—running/falling/fearing into darkness darkness, running DESPAIR! and the great bird closes in, talons red, feathers white—and the man with eyes of blue flame—and the wolves/spiders/snakes/shadows/HUNTER!—
A hand grasped hold of his shoulder; he felt it distantly, like a thing from another world, as the terror of the Hunter’s victims reverberated through his flesh, drawing strength and solidity in each new second.
-face like a ghost and hunger a palpable force that licks at her with an icy tongue—
He struggled to surface and failed. Struggled to define himself, to divide himself from the tsunami of pain and fear that surged through his brain, but the memories were too strong, too compelling ... too many. He was drowning in terror.
-face of a monster—
Another hand grasped him, held him tightly.
-face of a god, too dark and terrible to behold. She lies transfixed as he bends down over her, her heart pounding like a frightened animal’s ... and then, suddenly, there is something besides fear in her. A rising heat, sharp and shameful, that makes her stretch back her throat as his shadow embraces her, baring it for the kill-
—secret, shameful thrill—
—power all around her, throbbing like a living thing, HIS power—
—raw and terrible and magnificent—
—ecstasy as flesh is to,rn from her bone, one last glorious moment in which she shares his pleasure and is willing to die for this terrible embrace—
With a gasp he surfaced long enough to see Rasya’s face just above his own, expression drawn and strained as if by some private agony. “Can you move?” it whispered. A dead hand grasped at his thigh as he nodded, and it sent him plummeting down into nightmare once more. But they were no longer cold dreams of horror and despair; this was a hot sea he sank into, fear transmuted into desire, horror made into beauty, resistance giving way to a blissful acquiescence. He could sense the real terror behind it, masked by Kami’s hedonistic illusions, but its edge had been blunted. Just enough, he thought, to give him a fighting chance.
Panting, he struggled to his feet. His groin was painfully swollen, and when an undead hand brushed against it from beneath he cried out, waves of pain and pleasure radiating out from that point in stunning, shameful confusion. He held onto Kami’s arm and let the demon guide him, accepting the transformed memories as they washed over him like a wave. Once, for a brief instant, his sight of the real world grew clear enough that he could study the land ahead of them, searching for some end to this trial. But the ground was covered in flesh as far as he could see, bodies piling upon bodies in all the directions he might choose to turn. There was no end to this, he realized. Already it seemed like he had been here forever. Each memory that took hold of him seemed to last forever, and the journey yet to come—
With a strangled cry he acknowledged an even greater danger facing him, and as the next memory dragged him down into the past he fought the time-numbing power of its imagery, and struggled to regain some kind of temporal framework. At last he was reduced to counting seconds in his brain even as he ran, on remembered legs, through the Hunter’s Forest. Time and time again, in the dreams of the Hunter’s victims, he ran and suffered and desired and died—and all the while the counting ticked in his skull like some vast spring-wound clock, marking the parameters of his body’s survival. One minute. Two. Ten. An hour ...
It’ll never end, he thought grimly, unless I make it end. He struggled to win free of the nightmares that assaulted him long enough to get a good, hard look at his situation. If he had managed to gain any forward ground thus far, it wasn’t visible. There was still no end in sight. And Karril, whose bizarre ministrations had allowed him to cling to sanity, was clearly weakening from the strain of such sustained effort.
With the kind of courage that only sheer desperation could muster, he drew himself upright and raised up his fist against the black sky. “Damn you!” he screamed, in a voice so hoarse it hardly sounded human. “You know we’re here! You know why we’re here! Why play these games?” A cold hand closed around his ankle and he began to sink into memories once more; he struggled to cling to consciousness long enough to voice the challenge that his heart was screaming. “Are you afraid?” he demanded. “Afraid of one man and a Iezu? Afraid that if we get through this nightmare, we’ll lay waste to all your plans?”
“Don’t,” Karril whispered fiercely. “You don’t know what they’ll do—”
But I know what’ll happen if they don’t do anything, he thought grimly, as the horrific images began to flood his brain anew. Already the black sky was fading, and his image of the swollen sun, and the bodies on the ground were giving way to night-black, Forest-spawned underbrush—
And then there was a rumbling beneath his feet, so like that of a volcano’s flank that he nearly turned back to see if some new eruption had followed them here. But Karril was clutching him too tightly for him to turn. Another quake shook the ground, and it seemed to him that the bodies before him were beginning to withdraw, clearing the way ahead. The one that grasped his leg let loose, and he felt an almost unbearable relief when, for the first time in hours, his mind was wholly his own.
“Karril-” he began.
“You’re suicidal, you know that?” Amazed and exasperated, the demon shook her head. “How on Erna did you manage to survive this long?”
The ground split before them with a roar, and a vast, black chasm opened just before their feet. The bodies on its edges spilled down into the guts of the earth, still twitching their death-dance as they fell. It seemed to
Damien that the bodies moaned as they fell, or perhaps some hellish wind that scoured the chasm’s depths merely mimicked the sound. Instinctively he stepped back, but the demon would not permit him to retreat.
“You summoned it,” she growled. “You deal with it.”
Something in the chasm’s blackness made his stomach clench in terror, but he knew in his heart that Karril was right. Tarrant’s captors were clearly aware of their journey here-as he had guessed—and they had answered his challenge. It was too late to undo that. All he could accomplish now, by refusing their invitation, was to anger them enough that they closed the way out of here forever.
He walked slowly to the edge of the chasm and gazed down into it. Though his human eyes could make out no details in the blackness, other senses picked out motion within the lightless depths, of things that slithered and flew and ... waited. A sickening reek rose up to his nostrils, all too like the one that had been in Tarrant’s apartment. He had barely been able to tolerate that assault; how well would he handle this, its hellish source? As he stared down into the abyss, he suddenly wasn’t sure.
Well, you should have thought of that before you came here, priest. It’s too late now.