Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3) (30 page)

I knew now I would not be
able to fight the first phase of the battle, for I had to begin a
search for this threat. I had to find and destroy it.

From my sacred space on
the moon, where silence and darkness were a caress, I dipped into
other dimensions and realities, searching both benign realms and
those that would have been seen as hell dimensions, in order to
find the source of this call. I found nothing. Only Earth remained
and the humans which existed on a limited sphere of consciousness
and spiritual evolution. Searching Earth meant not only searching
space, I would have to search through its past and future, a
time-consuming and demanding enterprise. Hovering above the surface
of the moon, I began my search through the centuries—a journey that
was not a linear one, but which saw me inhabit different times and
places simultaneously. Whenever I returned to my time, only days or
weeks had passed. During that time war burst forth and devoured the
fragile peace amongst the Timeless Ones on Earth.

I was indeed far from the
source of the threat when a cry, not unlike the wail of a violin,
broke through the annals of time spinning around me in a billion
pinpricks of glittering light. I was thrown out of the stream by
the cry, plummeting through space to land on the ground. Disbelief,
along with chagrin, billowed within me.

I had not been able to
find it. Instead it had found
me
. How could this be?

Knowing exactly where I
must now go, I rose above the surface of the moon once more and
drew time and space to me. It curled forth and I moved into it,
stepping thousands of years into mankind’s future to a little
island surrounded by dark, choppy waters. I entered what was little
more than a box of stone, invisible to the humans present. To me,
the large bed and solid wood furniture looked cumbersome and
archaic, although it was a comfortable room belonging to people who
had accumulated the things that were considered of value in this
time. The air in the room was warm and close, and three women
hovered over another: a pale, slender woman with dark hair and
refined features. She looked earnestly toward something one of the
females in the room held out of view. Wrinkling my nose at the
primitive nature of their existence, especially in this period of
their evolution, I stared at the woman, anger flaring
within.

Was she the one who had
been able to call me out of the streams of time?

Then I heard the cry
again, and once more felt that wrenching of the soul I could not
ignore. As if in a trance, I moved closer to the cluster of women.
When one of them placed a baby in the arms of the dark-haired
woman, I finally saw the threat that had been pulling on my soul
for as long as I could remember.

It was a child, a male
child, his face flushed with feeling as he wailed, no doubt
bewildered by the sights and sounds of this hard, bright world
after the comforting dark of his mother’s womb.

How could a mortal—a
baby—have called to me so strongly?

Now I was near him I
realised why the pull had tormented me, a pull that was gone now. I
looked on in shock. This baby had been able to call to me because
my soul was linked to his. This type of a bond—when two souls
melded into one another to form a single bond which could never be
severed—was known to the Timeless Ones, but it was rare.

Only love could bind two
beings in this manner.

I stared at the baby, a
smirk on my lips. This must be a trick, for how could a mere mortal
hope to capture the heart of a goddess?

I moved closer to the
mother and child whilst the others in the room bustled around them,
passing around and through me, completely oblivious to my
presence.

The baby was quiet now,
feeding at its mother’s breast. Again I felt a ripple of disgust at
the primitive existence of humankind. Yet unable to tear my gaze
away from the baby, I looked into its future.

I watched his life unfold
before me. I saw the many moments he spent in this room as a boy
sitting on his mother’s lap whilst she sat in the chair by the
window, sorrow lining her face as she thought of the man who had
captured her heart and treated it so carelessly. All the while he
sat staring at his mother, his vivid blue eyes filled with love and
also a quiet empathy unusual for a child so young.

I watched as he grew into
a quiet, serious boy and even saw his first day at school, how tall
and thin he looked as he stood at the school gates trying to evince
a courage he did not feel. I was there to see him standing at his
mother’s graveside, his sensitive, handsome face pale with anxiety
regarding the future.

I remained with him as he
lay that night in his room staring up at the ceiling, his eyes
filled with the sorrow he would not allow to form into tears. His
lips were slightly parted as if in astonishment at the death he
still could not fully accept, dark circles under his
eyes.

I could not tear my gaze
away from him, his sorrow and loneliness pulling at some part of me
I had hidden away even from myself. I wondered then if I should
reveal myself to him and show him the realm just beyond seeing that
awaited him so he would be comforted by the truth: Death was not
something to be mourned. Death should instead be met with joy for
it led to paradise.

I sighed instead. I had
always been scornful of the Timeless Ones who developed attachments
to humans, no matter how fleeting. Although this was only
an...attachment, not the type of bond that had the power to call me
to this boy, I had to find out how the trick that had brought me to
him had been achieved and return to my time.

Despite that I remained
with him in that dark little box, observing his sleepless vigil
along with his grief, until dawn.

I moved to his bed then
and placed a hand against his though he could not feel my touch. He
looked toward the window in that moment at the brightening dawn
peeping through the gaps in the curtains. I could not explain the
elation that surged within when he turned his gaze toward where I
stood, or the pang of distress that replaced it when he looked
through and beyond me.

I removed my hand from
his.

A Timeless One developing
an attachment to a human never bode well for either them or
us.

Reluctantly I left the
human boy looking through the gloom toward the draped window and
the breaches of light struggling against the darkness he lay
in.

I left that period in his
life and walked into a rain swept landscape and a day turned a
spent grey by slate-coloured clouds.

I let out a gasp when I
beheld him, vibrant and virile against the grey surroundings. He
was a man now. He stood before me dressed in black, completely
oblivious to the rain, his glistening dark hair pushed away from
his face, his skin dewy and flushed. I stared up into a face that
was beautiful beyond anything I had ever seen and which made my
heart lurch only to quiver against my chest in
submission.

His vivid blue eyes seemed
to meet mine for a split second and it felt as though I could not
breathe. But of course he couldn’t see me. He was looking beyond me
to two dogs frolicking in the rain. A dazzling smile broke across
his face. He moved away and called to the dogs. He ran after them
leaving me trembling as I watched him come to a stop and then call
the dogs again.

I was a god. Power, the
omniscient, it was all I knew. Yet in that moment I had known what
weakness was. I had felt it in that fleeting moment when he looked
into my eyes.

It was then that I finally
accepted this was no trick. His soul had been able to call to mine
because he held my heart long before he came into being.

Yet his future was clouded
with danger and pain. In his otherwise unremarkable life, I saw a
seed of evil which would draw him into a darkness that would
destroy him. I felt a flutter of anxiety at what awaited him and
realised for the first time that the war currently taking place
among the Timeless Ones would eventually spill out into human
existence in the creation of creatures like the one that laid a
snare to capture him.

Without my even being
aware of it, the decision had been made the moment I heard his
call. Even if the decision had not already been made, I knew I
could not let him fall into darkness. I had to be with him, it was
what my soul—and his—demanded.

It was forbidden for one
of the Timeless Ones to mate with a human, so it meant I had to
become mortal.

And this is how a goddess
became a slave.

I pulled myself out of the
silky cobwebs of his time and returned to the moon. Already away
from the sight of his face, so far from the lullaby his soul sang
to my own, I felt the loss keenly. The cold, dark emptiness of the
moon, which had previously been my sanctuary, was a
wasteland.

The decision had been
made.

I closed my eyes and
called forth the power of the universe, of the moon, the sacred
power at the heart of my being. I knew where I would go. The human
female I had chosen to be my mother came from a powerful line of
humans called witches. They carried a limited form of the power of
the Timeless Ones. Entering the world through this woman would
ensure I would not be completely helpless in my mortal
form.

When it was done, I opened
my eyes.

Floating in the almost
liquid darkness cupping the moon, I saw her, my mortal incarnation.
My beloved’s soul would recognise mine, and so long as our paths
crossed, he would be inescapably drawn to me no matter what form I
took. Yet I had created her in my image, although something that
had never been known to me shone in her eyes as she gazed upon me:
fear, even as awe unfolded across her face like a flower opening
itself to the sun.

It was done. I lifted my
head to the darkness and all that I was—timelessness, knowledge,
power, the divine—bled from me and there was only
darkness.

In the present I had been
released from the chains of my mortal body. Now I could exist in
the fullness of what I was.

I whispered a command to
the darkness and it faded away. The underground chamber blazed into
being.

The entity in its hideous
rendition of my mortal body sat at the altar. Any pity I may have
felt for the child this thing used to be—a child who had been
forced to wear the mantle of a goddess and carry all the burdens
associated with that role—was gone. Its laughter shredded the
silence in the underground chamber whilst my body lay prone before
it, the gold staff protruding from my back. Blood seeped into the
earth around my body whilst the dead gathered around bearing silent
witness.

The entity’s laughter
faded away and its face froze into a mask of fear. Rage quickly
replaced it, its eyes like black cauldrons of hatred when it
glimpsed what it could perceive of my true self, standing by my
mortal body.

A staff through the heart
would have killed a vampire, but I was more than a vampire. So
although wounded, I was not dead. Instead the shock of the wound
had allowed me to leave my mortal body, as I had done long ago in
sleep in order to swim through the mists of time and tell my
beloved to wait for me. But I did not know if my mortal incarnation
would remain alive long enough for me to do all that needed to be
done and return to it.

With only the power of
thought, I hoisted the chapel entity into the air. It had no
tangible body, but with a mere thought, I could make it feel
pain.

It went rigid and
screamed. Gut wrenching screams as I visited every single one of
the deaths it was responsible for, along with hours of torture its
victims had endured at the hands of Auria, Emory and Onyx in a
single, fluid burst of pain. Its screams were terrifying to
hear—raw wrenching screams of unimaginable pain. I released it and
it crumpled to the floor where it remained, a sobbing, broken shell
of what it had coveted for millennia.

I knew where I would send
it, a place of inconceivable darkness. A hell dimension where
hideous beasts resided. Even now I could see the seams between our
world and theirs unravelling and the air around the entity rippled.
I saw some of the inhabitants of the hell dimension from which the
entity had escaped when Auria summoned it. Some looked like men,
with long pale limbs and large, bright, glassy eyes that filled
most of their faces. Others were hideous beasts, one a
multi-legged, amphibious-looking thing crawling on its stomach.
They reached for the entity.

I turned away from it and
back to the souls of the dead. I once more held my hand out to the
Negro ghost. She was smiling now, the anguish and sorrow gone. When
she grasped my hand this time, it felt solid. I held out my hand to
another and looked around me at all of the faces of the dead. I
pulled them to me like a fistful of petals, and the underground
chamber—along with the broken figure of the entity, which was
fading away back into the darkness—disappeared from sight along
with the hideous beasts tugging at its edges. I carried the souls
of the dead with me and released their spirits into that place of
perfect happiness which we all know is whispering at the
peripheries of our mortal lives.