A/N: It's hard not to get overly vague and abstract with the whole Voidstreams concept, given that's basically how it's treated in the game. We'll see how we do.
Chapter 19
Laure held Tychicus Varen's arm as the stars faded. When the dizziness was gone, she let go. He didn't seem to notice one way or the other, but Laure felt herself reluctant to lose hold of that strong anchor. Oh, dear. Very bad indeed. Think about something else. She looked around at the ruin, silently damning her telltale Breton complexion. Sercen seemed completely unchanged since their last visit, bar the absence of any bodies. She sensed no evil, at least.
"They're gone?" she said.
"Yes," said Brother Varen. "I am sure they left shortly after we did. I brought us here only because this is the furthest East I have been on this continent. I have no reference point for where we are going."
"So we'll have to walk," Laure translated this.
"Yes. Come, Sister."
"Yes, Brother," said Laure, and they set off toward the East. She dearly hoped he hadn't noticed her reaction earlier. He did seem fairly oblivious to such things. And how had no one noticed this before? But that's why you liked him to start with, remember? Because he treated you like everyone else. I suppose everyone just assumed he was egalitarian. It's not as though priests of the Nine are sworn to celibacy.
How very fascinating, she thought glumly. I know what a schoolgirl crush is. I know how truly pathetic I am for even thinking of it at a time like this. And yet my knowledge changes not one thing.
Gods damn it all.
---
Ghatha sat on the bench she had set up near the cage. She knew her own limits, and it took considerable effort merely to maintain the link to the creature Akhanad. The Void is near us as breath and further than Nirn. So has it ever been. So shall it ever be.
A mind in the Void was easy to locate and difficult to read, more so than if she had summoned a creature out of Nirn itself (as she had sometimes done with undead mortals). Alien and conflicting impressions surged across the surface of her mind – a blackness deeper than any sky she had ever seen, and a maelstrom of colored threads interwoven one with the other, and a mist of soft gray without landmarks or distance - and all of these at the same time and overlying one another. It might have driven a more imaginative kynaz mad. She half expected it would do so to the atronach.
But Akhanad was still sane. Ghatha felt it searching with the determination of pain and fury, tearing through the threads in search of what she had told it to seek. This was the fifth time she had killed it, and she had not done so quickly. It knew what was waiting should it return again without result.
After a time for which she had no standard of measure, Ghatha felt a nauseating shift in perception. Akhanad at last had found footing in the gray. Mist swirled up and occluded the confusion, and then she saw a definite form in this place of utter formlessness.
It was a kynaz. There was no mistaking the horns. But this one's skin had the odd purple tinge and fleshy look that she knew belonged to Sleepers, and its eyes were black and dull. Through Akhanad's discorporate eyes she saw it turn slowly, standing as if the mist could support its weight.
And in that second, as the Sleeper's eyes fell on the soul of the atronach, Ghatha felt the connection from mind to eye to eye to mind -
And the mind was not the Sleeper's. Another kynaz stood behind it, a krynvelhat powerful enough to rule a citadel searching the Void through the mind of its captive. It was a clever idea, too clever for Ghatha's own Lord...
"This is not the one we seek," she said. "Move on!" Akhanad backed away, trying to find the way out as it had found the way in. Ghatha cursed the creature's clumsiness as it fumbled at the substance of the Void.
What is it? demanded that other mind. I sense another kynaz behind it.
The Sleeper's seemingly corporeal mouth worked for a moment, fumbling for the word, before she said "Atronach."
Then get it out of my way. I have no time for this.
"Dagon damn your soul - " Ghatha said, and writhed on her bench as the Sleeper reached out with startling power to push the atronach away, far away and down -
And then it snapped out of the Void altogether, and fell into Nirn.
---
Akhanad felt herself flying through something like the air, but knew it was not; this was yet another trick of the Void, another channel of its streams. She sensed the fury of the summoner who would be called Master, who could not break her fall, and she sensed the plane of Nirn drawing ever closer as she spiraled out of control. She could no more stop herself now than she could break out of the gemmed cage; the Void-kynaz had been much more powerful than the one who had sent her.
"Find her!" screamed the Master, and Akhanad strove to obey. Now she knew what a Sleeper was like, and the one she was to find must surely be somewhere in Nirn below (insofar as "below" had any meaning in this place) -
Akhnanad howled silently. She sensed two of the dark kyn, and they were far from each other – how was she know which one to seek? She wavered desperately between them, but did not stop falling as she did it. In the end the choice was taken away from her, and she had to seize on a point of equidistant focus or lose herself completely.
And she did find a point of focus, though it was not one she would have touched had there been any other choice...
---
"He has been here," said Tracks-Too-Well. "More than once. The last time very recently." The Argonian raised his long snout and looked around, eyes narrow and nostrils wide. "Not today. Yesterday, this one thinks. Also the Breton female." He looked impassively at Marcus Barnabas, who avoided his gaze. "She is very young. This I can tell even though the stench of daedra is over nearly everything."
"I know," said Marcus. He looked around the ruin with narrowed eyes. It was deathly quiet, not a breeze stirring the scrubby grass. "Did they go inside?"
The Argonian paced nearer the square stone door to the main city, albeit with some reluctance. "This one thinks so. Many hands have touched this door, you understand, and most were human, and some I think perhaps were not even alive. It is ever so with the Ayleid places."
"We know," said Lybiad. "Did they come back out?" Marcus exchanged glances with him, but neither one commented further. Down a dark stairway with a restless spirit or a deadly enemy at the bottom. Wonderful.
"Oh, certainly," said Tracks-Too-Well. "They went that way." He waved a negligent hand toward the Northeast. If he noticed any subtle lessening of tension in his companions, he showed no sign.
"Which ones?" said Marcus. "The daedra or the priests?"
"Both," said Tracks-Too-Well. "Not together. The demons left days ago. This one suspects the priests are following them."
"See?" said Marcus to Lybiad. "He's trying to do the right thing."
"Then why didn't he tell someone?" shot back the other man. They shared an unhappy silence. "Get out the crystal ball. We've got a report to make before we go further."
---
Menien Goneld padded silently ahead of the other two, listening to the solid sound of the caitiff's booted feet. He'd kept himself together, but the screams tended to linger in his ears. He had heard that so many times in the Citadel, the distant echoing sounds of human and inhuman pain...
Goneld shook his head. This can't continue. I can't.
---
"Are you awake?" said Ebel-Merodach.
Sodrinye blinked her eyes open. She lay against Merodach's chest as he carried her, a pleasant change from being slung over his shoulder. The bulk of his shoulders and head shielded her face from the sun. He hadn't called her loathsome one, and she was not sure what to think of that. "Yes," she said.
"When you killed the creature," said Merodach. "Afterwards. You made a noise."
Sodrinye was not sure what to say to this, either. She was busy dreading what she knew he was about to say.
"You made no sound the last time you took a life," said Ebel-Merodach. "Not even when you were dying. You are without rage and ordinarily without anything I recognize as defiance. I remember this because it is not kyn, you understand. What happened today?"
"Today I regained my vision," Sodrinye said. "And I saw."
"Saw what?" said Ebel-Merodach. "You were not in pain. What alarms you more than the prospect of your own death?"
Sodrinye considered this. He was going to know the truth soon, whether she would or no.
"The prospect of yours," said the Sleeper.