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The monster rose miles above his head, gray scales glistening with the silver waters as they ran down its back and escaped back into the bottomless lake. Its mouth opened, revealing row after row of sharp teeth filling the entirety of its hellish maw. There was no tongue, just a massive, macerating clamp designed to grip its prey and maim it with a thousand bites in one single chomp. It might drop you after the first bite, but you would not be able to run again. You would lie, broken and bleeding, waiting for the end.
Bryn stood perfectly still as the creature cast that terrible head about in the dark, wailing and screeching with a sound like iron scraping against itself over and over and over again.
It had detected him, but it had not actually seen him. He was one with the shadows, cast over his own face. He turned the side marked with charcoal toward it and waited for the monster to calm.
“There's a good boy,” he growled, speaking to the horrific beast as if it were a lyrakin whelp.
He had not come to destroy the creatures of the dark. They each had their place and their reason. What appeared monstrous to him was loved by another. Bryn had come to this understanding over a lifetime of causing the most brutal pain.
He had renounced it all and taken up residence in New Rahvin. He thought he might avoid battle forever there, where the wars did not bother to come. For ten long years he had been able to lay down his blade and forget the many horrors of his past.
Bryn was no innocent. That was why he understood the importance of preserving it in others.
“Come out! Your minions will not do me any harm. All we are doing is wasting one another’s time.”
“Bryn.”
The creature spoke his name like an old friend.
“Hello, Master Dark.”
The creature laughed.
“I have come for my own.”
“Ah. The woman.”
Bryn was going to correct it, and call Hail a girl. But the creature was correct. Hail had not been a girl for some time. She was a woman, with all that implied and entailed.
“She bears my mark. She is protected.”
“She took your mark off. She summoned me forth. I know about the reload.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know you used one of your reloads in order to save the rest of your young. Those saves and reloads are limited, even for you. The game will win even if you try to cheat it of its prey.”
“Reloading is not cheating.”
“Do you have a save point set to the moment before you walked into my realm, so you might return to it in the case of failing? I hope not. You can only use one at a time, and that means you have forever set every other event in stone. It means I have forever taken her. And if I will not return her, it means she is forever gone.”
“You have been bored, have you not,” Bryn asked. He was very well aware of the dynamics of the save spell, and the consequences of it. It allowed a brief return and a complete do-over to the point at which it was cast, but it solidified everything before it in adamantine time. Past tragedies, previous losses, all were preserved. Few knew the save spell, and even fewer had the courage to cast it.
“You have been casting saves over and over since the girl reached eighteen years of age. Why is that, Bryn? What do you fear?”
“You already know. That’s why you took her, isn't it?”
“She has the old blood. The very old blood. I thought it had disappeared from the world completely. And yet nothing ever truly disappears, does it? I knew it would return one day.”
"She has barely a drop of it. She knows nothing.”
“She knows enough to try to build her power. And that’s the last thing either of us want, isn’t it, Bryn. A new chaos node? Free on the world? Able to draw on the ancient magics? You are fortunate I took her when I did.”
“She doesn’t belong with you.”
“I think she does. I think this is the only place she belongs. And I think you think that too. Because, you, Bryn, belong here too.”
He couldn’t kill the Dark. It wasn’t possible. The Dark could only ever be driven back. But things could be taken from the Dark and brought into the light. His whelp was one of them.
“Hail!”
He called her name, hoping she would come to him of her own accord—though he knew that would be too easy.
“She left you, Bryn. She sought her own path.”
“And that path is your path, is it?”
“It is.”
Bryn drew in a deep breath of the evil air and knew that there was no way to take Hail against her will. Not in this place. She could not be dragged from it. She had chosen to enter a realm from which few ever emerged.
