94

Lightless Dawn

"I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name."

– H. P. Lovecraft, "Nemesis"

The sun rose behind thick cloud cover. The rain had become a storm in the night, and the weather showed few signs of improvement. The day's grim look reflected the moods of those Chosen Children who had the good fortune to wake up in their own world. They sat at their breakfast tables as part of morning ritual, but had little appetite despite the rigors of the previous night. They sat and thought about what had happened, and what might happen in the future. Naturally, their thoughts went out to their juniors, but there were other things to consider as well.

Foremost in Taichi's mind was the black Tailmon that had led them into Lilithmon's trap. They hadn't seen her again after the battle, and if she was still in Odaiba he wanted to find her. Once again she might be the only real lead they had. All his muscles tightened when he thought of her and the way her very shape mocked him. When he woke that morning, a part of him hadn't been able to let go of the idea that yesterday had been just another nightmare. It was too awful, too elaborately terrible to have actually happened. But his sister's room was empty.

Agumon sat in one of the table's other chairs. His appetite was as rapacious as always, but he was too in tune with his partner's emotions to eat at his normal rate. Taichi looked at him and he felt he should say something.

"What—" Then he cut himself off, not sure that it was a good idea to ask what Taichi had dreamed about. Taichi caught the abortive question and guessed what it might have been. He remembered meeting someone in the dream, possibly the man responsible for all of this, though he hadn't really learned anything about him. If he could find the guy in real life… but he might need to find the black Tailmon first. He got up from the table without saying anything to his partner. He needed to talk to the others. Koshiro would have a plan.

Ken returned to consciousness slowly. He knew in a subconscious way that it would not be a pleasant awakening, but his exact situation wasn't at all clear. His body ached, and it was no wonder considering that he was lying on a hard stone surface. He groaned and sat up slowly, his newly opened eyes adjusting to the dimness of the room. "Where…?"

"Hell."

At the sound of the voice he snapped into full awareness. His gaze jumped to the figure standing in the center of the small gray room. That one word had been enough to tell him who it was, and even if it hadn't he wouldn't have been able to mistake that tall figure and its dusky, strangely foreign face. The whiteness of the Dark Man's teeth shone through the shadow that clung to him, and the black eyes glittered as they had on that first night of uneasy sleep.

"Or," the Dark Man continued, "a place that's close enough."

Ken didn't know how to react. He realized that he was handcuffed, and that his arms were useless behind his back. Standing now, he glanced over the room, looking for a possible escape, but there were no doors or windows of any kind along the walls of grim stone. The room's only feature was the elevated part of the floor along the wall, which he had been lying on. A sudden intense claustrophobia seized him. No way out.

The Dark Man chuckled, long and low, and Ken turned his frightened face to the figure again. Even at such close range he couldn't discern the Dark Man's appearance beyond its essential features. He wore a long, dark coat or cloak of some kind. He might have had jet black hair, or no hair at all. There were eyes and a smile – they drew all attention away from minor details.

"Well, Ichijouji-kun?" the Dark Man said at last. "Don't tell me you're just going to sit and stare."

What else can I do? Ken wondered. He tried to break through his stunned surprise and think. It didn't take long; this was no dream, and there were no impediments to memory. The fight in the desert came rushing back to him, and with it the memory of what he had seen at the last when the eclipse fell.

"You… You killed Wormmon."

"Well, it was only fair. You killed Wisemon and ruined my surprise party."

"Y-You killed Wormmon!" Ken repeated, this time with anger in his accusation.

"So did you, once," the Dark Man replied, unperturbed. "The way I see it, we're tied. If I see him again I'll have a chance to take the lead."

Through his anger, his fear and grief, Ken realized that there was still that hope – Wormmon would be reborn. Ken had found him once; he could find him again. For a moment he felt a strange sense of peace… but then he returned to reality. He was trapped in this room with this man – this thing. And what had happened to the rest of his friends? Were they here too? Had they even survived?

The Dark Man watched the changing subtleties of Ken's expression with apparent interest, smiling all the while. Gradually Ken's look settled on one of determination.

"Where are they?" he asked.

"They're nearby. But that doesn't make much of a difference right now, does it?"

"It does make a difference," Ken said quietly. "They're my friends."

The Dark Man gave an exaggerated sigh before fixing Ken with a look of arch appraisal.

"What happened to you, Ichijouji-kun? You used to have so much potential. Didn't need friends then! You had power. Absolute control over thousands. The Digimon Kaiser, master of darkness!"

"No…" Ken said. "I was too weak to stay who I really was."

"The same old useless Ichijouji Ken. The Kaiser was better. As Kaiser you served a purpose – several purposes, actually, and you possessed that highest of human virtues… sadism. Though I think Sato Katsu has you beat in that regard."

"Is that why he puts handcuffs on people who are already trapped?" Ken asked, with a grim smile.

The Dark Man flashed his teeth and took a long step forward. Caught off guard, Ken couldn't react before the Dark Man had grabbed his shoulder and turned him half around. Ken's ironic smile vanished; his face became a mask of horror. The Dark Man's touch was poison. Intense cold shot through Ken's shoulder, his heart began to race, his chest and head ached. Dimly he heard a click and the rattle of the handcuffs as they hit the floor. Then the Dark Man released him and stepped back, still smiling.

With a reflexive motion Ken brought his hands in front of him and grabbed hold of his arms. He stood there, quivering, and gradually the shock from the contact wore off, replaced by the more mundane pain in his wrists where the handcuffs had been throughout the previous night.

"Sato made those out of data," the Dark Man said, looking down at the handcuffs. He grinned at Ken. "Too many eyebrows might be raised if he had looked to buy them in those sizes."

Ken stared back at him, saying nothing. Coming into contact with the Dark Man had reminded him of how little humanity there was behind the mask, and he was still in the process of recovering.

"Come on, Ichijouji-kun! That's funny!" The Dark Man shook his head. "I'll never know how your species can be so entertaining and yet so lacking in a sense of humor."

"What are you?" Ken managed.

"Sato-san's assistant," the Dark Man answered. "He was the one who called me from my world, to help him deal with the Chosen Children."

"Sato… Katsu…" Ken murmured. He thought back to the unforgettable scene in the generator room when they had met the man. A willing servant of the powers of darkness, who thought nothing of torturing humans and Digimon to achieve his goals… Why? "Who is he?" Ken asked, raising his eyes to meet the ones that glittered in the Dark Man's face. "Where did he come from?"

"Onryou," the Dark Man said slowly, smiling at the word. "A vengeful ghost. That's what Sato is."

"A ghost?" Ken muttered. In this surreal and terrible place he was unsure for a moment if the Dark Man was speaking metaphorically.

"But let's talk about you, Ichijouji-kun. There's so much else we can discuss. After all, why bother trying to understand Sato's past when you can barely remember your own?"

Ken almost made a quick rejoinder, but paused to think. What did Sato's history matter to him? There was little good that the knowledge would do him, especially now, as trapped as he was. The mention of his own past didn't seem relevant at first, but then he thought of all his recent dreams, and how sharply they had probed his memories.

"What do you know about me?" Ken asked, now speaking deliberately. The Dark Man didn't respond, but his smile broadened, and a chuckle came from low in his throat. A sudden unreasoning terror shot through Ken; the sound fell on his nerves like ice water. I've taken the bait, he thought.

Before the recent nightmares had begun, Ken had more or less come to terms with his past, or at least the parts that he remembered. There was always an inner ache when thinking about Osamu and the Digimon Kaiser, but acceptance of what had gone before and working towards a better future had dulled it considerably. Now what? Would the Dark Man answer his question? What he heard might tear the old wounds open… or carve new ones. His dream of the previous night came back to him, with all its hints at forgotten pains and fears.

"Oh, where to begin…" the Dark Man said, cutting off Ken's thoughts. "It's not really fair to me to have to do all the work. You'd think with all that wheedling Archnemon and company about why you became the Kaiser, you'd have taken an interest in the rest of the story. Wormmon could probably have told you more. I would tell you to ask him, but…" He smiled brightly, and raised his hands palms upward in an exaggerated shrug.

Again Ken's fear became submerged in anger. "Why… Why are you mocking me? What do you think is funny about this!?"

The Dark Man laughed. Ken stumbled back a step in the face of that laughter – there was something so powerful and awful about it. He thought the tears forming in his eyes would freeze in it.

"We live in funny worlds, Ichijouji-kun!" the Dark Man said when he had finished. "You humans! Just far enough evolved to imagine that you're the crowning achievement of the universe. You take everything so seriously. You worry about life and death. You wonder what your purpose is. Oh, if only all of you could see things from my point of view! You were right about one thing as the Kaiser. They really were a bunch of insects. You just didn't realize you were one of them."

"Where are my friends?" Ken asked, trying to put force into the question in spite of the blackness that was settling on his soul.

"You mean the ones I didn't exterminate?" Again he gave Ken an appraising look. "Why ask, Ichijouji-kun? Are you so lonely? I can be your friend." As he spoke the Dark Man was changing, shrinking and then expanding, his features melting from those of one Chosen Child to another. Ken shut his eyes tightly, but it didn't block out the nauseating flow from voice to voice. "I can be any one of your friends!"

Slowly, eyes still closed, Ken sat back down on the bench he'd awakened on, not trusting his legs to hold him up.

"Don't like that?" The voice was the Dark Man's own again. Warily, Ken opened his eyes, though he did not raise his head. There was silence for a moment.

"What will happen?" he asked at last.

"Oh, I don't know quite what Sato has in mind, though I'm sure some of the Chosen Children will suffer very painful deaths. Others may live to envy them. But that's yet to come. Let's get back on topic. Think about what happened three years ago."

Many chaotic thoughts were going through Ken's mind as he sat there, but part of him couldn't help obeying, and thinking back to August of 2000. His memories were so fragmentary. He had met Wormmon, an event he couldn't recall in any detail. There had been other meetings as well, with people who remained vague, and battles that had been fought. But most of all his thoughts turned to one of the images from his latest dream. There was something – someone – very important, that his memory had lost somehow.

"How about a hint?" the Dark Man said. "A-ki-ya-ma…"

"Ryo-san," Ken whispered. At first the name meant nothing to him. It had been an automatic response. In his mind he applied the name to the image of the boy in his dream, who he had recognized but not recognized. Yes, that was Ryo-san. Ken realized now that Akiyama Ryo had been in his dreams even before all of this, never in the foreground, but still there like some object from dim childhood packed away in a closet.

"So you do remember a little," the Dark Man said.

How could I forget? Ken wondered to himself. Though now he barely knew who Ryo was, the boy seemed to be an essential piece of Ken's past. They had been together with Wormmon when—

"When I hurt my neck," Ken said aloud.

He stood up with a jerk. At the same moment he heard shoes click on the stone floor, and saw that the Dark Man had taken a few steps nearer.

"Yes, the Dark Seed," the man said. "And it was after that your memory started to go funny. Ryo was a mental liability. It was your brother that was the useful one. The Seed probably would have erased your memories of Wormmon too if he hadn't been clinging to your leg every time you returned to the Digital World."

"How do you know all this?" Ken asked. He braced himself where he stood, not wanting to give ground, but fearful that the Dark Man would come closer. "Did… did you do that to me?"

"Oh, no, that was all Millenniumon." The name struck Ken with more force than Ryo's had. Now he knew what that terrible shape in his dreams had been. "Sato only called for me very recently. But the Dark Seed did work to his benefit while it was active, and it may work for him again."

"What—" Ken began, but his voice cut off abruptly as the Dark Man raised his hands. His tongue refused to move, and the rest of his body went equally rigid, arrested by a shadow of the discomfort he had felt when the handcuffs had been removed. The Dark Man did not need to lay hands on a person to make his power felt. When Ken's body did jerk back into motion, it was not of his own volition. Stiffly he knelt. This is a nightmare, he thought. It felt like one of those nightmares. It felt real. It was real, and there was no difference. He needed to scream, but was held silent.

Hands still outstretched, the Dark Man stepped closer and crouched down to look at Ken directly, face to face. Ken vaguely felt the hands hovering on either side of his head, but all his conscious focus was on the face so close to his. Like everyone who had met the Dark Man, Ken had noticed the paradox of his eyes, how they were at once so dark and so bright. Now he was looking into them, and it was like looking into the night sky – infinite blackness, shot through with stars.

He heard the Dark Man speaking in a low voice, sounding like an echo from outside the universe.

"It really could have been anyone, Ichijouji-kun. They told you the truth. It would have been Ryo, but instead it was you. You built the Dark Towers. Indirectly you created BlackWarGreymon, the tool without which Sato's triumph might not have been possible. Instead of just anyone, it was you, with all your kindness, and all your weakness. Isn't that funny?"

The hands clamped down like the jaws of a vice. Lightning bolts of pain shot through Ken's head as the Dark Man began to laugh. The laughter mounted higher and higher, it echoed and reechoed in that small stone room. Poison coursed through his limbs, and in the back of his neck there was a red-hot dagger of pain, but above everything else was the laugh that stabbed into his brain again and again with spear points of polar ice.

When the world swam back into view once more Ken found himself standing in the center of the room. His arms stretched above him, pulled at by the replaced handcuffs. Gradually his vision became clearer. There was the Dark Man, standing quite composed near the end of the room. An aperture in the shape of a doorway had opened in the wall, and a squat creature in a baggy rubber suit and gasmask stood within it.

"I think that's enough for one session," the Dark Man said. "I thought it might be a good time to introduce you to my Troopmon." He gestured to the Digimon in the doorway, which stepped silently forward. From what might have been a deep pocket in his clothes he drew an object which Ken recognized coldly as the Digimon Kaiser's whip.

"I'm leaving," the Dark Man said to the Troopmon, handing the whip to it. "Get these two reacquainted."

And with that he walked out of the room.

Sato met him in the dark corridor as the secret door slid shut again.

"Will you be wanting to see one of the others?" Sato asked, falling into pace beside him. "Inoue? Takaishi?"

"Too easy," the Dark Man replied. "I've had fun with my warm-up. Now it's time for a challenge."

"Motomiya," Sato said, nodding. "I've been at a bit of a loss concerning him."

"Yes, I expected you might be, which is why I took certain steps recently that should facilitate things. Oh, I can work magic, Sato-kun. You'll see when I get back."

Sato gave him a curious glance and stopped walking. "You're leaving? Now? Why?"

"To go and get what every great magician needs," the Dark Man answered, not slackening his pace. "A beautiful assistant."