounding Megiddo's bier. Serovek stared at his reflection with eyes flooded in the same shimmering hue. His natural eye color was blue as well, but of a more natural shade. His dead wife had once likened his irises to the deep of a cold ocean. Now they glowed with the ethereal strangeness of a Wraith king's power, like the simulacrum vuhana he'd ridden into battle against the galla. As he continued to stare, the light faded, his sclera becoming white again, even as his irises darkened, losing their definition to pupils dilated from the dimness of the stables and the last vestiges of his nightmare. “Gods,” he breathed, before thrusting the mirror at Anhuset.
Her claws scraped across the glass as she took it from him. Her eyes glowed as well as she regarded him, but from the nature of her heritage instead of sorcery. “How long has this been happening?”
Serovek shrugged. “This is the first time I've seen it.”
“But is it the first time you've looked?”
“No.”
This was the worst nightmare he'd had about the galla or Megiddo so far, but not the only one. Each time he'd awakened, the shuddering aftermath left him bathed in a cold sweat. He'd suffered through battle sickness when he was younger, less inured then to the savagery of war. This wasn't battle sickness. No one's eyes glowed ethereal blue when they fought their own inner demons.
Anhuset put away the mirror, switching it for a flask. “You look like you need a drink. If this doesn't chase away the echoes, nothing will.”
Serovek ran the flask under his nose, rearing back when his eyes watered at the familiar smell. Peleta's Kiss. He saluted Anhuset, took a healthy swig and braced for the burn as the spirit scorched a path over his tongue, down his throat, and into his stomach where it ignited with a heat to melt the last splinters of ice coursing through his veins. This time the shudder that threatened to break his joints loose had nothing to do with the nightmare and everything to do with the flask's contents. Clear-headed, with a warm glow burning in his belly, he thanked Anhuset for her offering and returned it to her. “The spirit that cures all ills,” he said.
She nodded and tucked the flask back into the satchel where she'd stashed her mirror. “Nectar of the gods.” Her mouth curved. “For when they want their insides set on fire.” The amusement softening her features faded as she eyed him. “I've had bad dreams, but yours was worse than what most of us suffer, I think.” She inclined her head toward Megiddo. “And him being here has something to do with it obviously. Do you wish to speak of it?”
He liked that she didn't demand he tell her what he dreamed, though holding such a nightmare close did the dreamer no good. “Not really, but we both know this was more than a dream. I think it was a warning and probably something you should relate to Brishen when you return to Saggara.” Her features remained expressionless as he recounted the grotesque visions and the sounds of the galla as they tortured the Nazim monk. Only her eyes changed, their yellow brightening or darkening as he spoke of the hairline crack of light in the writhing darkness and Megiddo's desperate command that Serovek get away.
When he finished, she turned to stare at the monk's bier and the body lying peacefully under the blanket. The blue light had disappeared completely. “How long have you dreamed of the galla and Megiddo?”
It felt like several lifetimes. “Since a couple of months after returning home from Haradis. They've grown progressively worse as time passed but nothing like tonight.” He followed Anhuset's gaze to the bier. “Then again, this is the first time I've been in such close proximity to him since I turned him over to his brother for safekeeping.”