Beastborne: Voracious (Book 5) [Chapter 6]

Chapter 6

“Why are you doing this?” Besal asked, releasing his clawed grasp on the dying creature. “What use am I to you?”

“Ah-ah!” Ralst wagged a finger at him. “You agreed to do what I said without questions, remember?”

With a frown, Besal looked at the body between them.

Several puncture marks in its thick hide showed where Ralst had dealt swift near-death.

Besal had to admit, she knew what she was doing. He had seen Hal fight, felt it firsthand, but Ralst was on an entirely different level. This woman was death incarnate. She had stepped out of a shadow and fell onto this unsuspecting creature with the force of a natural disaster.

And then she had given him strange orders.

“Did I tell you to stop?” Ralst chided.

Kneeling back to the creature, Besal formed his shadowy hands into claws and pierced them into the creature’s wounds. It was too weak to thrash, but its strange scaly tail still tried to club Besal, even though it could only move an inch or two before it fell again.

Black tendrils of corruption spread from Besal’s fingers—his very essence—into the creature’s scaly layered hide. It looked a bit like an armadillo crossed with a scorpion, only its tip was shaped like a club.

The creature thrashed once or twice as the corruption invaded its body… and then it went very still.

A garbled array of Script appeared in Besal’s vision for all of a second before it vanished.

“Well?” Ralst asked.

Besal shrugged. “You have not told me what we are doing,” he pointed out. “I can’t tell you what is or is not going right if I do not know what I am looking for.”

The drow tsk’dand folded her arms. “Then it didn’t work. Trust me, you’ll know the moment it works.” Then, in a voice she didn’t intend for him, she added, “Maybe I’m taking them too close to death?”

A handful of [Sparks] popped out of the creature as it finally died. Dark smoke roiled off the body until nothing was left, leaving a faint greasy soot-stain on the heavily carved floor.

Besal had no idea where they were. Ralst had taken him deeper into the Fathomways than he had ventured. And there were… strange things around. He did not know how to explain it.

Something was very wrong.

The ground bucked and rolled. Carved grooves in the stone moved like plates of armor beneath a massive creature the size of a planet. The stones did not crack, there was only a little dust that fell from the ceiling.

“It’s getting worse,” Ralst said softly. Worry threaded through her words. She turned to Besal and smiled. “You’ll just have to work that much faster then!”

“For what purp—” Besal started, then stopped himself. She would not answer. She never answered.

“He’s learning,” Ralst said with a wink. “You’re a quick study, you know that?”

“It would help if I knew what the study was.”

“But that would ruin the surprise.”

“I do not like surprises,” Besal said. Then, realizing he actually meant something quite different, he added, “Not unless they are an ambush I am laying, at least.”

“A demon after my own heart,” Ralst said, turning on her heels and leaving the [Sparks] behind.

He had corrected her several times already, so Besal eventually let it drop. “You are leaving the… money behind?”

“I don’t need that pittance,” she said. “You would be free to take it if you wanted.”

This is another test, he thought. Why iseverything with her a test? Hal did not test me half this much, and I was an ever-present threat to his very being!

Resisting the hunger that seemed to permeate his every fiber, Besal heeled after Ralst with little more than a brief pause. He was beginning to realize that without Hal tempering his desires, he was a bloodthirsty, greedy beast.

He was a Khaeros without a host. Somehow still alive, when he should be dead. And the only person who could grant him the peace of some sort of answer outrightly refused to do so.

After the first attempt to rip out her throat as she slept, there had not been another. Besal still keenly remembered that lesson.

Besal had learned a lot from Hal, but the lessons he took to heart were those of the human’s deviousness. You did not attack the moment the opportunity arose. Nor the second, third, or even fourth.

It was the fifth.

And so Besal waited and heeled when Ralst asked. Performed strange rites on dying creatures at her behest without ever understanding or knowing what she was trying to accomplish.

Just as the feeling of frustration—at himself, no less!—began, he struck.

They had been walking for an interminable amount of time until finally stopping at a nondescript alcove set in the geometric stone. Besal tried to strike up a conversation with her in accordance with his limited ability and what he had remembered from Hal to no avail.

Ralst was resolute. She was driven, and she was fast. Besal had to jog just to keep up with her walking pace. Still, with no lungs to burn, no heart to feel like it was beating out of his chest, and no muscles to turn watery, it was more a nuisance than anything else.

Still, this creature refused him every courtesy. She treated him like a wild animal she intended to break.

Besal bided his time, never showing the hatred that began to burn in his heart or whatever passed for one in such a creature. He did not need to sleep, though he pretended to each time the drow stopped for a rest.

The drow sat in her meditative stance, legs curled beneath her, hands folded in her lap. Besal curled up beside her and then lunged.

Besal knew he should have felt her flesh rip beneath his solidified shadowy talons. He should have tasted the copper-sweet tang of her blood as it sprayed across his face.

Instead, from one moment to the next, he found himself with his arm pressed into the small of his back and his face pinned to the ground.

“I’ve been waiting ages for you to finally show some spine,” Ralst had whispered to him. “Now that you’ve got it out of your system, I’ll explain very slowly so you understand. Firstly, stop struggling.”

Fighting Ralst’s grip was like trying to escape the accretion of a black hole.

There was a certain… inevitability about her.

“Good boy,” the drow said, relaxing her grip somewhat. “Everybody gets one, my dear. Little Luda learned that quite well. Now she’s a good girl that knows what role she plays. You’ll learn too, though I expect you have already taken too much of the Founder into yourself to do so as quickly as we need. If you try it again, I will have to punish you.”

There was a quiet malice to those last six words.

They were not said with the promise of blood and pain. Besal was used to those threats. There was a sadness to the words, as if she did not want to harm Besal, but that she would have no choice.

To Besal, that was more concerning than if she had just gone ahead and stabbed him. He keenly remembered the thousand retorts that had blossomed and then wilted on his tongue.

What could you say when somebody had you pinned to the ground faster than your mind could even process the action?

She could kill him quite easily in his current state, yet she didn’t. In fact, more than once she had saved him from a monster that leaped out of a side tunnel.

That was not quite an ally in Besal’s books, but perhaps Hal would have been more accommodating?

Besal started to laugh. No, no he would not have been.

The man would have railed and lashed out with everything he had just to be free. Even if that freedom lasted all of a second before a knife took him in the throat.

More to the point, Besal was beginning to realize that he was not Hal. They were similar in many ways. Some of those were for good reason, others were… more complicated.

Sharing a mind and a body with a person would complicate the most simplistic of relationships.

But the cold hard truth was that Besal was free to act of his own accord. How did he want to play this out?

Once again, he felt he should have had somebody to speak to. Hal might as well have been dead for all he could feel of the man.

That… saddened him, oddly enough. He had a strangely powerful affection for the man. And while being separated had its perks, it was intensely lonely.

Do all humans feel like this all the time?

“Mostly,” Ralst said, leaning against a pillar carved into a series of V’s. The ground shook again, and the pillar trembled slightly, the overlapping V’s sliding with a faint grinding sound. “If you want somebody to talk to, you only have to find somebody and talk to them.”

Besal had not realized he’d spoken aloud, but this was the first question since they started that she had answered. “Then why do you keep yourselves apart?”

Coal-black shoulders shrugged, her tight-fitted leather armor shifted noiselessly. “Who can say? Some of us like the company of the dark better. There’s no right or wrong.” She reached out and tapped the vaporous space where a heart might be on Besal. “Before you can follow your own voice, you first need to find it.”

“Is that what we’re doing?”

Ralst gave him a Look.

Besal was getting good at interpreting the Look. It said, “Shut up and keep up.” Which, to Besal, was a greatly economical way of speaking. His own attempts at Looks were… significantly less successful.

He chalked this up to the unfairness of not having standard-issue eyes.

The Fathomways were immense. No matter how long they ran, the overlapping ridges and geometric plates of the place seemed a perpetual grounding force.

Every so often Besal faintly detected the presence of corrupted monsters, those that even a Dungeon had rejected out of self-preservation. He kept his attention split between Ralst and them, because it seemed to him as if they were being followed by the creatures.

Considering the drow’s impressive list of abilities, Besal wondered if she could detect what he had.

When a shade phased through the wall and lashed out at Ralst, she flickered to the side, black knives appearing in her hands.

Besal, having felt the creature’s presence, had kept well back. She can’t feel them, he realized at the look of alarm on her face.

Ralst dispatched the creature with ease. The monster, a haggard collection of armor and rotted flesh, would have been something that Hal could have handled alone.

It was an effort to think of himself as separate from him. In more ways than he immediately understood. There was a hollow longing in his chest that he could not come to grips with.

The first corrupted creature down, Ralst turned to Besal as if this were somehow his fault. She was a smart one, however, and immediately realized he was looking with bored interest behind her.

Spinning about, the drow assassin—or whatever Class she was—became a… “blur” was not the right word to use but Besal’s grasp on language was tenuous at times when it came to things like this. Perhaps it was better to say she fused with the shadows between the strange glowing lights.

The next moment she appeared right beside the monster. It collapsed bonelessly to the floor in a clatter of rusted armor plates.

Ralst turned on Besal. “You knew they were there!”

His first instinct was to fall back on his knowledge from Hal. To dissemble. Lie. But then he thought, I am not Hal. I am me. I can do as I wish… what do I wish to do?

Seeing the fury on Ralst’s face should have frightened him. Their agreement was tentative at best, and he doubted that the drow would have any problems killing him and walking away.

Not only would it be a simple thing for her, but he doubted she placed much honor in the agreement. Hal would have, but she was nothing like him.

It was almost disappointing.

Still, he saw no reason to lie. Besal shrugged his wispy shoulders and nodded.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” she asked, her anger bleeding away to something approaching curiosity. So long as that something was sneaking up on curiosity with daggers raised.

“You did not ask me to,” Besal said simply. And I wanted to see what you would do, he added in his head.

Ralst stared at him, her piercing ruby red eyes bored through his very being as if she could read the words he thought. “Huh.”

That was it. That was all she said before turning on her heels and beginning to walk away.

Besal hurried to catch up to her.

As he did, she turned to look over her shoulder at him. “I can see why Rinbast is so frustrated by… Hal.” Ralst chuckled. “We’re off to a rather bad start. I was hoping we could get along easier than this, my social skills are a bit… rusty.”

Besal looked up at the ceiling, every so often there was a suspended wire frame containing a glowing crystal that provided a fairly even light with dim shadows between. “I did not notice.”

Ralst gave him a side-eye. It was clear she was struggling to discern whether he was winding her up, eventually she shrugged and decided it didn’t matter. “My point being,” she began, “we can’t have you acting as if you’re a prisoner this entire time. I don’t have the desire to watch over you every second. I’m trying to helpyou, Besal. And to do that, I need you to trust me.”

“I hardly trusted the man that created me, made me more than just a monster, and saved my life,” he said without skipping a beat. “Trust is a currency I have precious little of.”

Ralst stopped walking and turned to stare at him. “That’s… fair.” She extended a hand. “How about we start over.”

Besal looked at it, then at her. “I do not understand.”

She reached over with her other hand, gripped his wrist and shook his hand. There was no malice in it, though a faint amusement twitched at her lips and lit up her blood-red eyes in an interesting way.

“There, now we’re on friendly terms,” she said. “I still will abide by our agreement, but all that I ask of you is to keep my secret—as I will keep yours—and to do as I ask.”

“And the prohibition on questions?” Besal ventured.

Ralst put her hands on her hips and sighed. “You may ask them. I cannot guarantee I will be able to answer them, but you may ask. But first, I have one for you.”

Besal motioned to her.

“Can you detect more of those creatures? The ones with the corruption in them?”

“Easily.”

Ralst’s pearly white smile was at odds with her dark complexion and the dull bruised and bloodied light filtering down the hall. “Excellent. We may just make a monster out of you yet!”

Taking a sharp left down a narrow side passage, Besal asked, “Am I to be your hound then?”

“Something like that,” Ralst said. “For now, you seek them out. I’ll weaken them, and then you do as we discussed earlier.”

“Why?”

Ralst opened her mouth, to snap at him no doubt, and instead shut it.

After a moment she broke the silence of the Fathomways. “Do you know what you are, Besal?”

“A Khaeros.”

“And do you know where those come from?”

“I….” He paused.

Technically, there were two answers. Beastbornes was the obvious one, but they also came from the stars themselves. From the bloody nebulae that exist on the very edge of the Worldshards. Where untold Terrors and Horrors lurked.

Not too long ago he had wanted to ascend to their ranks. To become one of the Outsiders who yearned for the destruction of all Order, all life but their own.

Only recently did he begin to understand they were a parasite seeking to replicate and replace.

“Hard question, isn’t it?” Ralst said.

“No.” Besal shook his head. Wisps of black shadow fragmented and disappeared. He was significantly less substantial as time wore on. “There are multiple answers.”

Ralst had a black knife in her hand from nowhere and held up a free hand to him. She had heard something just on the edge of his hearing. They came upon a crossroads and Ralst motioned curiously at him.

Besal shut his eyes and focused. Without opening them he pointed and Ralst took off down the passage. There was a brief, unnatural cascading scream of surprise, the creature had been stalking them so well that even Besal’s senses hardly picked it up.

When he turned the corner and came upon the beast, the noise made sense. It was an immature Shoggoth. Its multitudinous mouths twitched and foamed with black reeking corruption.

“We’re in luck,” Ralst said, motioning with a dagger.

While Besal knelt next to the thing, Ralst fastidiously cleaned the blade. Besal looked at one of its mouths and the bloodshot eye nearby. A green iris peeked out at him.

There was a pleading emanation. Not quite sound, but not the projected feelings of a monster either. This was something unique to Besal’s kind. A sort of telepathy.

Besal shook his head, denying the request. It wanted him to empower it. As the weaker of the two creatures, Besal—by the rather unfocused, confusing, and knotted ways of Outsiders—should have acquiesced to its request.

He should have allowed the Shoggoth to digest his essence, using it to attack the drow. The shock of the refusal sent the Shoggoth into a rage.

With brackish black blood squirting from its wounds, the creature struck at Besal. A tentacle pierced through his chest and began to forcibly extract his essence.

Besal howled with pain as the Shoggoth’s attack cracked one of the stones Ralst or Luda had created for him. He still wasn’t sure if Luda had always been Ralst or if there was indeed a Luda this whole time.

It was easier to think about the minor oddity of Luda and Ralst than what was happening to him. The first stone shattered under the Shoggoth’s assault. The next started to crack, leaking wispy light that firmed up Besal’s form until it shattered and left him even weaker.

Ralst stabbed into the creature with vicious strikes, but Besal could see that even the power of the drow was not enough to stop it before it killed him.

The Shoggoth would die, that was guaranteed. And it was going to take Besal with it.

But there was nothing in the multiverse like the hatred of an Outsider. Seeing Besal as a traitor, the Shoggoth would do everything within its power to end him. To scrub him out of existence itself would be well worth the same fate.

“Fight back, Besal!” Ralst bellowed. “It’s attacking you, are you just going to take it lying down like that?”

Lying down? Besal looked around, only then realizing he was on his back with the Shoggoth perched atop him. A dozen or more tentacles with toothy maws were pierced into his translucent frame.

Thoughts of death and the afterlife were pushed aside as Besal seized onto the first tentacle. The one that was deepest and most likely to kill him.

Besal acted purely on instinct.

He would normally seek an answer, trying to search his memories—or rather, Hal’s memories—for an answer to the situation. But this was life-or-death, and there was no time to hunt for an answer.

Besal understood instinct. He understood blood and death.

The Beast fought back.

Gashed and leaking viscera, the Shoggoth’s eyes widened as Besal pulled on the vital tide of the creature. This was something that even Hal could not do. It went deeper than mere essence. This was an equivalent to a soul.

Horrors, even Lesser Horrors like the [Immature Shoggoth] in front of him, were interconnected to a greater web of decay and devastation. Killing their physical form only sent them back to the nest, like banishing a demon.

What Besal did was consume the creature. Every part of it.

Such a death was complete. There would be no coming back, no return to the Scarscape from whence such creatures came.

True death awaited it, and the [Immature Shoggoth] felt the terror of this certainty in every atom of its body.

You ¿? ¿? ¿? the [Immature Shoggoth].

You gain ¿? ¿? ¿? and ¿? ¿? ¿?.

¿? ¿?―!¿?¡?

Yes/No?¿

Besal struggled to stay conscious as the Shoggoth vanished from view and the strange garbled Shardscript flooded his vision. He batted at it and swiped angrily, unable to understand what it wanted from him.

Ralst shoved her hand into his middle and managed to wrap her hand around the last surviving stone in his body. The very stone that was keeping him alive.

It shattered, but her fingers were hard as steel, and she refused to let go. Panic ignited across her features, rich with dread and worry.

At the same time, in stark counterpoint, a powerful calm settled over Besal like a warm mist. He knew he was going to die. Ralst could not contain the last of the stones forever.

Eventually, she would tire. Even if it took days or weeks.

“Let go,” Besal said gently, though his voice was as weak as his body. He was barely a pale shadow.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen!” Ralst said through gritted teeth. Her hand shook with the strain of holding Besal’s lifeforce together. “If only Luda was… just hold on, Besal. You hear me? I’ll damn well tell you everything, but I can’t do that if you’re dead, got it?”

Besal glanced at the persistent Shardscript, then at Ralst. He finally understood something that had long since bothered him. Why humans, against all reason, wanted to be with somebody in their final moments.

They wanted somebody to remember them.

To care.

Being alone was something an animal did, Besal understood now.

Looking up at Ralst’s increasingly panicked expression, he felt himself smile. He had thought he would die alone after the Khaeros killed him. That he would be pulled back to the Scarscape and surrounded by his ill-formed brothers and sisters once more.

Even if they did not tear him apart—a near certainty given the Shoggoth’s reaction—their company was a sorry excuse for this.

What does it matter? He thought, accepting the garbled Shardscript’s question. It couldn’t be worse than dying.