Chapter 6 — The Uninvited
The celebration lasted four seconds.
That was how long it took the Gatewardens to process what had happened, and how long Kael had to kneel on the platform enjoying being alive, before the universe — which had clearly been waiting for its moment — struck.
"HE SURVIVED!" Kyle bellowed, in a voice nothing like his sepulchral Gatewarden voice, and grabbed Lucas by the cloak. "LUCAS! HE SURVIVED! A CURSE BRAND! A LIVING CURSE BRAND!"
"I KNOW, I WAS HERE, I'M STANDING RIGHT—"
"THE NETWORK MUST BE TOLD! THE GATEWARDENS OF EVERY CIRCLE ON AETHRA! THE CONCLAVE! THE ORDERS! THE—"
"Should we... tell him first?" Lucas said, gesturing at Kael. "He's kneeling right there. Looking a bit grey."
"IT CAN WAIT FOUR SECONDS!"
That was when Kael's skull split open.
Not literally. That would have been kinder.
It started in the soul-room. Kael felt it — the new space inside him, the one Spark had moved into, the one that still smelled of summer storm and smugness — and something else was there.
Something vast. Something dark. Something that had not been invited, and had come anyway.
'Spark,' Kael thought, suddenly cold. 'What is that.'
"...What is what," Spark said, but the smugness was gone. The storm-smell in the soul-room had changed. Turned sharp. Turned hunted. "Oh. Oh no. No no no—"
The presence unfolded.
It was like watching a shadow decide to be three-dimensional. It poured itself out of the brand — the brand, the Slyth's brand, the door the monarch had promised to open from his side — and it filled the soul-room until the room felt like a coffin, and then it spoke, and its voice was the most terrifying thing Kael had ever heard, because it was polite.
"Cosy," said the voice. "Cramped. Amateurish. It will do."
'SPARK.'
"I DON'T KNOW HOW IT GOT IN," Spark said, and for the first time, the rabbit sounded small. "The door was open — the contract, the transit, your soul was basically a hallway for three seconds — something came through WITH us—"
"Not something, little vermin." The voice was amused. "Someone."
A throne assembled itself in the soul-room.
Kael saw it — felt it — the way you feel a dream. Bone. A throne of fused black bone, tall and cruel and comfortable, and upon it sat a figure made mostly of shadow and entirely of confidence. He had the shape of a man the way a statue has the shape of a man: perfect, finished, and not even slightly alive. Where his face should have been was a smooth dark surface, like spilled ink held in the outline of a skull.
The figure crossed its legs, leaned its chin on one fist, and regarded the quivering storm-cloud that was Spark the way a man regards an insect that has just learned his name.
"Void," Spark breathed. "You absolute, cheating, door-crashing—"
"Language," said Void mildly. "We have a host to impress." The ink-skull turned, and Kael felt himself looked at, from the inside, by something with no eyes. "Greetings, Kael Vance. I am Void. Monarch of the Shadowrealm. Your soul is now contested territory. Congratulations."
Kael's body, kneeling on the platform, chose that exact moment to make a small, involuntary sound.
"Is he alright?" Kyle asked.
"He's doing something with his face," Lucas said.
"I CAN HEAR YOU," Kael croaked, "AND I'M HAVING A SITUATION."
Inside his skull, the two demons were facing off across the soul-room — the small furious storm that was Spark, and the vast reclining dark that was Void.
"Get out of him," Spark snarled. "He is MY contract. MY binding. I carried the brand, I sealed the bond, he said the rabbit seemed nice—"
"And yet here I am, fully inside his soul, unbound and unbothered." Void examined his fingers, which were long and shadowy and deeply unbothered. "Your binding holds the door open, little bunny. His soul cannot hold me without consent — I know, I know, the old laws, such a nuisance — but it can... house me. Think of me as a tenant. I pay no rent and I never leave."
"WHY," Spark demanded, "are you HERE?"
And Void was quiet for a moment.
When he answered, the playfulness didn't leave his voice, but something moved underneath it, like a shark passing under a swimmer.
"Because the Slyth waited a thousand years for this soul," Void said, "and I have no intention of letting him have it. The boy is a door, vermin. Doors are the most valuable things in either world, when they are the only one." The ink-face turned toward Kael's awareness again. "Sleep well, host. We will speak when you are less... leaky."
The presence folded itself away, down into the depths of the soul-room, into dark that Kael could feel but not follow.
Silence.
'Spark,' Kael thought, with tremendous calm, the calm of a man who has been scared so thoroughly that he has gone out the other side. 'I have questions.'
"Ask them later," Spark said faintly. "I'm having an aneurysm."
'You don't have a body.'
"THEN I'M HAVING WHATEVER THE EQUIVALENT IS. TWO OF THEM. HE PUT A THRONE IN YOUR SOUL, KAEL. A THRONE. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO FURNISH A SOUL-ROOM?"
On the platform, in the world, in front of two Gatewardens and forty settlers and his terrified parents, Kael Vance opened his blood-red eyes, pushed his new white hair out of his face, and said, to no one, in a voice of profound exhaustion:
"So. Good news and bad news."