Pain was the wrong word for what Alex was experiencing.
Pain was sothing the mind could locate and na and build a wall around, sothing that had edges and therefore had limits, sothing that sheer will or simple persistence could be pressed against and hold.
What moved through him now had none of those qualities. It was painful the way an ocean was water, technically accurate and completely insufficient as a description of the scale involved.
His body was in miserable agony, yes. Every part of it cycling through states that flesh was not designed to occupy, unmade and remade in patterns that grew more elaborate with each pass, the wrongness of it accumulating rather than dissipating, so that what was real and solid and genuinely his beca harder to locate beneath the layers of mutilation that kept being applied and changed.
His mind was suffering the sa fate, only worse.
Because his mind was a conduit for his soul, the laws of darkness were not limited to tornting his flesh.
They ravaged him with plagues that required no flesh to rot, with decay that withered thoughts instead of organs, with nightmares that drowned him in cascading waves of dreams and visions, so true and therefore worse than fabricated horror, others false and therefore disorienting in ways that truth was not.
The two varieties mixed until the distinction between them beca sothing he had to actively maintain rather than sothing that simply existed.
And above all of it, threading through everything, the laws pressed against his tether to reality itself, making everything that was wrong all the harder to realize and resist.
Venedikt had not been lying when he told the Domain Guardians that Alex would pull through, but he had also not been telling them the complete truth.
The laws would not kill him. Or more precisely, they had never genuinely tried, and even left him completely safe as they found him before they began tornting him.
But the laws were not conscious in the way humans were, nor did they operate according to anything as organized as reason, rcy, or normal understanding.
They restored him to normal condition, but if Alex failed to keep his mind and mories true and together, he would live at the end of this, but he would not be what he had been before the tornt.
He knew he had, after all, lived through one such event that left him nearly mad and broken.
The Dark King was the result of it.
Or, as most called it, the Mad Hegemon.
------
"Several Years Ago"
"Ancestral Realm"
A dark mountain peak pierced through the clouds and the sky alike, rising higher than anything else in the entire realm. Dark fog slipped from its surface in endless streams, moving like water that had forgotten the direction of down, snaking along the mountain’s countless paths and edges before spilling into the abyss of darkness that swallowed everything beneath it.
Atop the summit, a vast and nearly leveled plane stretched in every direction, drowning in darkness that swelled and shifted and crawled across its surface with the slow, purposeful quality of sothing alive, a million presences dragging themselves across the stone, spilling from the edges into the void below with the patient continuity of sothing that did not need a reason to keep moving.
At the heart of the plane, sothing rose.
Too large and too present to be called a hill, too wrong in its specific dinsions and its specific quality to be called a mountain, though it occupied the scale of one. It was neither.
It was a corpse.
A dragon, dead and vast, its body stretching for hundreds of ters in every direction, tall and long in proportions that defied easy comprehension, its entirety onyx black from scale to fang to horn.
The scales that covered it were layered in dense, overlapping formations, each layer darker than the one above it, and from them emanated the pitch darkness that served as the source of the fog drowning the surrounding plane like ocean tides finding their level.
Its face was a visage that the word death had been invented to describe, terror given permanent form, spear-like horns rising from its skull and bending back in rows that crowned it completely, nurous eyes of varying sizes lining its face in arrangents that had nothing to do with symtry but only with function.
Seven pairs of wings were fashioned across its back, folded now in the stillness of sothing that had finished moving a very long ti ago.
Its great jaw was stretched open.
Thousands of dark fangs lined it, cold and lightless as a starless sky, each one enormous and precisely spaced, and each one had sothing fastened to it.
No...Soone.
Thousands of them. Corpses and living individuals alike, bloodied and mutilated and torn and shredded, all bound to the dragon’s fangs by chains of darkness that held them.
Many were dead beyond question, their stillness carrying the specific quality of things that had finished. But many more were alive, and the sounds that ca from them were the sounds of people for whom death had beco the thing they prayed toward rather than feared, their soul-crushing wails rising and falling in waves that the vastness of the plane around them simply swallowed without acknowledgnt.
At one of the largest fangs, fixed at its tip, hung a man.
His skin was ashen, his features handso if they could be called that beneath everything done to them. His body bore a thousand wounds in the literal rather than figurative sense. Both eyes had been gouged out rather than removed. All twenty of his fingers had been taken, and his hands and feet bore mutilations that went beyond injury into sothing that required a different vocabulary.
Other marks covered what remained, each one its own specific testimony to how long this had been going on and how much attention it had received.
It was almost impossible to recognize him as Asher Winter. The first seat of the Drakaryx clan.
A na respected and feared throughout the Ancestral Realm with the particular weight of a reputation built on things that had actually happened rather than things that had been said, his status surpassed only by the three Hegemons themselves.
Almost impossible, but not quite. The structure of him was still there beneath everything that had been done to it.
The darkness before him shifted.
From it stepped a figure, his skin the pitch black of polished obsidian, his features chiseled, deep black eyes carrying no white in them, no warmth, no recognizable emotional register.
The thousands bound to the dragon’s fangs, throats long since stripped raw, voices reduced to nothing across the span of however long they had been here, found sothing to push through the nothing. The cries that rose at the sight of the newcor were not words. They had moved past the stage where words were available to them. They were the pure sound of suffering given sudden new urgency, inhuman in their quality, torn from bodies that should not have had anything left to give.
"I understand you tornting those of us who were closest to him." Asher’s voice, his voice cold and inhuman at its edges. "We were his closest. We acted at his command. I accept the logic of it, even if I would argue the scope."
He paused, the darkness beneath his skin threading outward in veins before vanishing deeper, his jaw tight.
"But why do you keep tornting them?" His eyeless face stared at the man with hatred and rage. "They were his subjects, and nothing more. They had no hand in what happened to your wife."
The figure did not open its lips.
The voice ca anyway, arriving in the air with the flat certainty of sothing that had already decided everything it was going to decide and was now simply delivering information.
"Where are they?" His voice was strange, emptied of everything except the question, and even the question was barely a question, more the formal shape of a demand that had already been delivered long before it was spoken.
The thousands around Asher roared for him to answer, their voices cracking back into sound with the desperate urgency of people who understood what refusal granted.
He remained quiet through several minutes of it, his jaw working against whatever was moving through him, until a roar tore from him that he had not chosen to release, the sound of sothing that had been containing sothing past the point of containnt.
With it, all of them suffered simultaneously. The sa terrible escalation moving through every bound body on every fang at once, the collective sound of it rising above the plane and into the dark sky above in sothing that was no longer individual voices but had beco a single, compound expression of what this place did to the people it held.
"Odysseus." Asher forced the na through what remained of his will, pushing it past the aftermath of the roar and the continuing waves of what was moving through him. "He is responsible for the condition of your wife. Not and certainly not anyone else here." His eyes, the places where his eyes had been, stayed fixed on the dark figure.
"You can tornt for it. I was his instrunt, I acted as he wished, I will not pretend otherwise. But these others. The innocent ones. What you are doing to them is a vile and heinous cri."
He held the silence that followed, finding the steadiness in it that the words required.
"I know you are better than this."
"I will find your wife and daughter," the dark figure said, his voice carrying the sa flat, cold quality it had carried from the beginning, as though the plea and the cries and the declaration of innocence had arrived at a place where no input was being received and processed into anything that changed the output.
"And I will hang them here beside you."
The words that followed were not said with rage or heat or the emphasis of sothing that was wanted to be understood as a threat. They were said the way administrative facts were said, plainly and without drama, already decided, already as real as anything else in the world.
He looked at the thousands of bound forms along the dragon’s jaw.
"I will make all of you suffer for eternity."
The dark figure stepped back into the fading darkness and was gone.
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