"Do you have anyone who'd be willing to give up the rest of their life to spend with her?"
"I would," Skulduggery said.
Lights twinkled on the accelerator's console. They cast a bluish glow over the room, illuminating a number of measuring instruments surrounding it, but not doing much else to alleviate the pressing darkness.
Electricity and magic hummed in the air, interrupted only by the soft constant beat of the heart rate monitor.
Skulduggery Pleasant woke up from his deep trance with a start and looked around in surprise for the source of his wakening. Her heart rate was steady. There were no alarms. No immediate cause for concern.
He stood up, bones creaking. He felt like he hadn't moved in centuries, and for all he knew he might not have. Slowly, he made his way over to the console monitor. Nothing looked out of place. There were no spikes in magic, no signs of brain activity. Nothing, there was nothing. There was always nothing.
He turned to face the girl. She hung suspended in the cube, slowly revolving, silent and listless; trapped forever. As young and beautiful as the day she had stepped into the cube and they'd put her to rest. She'd gone willingly.
He studied her carefully, his eyes (or lack thereof) penetrating the darkness. He knew every inch of her off by heart...every line, every curve.
No change.
He wasn't sure whether he prayed for her to give some sign of life or feared it. If she awoke he'd have to kill her. But…he missed her. He wanted her company. He wanted to hear her laugh again and to see her smile and feel her warmth. Damn, the world. It would be worth waking her up and letting her destroy the world, just to talk with her once more; anything, anything, to dispatch this overwhelming loneliness.
It wouldn't be difficult to wake her. Just turn off a couple machines, flick a few dials, and unplug a few wires. But he didn't move. He couldn't let her sacrifice be in vain. She had given her life up to save the world.
He never though it would be permanent. Not really.
Sometime after the Argeddion affair, she had turned herself in to the Sanctuary. Darquesse was growing stronger and she was struggling, struggling to stay in control, struggling to stay herself.
They'd used the accelerator to super-power the cube. She agreed to be imprisoned within it and he has promised to stay with her. Until the end.
They couldn't risk someone using Darquesse to destroy the world, so they had moved the cube and the accelerator deep underground, covered the walls in protective sigils so they couldn't be found, and filled in the hole with concrete. There was no way in or out. No communication.
Ghastly and Ravel had promised to find another way. They'd said it was temporary, once they found a way to stop Darquesse they would come and find them. He'd never heard from them again.
He didn't know how long it had been, a few hundred years at least, maybe more. The world might have already ended and he'd never know. It was more than likely without him there to save it.
He sighed. There had been no change. She wasn't dead but she might as well have been. Even he, a skeleton, had more life in him.
Then what had awoken him?
He felt had something…
He felt old and tired.
He was old and tired.
His mind was playing tricks on him again.
The first few decades had been the worse for that. She came to him in visions, along with others long lost to him…his wife, his child, friends, enemies…
At first he dreaded seeing the visions of her awakening, knowing he would be forced to act.
Then he hoped, just to see her.
And then he despaired when she didn't.
If he hadn't already been mad when they'd buried him alive, he would have been driven so by now.
There was no day, no night; just the sound of magic and machinery and Valkyrie's heart beating away.
He dismissed any other sound he might have heard or movement he might have seen or shift in the air he might have felt as wishful thinking.
He sat down on the cold stone floor once more and drifted back into his endless sleepless unawareness.
Her eyelashes fluttered.