Page 51 of The Blood Rites

Rask brings his fist down. I try to turn my head, but it’s too late. The punch connects with my nose. I see stars, then black.

I tunnel down within myself, looking for that innermost place where I can lose myself and become numb.

Somewhere in the muffled noise between punches, I see flashes of black.

A blow lands on my jaw, and I feel my teeth crack.

Everything shifts, colours drain away, so I squeeze my eyes shut to block out the world.

Sound is replaced by a slow, underwater roar as the blows continue to rain down on my head. I can feel the grotesque persistence of the Mother Shard's magic. She heals as quickly as Rask destroys. Bone knits. Teeth reform. Flesh closes just in time to split again beneath the next blow.

The pain becomes endless precisely because it means nothing.

Rask leans down, his face a blur of joy and rage that I glimpse through the crack of vision visible between my swelling and unswelling eyes.

“Is this what you wanted?” he slurs, spit landing on my face.

What cruel torture this place allows.

He smashes my face again, hard—with both fists, I think. I feel hot blood running into my eyes. A chill seeps into the air and shadows shift restlessly through my blurry vision. Consciousness slips as everything goes dark.

The last thing I hear is a gargled choking from above me. The suffocating weight pinning my body vanishes, and my arms are freed.

A shadow moves at the edge of my vision, there and gone again.

Atheron's voice slices through the haze, dripping with malice. “You will pay for this—”

But I hear no more as the world empties, receding into nothing at all.

I surface in pieces. Severed parts still yearning towards each other.

My memories float in the void, with no body to inhabit. There is the taste of blood, salt and iron, and then a faint burning feeling as though I have been set alight, though I’m too far outside myself to feel it.

A ringing starts—high, endless—a single note stretched in an infinite loop.

It is cold here. No walls. No ceiling. No floor.

Only whiteness so dense it feels difficult to breathe.

I try to pull myself together into something whole, but all that forms is a spiderweb of black cracks spreading in every direction.

I step with no feet, the fractures shimmering with impossible colour as I move, floating above and below at once. I gaze into the cracks and find a hundred reflections, each one almost recognisable, but every angle is distorted.

I want to vomit, to cry, to break.

A voice finds me before anything else does. It hisses at me, soft and languid, before rumbling and cascading into a thousand overlapping voices, ancient and terrible.

“Broken child. What are you? Why are you here?”

I do not answer.

The words echo. Broken, broken, broken.

The world shifts away, waiting for a confession I do not have.

A figure forms in the void, and it is Kael, but not entirely. His eyes are shadow-black, his body flickering with ink and starlight, but his mouth is not his own. It is twisted into Atheron’s sneer. He stands over me, tall and merciless. When he speaks to me it is the voice of the Mother Shard, layered and powerful.

“Weak. Broken thing.” Kael’s twisted form fractures and reforms as Alaris, then Fenwyn, then settles on Atheron. “How did you get here? How have you made it this far, when your light is so dim?” He leans in, his eyes pure white and terrifying. “What strength can you offer me, broken thing? Tainted thing.”