The inky blot laughed again, albeit much quieter this time. The sorcerer silently thanked him for the sake of his ears. “You are such an entertaining little Dru! Are all Drus like you?” Before the Vraad could explain how names worked, Darkness continued, “Give me access to your inner voice again! Let me experience your arrival again!”
It made sense to let Darkness survey his memories of the incident, but Dru could not help feeling as if the creature might tear his mind apart seeking those particular memories. They were not surface thoughts; they were conscious and subconscious impressions that even under the best of circumstances the Vraad would have been hard-pressed to recall.
“Come, come! Are you afraid of me? I am gentle!”
Shuddering, Dru finally nodded. When there was no reaction from his amorphous companion, he realized that Darkness did not know what the nod meant and quickly added, “Go ahead. Do it.”
He expected the worst. He waited for the blot’s probing to wrack his mind. Dru waited for something, anything, but felt only his own heart as it beat anxiously.
“But this is fascinating! Unbelievable! I must see these things! So much… so much filled Void! How do you stand being so cluttered? How can you not feel squeezed together?” As Darkness spoke, his shape contracted farther until he was only a little larger than the floating spellcaster. There was awe in his thunderous tones, awe at the existence of so many things, so many solid things.
Dru feared that the blot had experienced too much, was no longer able to cope with the situation, but that was dispelled when Darkness suddenly expanded again, growing and growing and growing… until it seemed he-he? — would fill the entire Void with his ebony self.
“I must go there! I must go with you! The forms! The… the…” Darkness apparently had no words for many of the things he had experienced in Dru’s head. The Vraad made a note of that; his nebulous friend was not perfect.
“Can you find a path out of here?”
“To be sure! Can you not feel the many ways? Can you not feel the paths that cross through here? There are endless choices, though some I will avoid since you are so fragile! I think I know the best way!”
Hope sprang to full life within the breast of the sorcerer. Freedom would soon be his! At the moment, it mattered not to him that his freedom would also mean letting the creature sorcerer loose upon Nimth. Darkness was no worse a threat to the world than the Vraad race had ever been, and with power once more his to command, he believed that he could hold his own against the black entity.
His thoughts were interrupted by yet another change in his unnerving companion. Darkness was contracting again, but now his form was also shifting. More and more, he resembled a crude black mouth, like the maw of some huge beast. The maw was disturbingly close to Dru and was getting closer with each passing breath.
“Darkness! Wait! What are you doing?”
Did the mouth actually smile? “Have no fear, little Dru! I am only making myself into a form that will be able to carry you! I will not, as you constantly fear, take from you! You have given me too much entertainment and I owe you! In fact, I owe you for an entire existence! To think of all that solidity together!”
Closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, Dru waited for the creature to envelop him. When he felt nothing, the sorcerer dared look.
“Serkadion Manee!” He floated in the center of a huge bubble in which there was no light save two pinpricks of an ice-blue color. There had been no feeling of transition, no sense of being swallowed whole. He breathed a sigh of relief, then nearly choked when the two blue dots swelled and became a very real pair of glittering eyes that lacked pupils.
“You are whole?”
“Yes… yes. Thank you.”
“You will be cushioned in here. I will let you see how we travel. Perhaps you will be able to do it yourself… should you need to, that is.” Darkness’s understanding of the Vraad language was becoming stronger and stronger. Except for an excess of formality, he spoke as well as any Vraad.
The bubble began moving; Dru knew this only because Darkness informed him of the fact. The sorcerer tried to brace himself for anything, then realized the futility of the attempt. What could he do, lacking power as he did?
For a long time-several hundred breaths, by Dru’s count-nothing happened. The Vraad watched as emptiness was replaced by more emptiness. His companion spoke little during that period, a sign that this was a tense situation even for the nearly omnipotent creature. Safe and secure within, Dru began to wonder more about the thing now calling itself by so apt a title as Darkness. Was it a demon of legend? Serkadion Manee’s books had mentioned the summoning of such spirits, but no Vraad living now had ever succeeded in summoning them. It had long ago been assumed that demons were either the products of great imagination or golems of fanciful design. Yet, his companion certainly fit the descriptions of a demon.
Could it be, Dru pondered, that some being much like Darkness had been the truth behind the legends?
He was never able to answer his question, for in the next breath, Dru collapsed, his mind suddenly a chaotic cornucopia of intense sensations. Pain, happiness, fear, sadness, indifference, anger… he went through each emotion in the blink of an eye. Other feelings that he could not exactly identify intermingled with the rest. The Vraad crawled to his knees and put a hand to his head. Darkness said nothing, but the bubble that was his form trembled constantly. The sorcerer fell again, but struggled forward even still. His eyesight was blurred, giving him liquidy images of the same emptiness that he had become so sick of and-
And was there something out there now?
Still Darkness did not speak, but Dru knew that the “demon” did not have the effort to spare for such a minuscule thing as conversation. His unearthly companion had located what appeared to be the way out of the Void and the two of them were even now breaking through. The emptiness had finally been replaced, but by what was hard to say for certain.
It looked very much like a pale path of light… a path that, when Dru looked behind them, seemed to run on into infinity. Ahead of them was a different tale. The path continued on for some distance-as well as the Vraad could judge-but then faded away slowly until it became-Dru forced his eyes to focus-until it became a mist very much akin to that which had blanketed the wraithlike forest.
“Free!” the sorcerer hissed without realizing it.
His joy turned to panic as the path before them suddenly split into one and then countless identical paths that turned in all directions and faded away in the same manner as the first. Which one led to his world, the Vraad fretted silently, and where did the others go?
One path that Dru did not want Darkness taking was a single path that appeared to curl within itself like some perpetual double loop. It was exceedingly inviting, for reasons that Dru could not define, yet it also filled him with a sense of mortality, of the death that had nearly claimed him. He breathed a sigh of relief when his companion ignored it.
At some point, the overwhelming assault on his brain had ended. Dru hardly felt comforted by that fact, faced with what seemed the impossible task of choosing a path.
“So many…” he whispered. To Darkness, the hapless sorcerer quickly asked, “Do you know which one?”
The icy orbs stared at him in resolute silence. Whatever decision Darkness had come to, the Void dweller had chosen not to include the tiny, insignificant human in it. Perhaps that was for the best, but Dru could not help feeling a bit of Vraadish indignation at the exclusion.
They alighted onto one of the paths.
Around them, the others faded completely away.
Darkness had made his decision and there was no time to turn back. Already, the incredible creature was nearing the mist. Dru closed his eyes, hoping that a repeat of the onrush of sensations was not in the offing. Hoping, too, that they would not be destroyed or, worse yet, left again marooned in the midst of the hellish Void, this time with the knowledge that there was no escape.