Chapter 38: Event Horizon
Perspective: Astro/Shadow
I am ripped from the tranquility of laughter when I see Shadow drifting down toward us. The Entity's zweihander pierces her chest, but even though the sword is twice as tall as her, she appears to float along without difficulty. Even when she asks her question, I'm still not quite able to read her mood:
"What the hell happened here?"
"Astro," Kay wheezes, finally reigning in his own hysterical laughter. "Would you help me up?"
I try to, and then a sharp pain shoots through my gut. Calling the wound Claw inflicted on me "healed" would be an insult to healing. It wasn't actively bleeding and that was the extent of it. I shrug and Kay nods in understanding, gesturing for me to speak.
"Prophet's dead. Other Steve is dead. Kay and I are halfway there," I say tonelessly. "It…"
I want to continue. To say what did all this, but I know the pain it will inflict on her. I see the Void and it burns away at my mind. Suddenly, the sunlight is too much for me. I flinch and look at the ground.
"Wait, before you say anything more, let me heal you. I can see that talking is painful to you."
A reprieve. I strategise rapidly, but the ideas all keep falling apart before they can come together.
"Thank you, Shadow," I grunt, making sure to sound as pained as possible.
She moves in close, places her hands against my torso, the most obviously wounded part.
"I was using a lot of magic a few minutes ago. This may come out more forcefully than usual," she explains.
I start to nod, but before I can even think about bracing myself there is a flash of white light from her palms. I'm half-blinded and roar in pain as my insides begin to jolt back into place and my skin tears itself back together. Then, after a few seconds, I am healed. No scarring - the bottom of my stomach looks good as new. There are even a few hairs sprouting back into being.
Shadow moves on to Kay, who is just barely keeping his eyes open. He has a dreamy smile that doesn't seem to match the bitter laughter of a few seconds prior. I had been unable to do much on account of my wounds, so his leg is still visibly broken, and there are still wounds across his scalp and under his armpit that weep blood with little impediment.
Shadow appears undaunted and, after reshuffling the zweihander which still protrudes from her back, she plants one hand on his leg and one beneath his armpit. Her hands glow and with similar force Kay's begins to mend himself. I'm not sure if he's better or worse-prepared than me. He writhes and clenches his teeth, but only a few isolated grunts of effort rise from his throat. Then, Shadow stops, and he falls panting. His leg still looks pretty bad, but he's no longer at death's door.
"So, what did this? Did I miss a manifestation?" asks Shadow with a tone that could probably indicate worry.
Suddenly, I realise I am no closer to an explanation of what happened on the Hill. I almost contemplate lying.
"Well, Shadow…" I trail off again.
I lock eyes with Kay, and I know I am being reproached. He shakes his head.
"Claw is free," Kay grunts as he pulls hobbles up.
I see the colour drain from Shadow's face, given her natural skin tone this was a bad sign. She is silent.
"I don't know how," he continues. "But he is in control and working for the Entity. He arrived, wearing their obsidian armour and I just assumed he had escaped. Because of my error, the Prophet and Steve are dead, and Astro almost joined them."
He stops and waits for her to react. One hand is open, twitching with a desire to summon voidfire. The other hovers near the pommel of Apotyre, ready to draw it. His face, however, is grimly impassive.
The yawning void behind my eyes grows more intense. It is practically screaming at me, and the sunlight is getting unbearable. I scrunch my eyes closed, but then force them open. That's when I realise her hair is rising, and her skin is descending to that shade beneath darkness.
"Get to safety," I warn Kay.
He doesn't move, so I plant a hand on his chest and push him back as gently as I care to be - which isn't particularly gentle.
"Get to safety," I repeat.
"I'm not-"
"-Book, get him to safety. I'll see to it you're not reprimanded," I instruct aloud and telepathically.
"If I must," it answers wryly.
Kay falls into a rift in a string of curses. With that liability dealt with, I return to Shadow.
She is standing there, but she doesn't look right. Her shape and skin wavers, as though seen through immense heat. She is slumped forward, but the zweihander's blade which protrudes from her back has a strange balancing effect - it looks like an awful wing.
I take a few steps back, then levitate a foot or two just to be safe. The tear in reality continues to shriek at me, as though it is being ripped open all over again.
"Shadow, are you there?" I ask.
I crane my neck and float around and see the profound look of grief on her face. Her face is scrunched to the point where it looks like it's about to burst or fold in on itself altogether.
"Shadow," I repeat. "We need you here. We will find a way to save him, I promise."
I don't know if that's a lie.
She jolts - it might be a nod? - and raises her trembling hand to the zweihander. The fingers clasp around the obsidian handle, and she begins to pull. I realise she's not pulling it out. She's wrenching it up.
Suddenly, I am almost paralysed by the memory of the Void. It is unseaming the world and ripping my mind in two. I am agonized, but I remain afloat. Somehow, behind and beneath the screaming, there is a strangely comforting note.
Shadow arcs the zweihander up through her chest and head, cleaving both in two. My eyes widen as her physical form falls away, unmoving and expressionless as a doll. What remains is an ever-shifting mass of silhouettes. Shadow is there, but her not-skin is of a shade so far past darkness I cannot find a name for it. It is as though the night sky had burst open before me to reveal something vaster and emptier and more overpowering.
She still casts a shadow of her own, but Wodahs appears unable to capture this new form. She is a writhing, angry mass of near-complete shapes for several seconds, shifting between arms and legs and tentacles and many more shapes a shadow should not know how to convey at all. Then, Wodahs settles into formlessness, and swirls more calmly beneath her master.
That's when I realise, looking directly upon this new, unveiled Shadow, how quiet the tear in reality has become. It is as though the gaping wound has not healed but triumphed over the flesh it afflicted. A scar now, not an injury. I hear a comforting song of everything and nothing, and all that tension and confusion I have felt for the last few weeks is banished.
The zweihander clatters to the ground.
"I will kill it." says Shadow.
"K-kill what?" I stammer dumbly.
She walks away, and for a moment I am tempted to follow her in pursuit of this unspecified prey, but I cannot bring myself to do it. Every inch of me wants to flee, and I obey my body for once. I fly away from her and away from the answer to my question, trying to dull my guilt by promising to find people to help elsewhere.
Shadow felt empty. Emptier than she had ever felt before, emptier even than when she had floated above an altar, all her blood having drained from various rune-shaped cuts in her skin. It was not a hollow emptiness, it simply was an absence. An absence of the grief she had felt seconds before, an absence of the anger she had felt when thinking about the outcome of her brother's mission, an absence of her usual thoughts and worries. There was one thing she had said she would do, and she was going to do it.
Shadow was going to kill the Entity.
She put one foot in front of the other, she didn't need to be fast. There was no rush, the Entity would always be there. While walking Shadow observed her surroundings, not just in the way everyone else did. She looked beyond, even beyond the additional layers of magical energy she had seen before. Behind her, where the Prophet lay dead, she saw a rapidly fraying snarl of magic, its strings going all over. One of those strings was different, it was older. It pointed straight where Shadow was going, at the Entity.
Despite her slow pace, trees flew by as Shadow took her steps, each time she put a foot forward it reached further through space than the last. Before long she had arrived at the battlefield, it now lay quiet but not empty. The only things that were still moving were the Entity's manifestations. They were Shadow's first target.
With a final, long step she closed the gap to the closest one. It saw her and swung its zweihander at her. When the blade made contact it was split in two, the part that hit her having simply disappeared into the vast nothingness that was her body. The manifestation hesitated, Shadow simply kept walking towards it.
Shadow's hand reached forward, through the bronze armor and into the grey substance beneath. The armor disappeared at her touch, the grey substance did not, it even resisted her for a brief moment, then gave way to her palm, deforming around it like a viscous liquid. Shadow felt the structure of the manifestation, it was like a bubble connected to the main body with a thin string. With a mere thought the string was severed, the grey substance collapsing in on itself and evaporating into the Void. The bronze shell fell down as it lost support.
The next manifestation tried fighting back but the only result was that Shadow could cut its string faster. The other two fell just the same way. As she separated the last one, Shadow felt something different, a movement far off.
Moments later an identical set of bronze armor materialized in front of Shadow, she felt that this was the real Entity, the main body. Shadow began walking towards it, but did not seem to be getting closer, as if the space between her and the Entity was extending into infinity. Shadow raised her hand, gathering up energy from within. Reality tore itself apart at her fingertips, the rift propagating towards the Entity, moving faster the denser the space ahead became.
When the rift reached the Entity, it swallowed its armor but the vague grey body beneath remained visible, as if it existed above the tear in reality. The world snapped back to its normal geometry at the same time the rift closed. The Entity stood only a short distance from Shadow. She reached forwards, trying to make contact. The Entity preempted her by wrapping one of its huge hands around Shadow's torso and brought her up to the height of its head.
The Entity spoke: "You-are the anomaly. You will… be absorbed."
Its other hand reached out to Shadow's head. Once it made contact a brief flash of grey intruded on the fringes of Shadow's mind before being pushed back by a surge of nothingness. Shadow felt the pressure increase but she held against it firmly. The assault stopped minutes later, neither of them was able to breach the defense of the other, like water and oil attempting to mix.
The comforting emptiness Shadow had felt so far slowly receded, she could not do what she wanted to do, at least not yet. She would need to be stronger. Her regular thoughts returned as the realization settled in.
A grin spread across Shadow's face, a blindingly bright gash in the nothingness. She said: "Hello, fellow abomination."
The Entity's hand jerked open, as if it had been awoken from a daydream. Shadow slowly slid down to the ground after being released. The Entity took a step backwards, away from her, something akin to fear in the movement. Then, from one moment to the next it disappeared, leaving Shadow alone in the middle of the battlefield.
Shadow thought about what had happened but was not entirely sure how to describe it. It had been her that did all this, not someone else, she couldn't deny that. What had changed? After having heard of Claw being in control of her brother's body something in her mind had snapped, or maybe clicked was a better word for it. After shedding her physical body, she felt more whole than ever, it was like she hadn't changed into something else, but became a truer version of herself. It was like the form she took when she ate the minds of rulebreakers, only so much more. Was this a good thing or a bad thing? Her talk about humanity with Astro came back to her, what if this was only the beginning? How much of this was related to her brother's well-being and how much of it was just her?
Shadow shook her head. Now was not the time to answer any of these questions. For better or for worse, they would answer themselves in time. It was now time to return to the others, there would be questions. As Shadow went, she slowly reformed her physical body. The more of it formed the less she could keep her grief from returning, by the time she was back at the hill to retrieve her clothes, she had to fight to not break down on the spot.
Shadow felt now more than ever before that Humanity, however you defined it, could also be a burden.
