Aven fell for longer than he expected. The darkness of the void made the depth of the pit deceptive. He had long enough in midair (midvoid?) for the annoying thought to intrude.

  What now?

  Thinking any further ahead was impossible because the mist of the void shocked Aven by sucking him straight down. Where the other voidpit had been bubbling, surging upward even as the voidspawn had tried to drag him down, this one instead seemed to have a mind of its own and a determination to bring him deeper, faster. The darkness swallowed him, and the blackstone walls of the pit vanished into the abyss.

  There were voices. All around. He couldn’t recognize the words, or even the language, but the sound of it filled his mind. It sounded like hate, and rage, and despair all mingled into one incomprehensible cacophony.

  He came to rest in the blackness, no longer pulled down, just surrounded by nothingness. Moving his limbs felt like fighting through thick mud. The void clung to him in a smothering embrace.

  Not smothering, actually. Aven could breathe. The weight of the void was more like a heavy blanket than a choking flood. Aven relaxed at the realization. The surrounding chorus calmed as well.

  Then, when he turned, he saw something. A silhouette. Human, not voidspawn.

  Aven felt a prickle behind his eyes. He squinted, and he felt a trickle of the void’s power rise up, squeezing past the block from the manacles. That trickle crawled up to his eyes, and he could see through the blackness. There was no light at all. It was simply clear to his sight. No color, but shapes and contrast enough to see.

  Nasty’s corpse was floating there in the void. Neck punctured by hellfire, blood disappearing into the blackness. His fingers were...dissolving. The tips fading into the void. As were the edges of his clothing.

  Aven glanced down to see his own fingers beginning to crumble as well.

  Stop that. Aven shook his hand irritably, drawing on the void. The disintegration halted. It did not reverse.

  Nasty’s eyes opened. He screamed.

  “No!” the panicked voice sounded distant, muffled as if speaking through a wall. It was also weak, lacking any power or air. “I-I can’t die here!”

  “Well, you’re a touch late for that,” Aven replied, and Nasty jerked in surprise, eyes focusing on Aven.

  He screamed, “Voidspawn! Stay back! Stay back!”

  Aven shook his head. Of all the company to have in the darkness of the void...

  Nasty’s scream cut off into a gasp. The void was dissolving him faster. Already he’d faded up to his elbows, the rest of his fingers crumbling, the rest of his legs going with it. He flailed, but the panic was quickly fading into confusion, and his movements grew more and more languid.

  “I...can’t...” the man’s words slurred as half his face disappeared into the void. “Die...”

  Reality did not seem to agree. The man vanished, and Aven was alone in the darkness. A moment pondering mortality let the void encroach further, and when Aven looked back down, his right hand was missing the fourth and fifth fingers. Another surge of power halted the void again.

  Strange. It didn’t hurt. He felt...nothing. A simple absence where the appendages used to be. He could still move the muscles, or at least felt like he could. There just wasn’t anything there. Waving his other hand through the space confirmed the lack of fingers. Thankfully, his left hand remained intact, the black veins pulsing slowly with his heartbeat.

  Time to leave. It had been a brief escape, but dissolving in darkness was no better than being crushed by Erdrak. Maybe, if fate was kind (because Aven had such a wonderful relationship with fate), Erdrak would simply assume the deed was done and leave. Maybe Aven could crawl out of the pit and...well, the rest he could figure out later. Problem: Aven had no idea which way led back. There was only darkness all around, nothing to orient him.

  The whispers grew louder, and before Aven could stop it, his right hand dissolved to the wrist.

  No sense of direction. The manacles still suppressed the full strength of his power. His eyes couldn’t see a damn thing unless the void powered them. With nothing else to do, Aven swam forward. Less swimming, really, and more grabbing handfuls of the voidmist and pulling himself forward one-handed. His left hand ached within moments. The manacle slipped from his right arm, but the smothering force of the remaining manacle still stifled his vis. Aven didn’t even bother to look at the missing limb. If this failed, it didn’t matter how much of him was left to return.

  His surviving fingers touched something at the edge of the voidmist. Blackstone. Not smooth bricks like the proper keep but rough-hewn walls like the cliffs dug into the quarries. It wasn’t comfort, but it was a path. Aven followed the stone in a direction that felt like up.

  The void became thicker. The voices louder, though still incoherent. His right arm dissolved to the shoulder. Kicking out didn’t help his advance, because he no longer had any feet. The only sense of motion was his fingers digging into the stone.

  There was something ahead. Not a light, but a change in the darkness. The blackstone rounded out.

  Aven laughed. He’d gone entirely the wrong direction.

  “Well, Aven,” he said to himself. For a moment, the other voices fell quiet as if to listen. “Looks like we’ve reached rock bottom!” No one else was there to laugh, so Aven did so himself. The chuckles were a bit hysterical. He slapped at his knee. He missed, because his knee wasn’t there.

  A glance back. No idea how far away the surface was. However far, there would be little left to reach it.

  He could try. He could swim back to crawl out of the voidpit again. What would be the point?

  He could fight. Or he could wait for the void to consume him.

  Does it matter?

  That was when Aven realized that the voices around him were his own thoughts. All the same whispers that followed him every day that he suppressed by throwing himself into action.

  Why fight? You can’t win.

  You don’t deserve freedom. Kinslayer.

  Father was right.

  Does it even matter?

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  “Quiet, you,” Aven snapped. To his surprise, the voices actually listened. The silence offered no relief, though, the emptiness deeper than before.

  He felt along the blackstone floor, the bottom of the pit. There was movement there, the mists slowly leaking downward. There. A crack in the foundation. An opening to some deeper blackness.

  Aven pressed his eye to the crack.

  He saw the truth.

  Beneath the world was an abyss. A single glimpse of that darkness showed Aven everything. Beneath the world was hatred, festering hatred that sought to devour everything. Resentment, hunger. Rage at what was, and desire to destroy all things that had not earned their existence.

  This world did not deserve life. There should have been no light, no warmth. Only cold, and darkness. A world only alive out of cosmic mistake. Thousands, millions of shapes moved in the abyss, formed from desire to drag that malformed world back into nothing.

  Life was an aberration, a stain on existence. A faint spark that insisted that it was the endless night around it that was wrong, that the emptiness was unnatural. Life was madness, a disease forcing the delusion of meaning on the wretched souls it infected.

  Voidspawn hungered for that life. To destroy and devour until accursed existence was gone. Deathsingers sang in those depths, elegies for a time before the light had come to these realms.

  Deeper things stirred in that darkness. Stronger. Purer. They were coming, and they would bring glorious, empty night...

  Aven screamed and tore himself away from that sight, retreating into the mists. He shook. Tears fell down his face. He looked down and saw his body more than half consumed. Half returned to the natural, pure state of nothingness. As if the mists themselves shared the same hatred for life and sought to strip it away.

  “Overwhelming, isn’t it?” A new voice broke through the darkness.

  Aven turned, and a figure resolved in the darkness. A face he knew better than his own, because it was the first face in all his memory.

  Mother’s face was smiling gently. It brought no comfort. The image was perfect, but it was just that: an image. Not Mother as she would exist now or even the last time that Aven had seen her with new wrinkles and hair beginning to gray. This face was the same Aven remembered from his early childhood, when Mother was a protector and provider who would always keep him safe. The figure even shared the proportions that Aven remembered from those long-past days, standing over him and looking down with love. Just a vision plucked out of his memories.

  “Who in the hells are you?” Aven asked.

  The image of his mother’s face tilted slightly, “Who do I look like to you?”

  “You look like my Mother,” Aven said slowly.

  “Really?” A chuckle. Mother’s giggles were often almost girlish, a stark contrast to her usual elegance and calm. This wasn’t Mother’s laugh. This was a secretive laugh, as if in delight that only it knew the joke. “Not uncommon, but in your case…probably not a healthy sign.” She turned back to face the bottom of the pit. “Then again, ‘health’ is not something one often finds in the void.”

  “What...what did I see?” Aven whispered.

  Mother’s lip curled in disgust, “You saw what lies beneath even the void. It has no proper name. Certainly, its inhabitants have no name for it. They do not speak in any language we can comprehend, and if they have concept of names, we certainly have never heard them. Among my people, speaking of it is forbidden.” A harsh laugh, “As if refusing to name a thing will lessen its existence.”

  “And who are your people?” the questions rushed on, automatic, even as Aven knew with greater certainty than ever before that none of it mattered. Words couldn’t capture what he saw. There were no answers that could overcome what he’d seen.

  “I suppose you would call us gods,” Mother smiled.

  Aven laughed at the absurdity, “And what have I done to earn a visitation from a goddess? Come to punish me for my lack of belief?”

  “Hardly,” the smile continued. “I am not visiting here. I could not. There is nothing here in the void, Aven. Nothing except what people bring with them. I am here, because I came with you. I am here, because I have been with you all your time in Hellfrost.”

  “You couldn’t have offered aid before now?” Aven asked.

  “I do not offer aid,” the goddess said. “I am the companion of the Lost. I am She who accompanies those who are most alone. I walk with those who have no path. I am witness to the suffering of those who no one else will watch. I do not intervene. Yet I am with you.”

  Aven gave her an exasperated look, “Well, that sounds…useless.”

  The goddess laughed, no longer that secret laugh but a full-hearted laugh much more like his own. “Perhaps. I have watched you for a long time. In the hours when you lay alone, beaten by your father and waiting for your mother to bring you comfort, I was there. When Ralius Talone accepted death and knelt patiently for you to take his life, I was there for both of you. When you pierced your father through his heart, I was there. When you hung over the void, dragged down by Old Fox’s corpse, I was there.” She spread her arms out to the void, “Here, in this realm of pure emptiness, here I can be closer to you than ever before.”

  “A bit of aid would be better,” Aven focused on the exasperation he felt, because it was at least something to hang onto with the terror of the abyss still looming large.

  “There is no aid within the void. The void is nothing. All that exists is what you bring with you,” the goddess said. A faint smile, “Though I think you have everything you need within yourself.”

  Encouraging, if still useless. When the terror tried to return, Aven reached for the Battle Mind. That, at least, he could still do. He could still take that part of his mind and shove it away, focus on other things. The terror faded into the background, set aside if not gone.

  “Excellent,” the goddess said approvingly. Despite everything else being slowed in the Battle Mind’s perception, her speech and movements remained just as they had been. “Of all the poisoned gifts your father left, the Fractured Mind at least is one you’ve used well.”

  “Fractured Mind?”

  “Oh, you call it the Battle Mind, don’t you?” the goddess chuckled. “How very like Octarnis. To focus on a technique’s application, rather than its essence. So eminently practical. You understand the technique, though, do you not?”

  Aven did understand. The feeling that always came with it. Splitting his mind in two. Letting one piece focus on what he needed to see clearly and setting aside the other pieces for later. The first time he’d used the technique, it had indeed felt like he was fracturing. Perhaps her name for it was the more appropriate. And perhaps it said quite a bit about Aven’s mental state that such a technique came more naturally than so many others. Something to ponder when his body was not currently dissolving into nothingness.

  “Well, if you don’t offer aid, what do you offer?” Aven asked. The dissolution was nearly complete now. Only his left arm, shoulder and head, stitched together by the power of his voidhand and mind domain.

  “Only a presence, a witness to your trials,” the goddess said. “And a question.” She spoke the words again to Aven that he had heard so many times before, “Does it matter?”

  What did it matter? What meaning did any of Aven’s suffering have? Did it matter that he fought? Did it matter that he killed his father or his closest childhood friend?

  In the abyss, he saw the truth that life and light were just aberrations, just a momentary delusion of meaning in an uncaring void of eternity. Nothing he could do could possibly matter. All life would fade, and in a mere hundred years, no one would even remember the name Aven Arvanius. In a thousand, his entire family and history may be forgotten. Even the empire itself. As centuries and millennia turned, all life would grind to dust and disappear.

  “Of course it fucking matters,” Aven said.

  The goddess smiled.

  “Everything matters,” Aven scoffed. “To someone. What does it matter that I’m going to die? I’m not dead yet.” A manic grin spread over his face, “I felt the hatred in that abyss. No one hates without meaning. No one despises existence without it meaning something. Why should I listen to those voices instead of my own?”

  Why should he believe that life was worthless simply because the abyss claimed so? Aven hadn’t listened when Father and Mother each tried to choose Aven’s path for him. Why did nameless things of the abyss deserve Aven’s respect more than his parents?

  He looked the goddess in the eye, “Does that answer satisfy you?”

  “Does it satisfy you?” she asked.

  For now, it was enough.

  “I think,” Aven said slowly. “That I’m going to kill Yvris and take Hellfrost. How do I get out of here?”

  “You swim,” the goddess replied. “Or crawl, or whatever else you can do.” She gestured, “Though that will be difficult considering that you don’t have much of a body left.”

  His chest was gone. Yet he was still speaking without lungs. His heart still beat, even though it had been consumed by the void.

  Aven let go. His left arm disappeared into the void. As did his head. His eyes were consumed. He still could see.

  Aven reached for the power of the void as the manacles drifted away into the void. Not just within him. The power all around him.

  He spoke without a mouth. “I’ll just have to make a new one then.” He paused. “...can I do that?”

  The goddess looked at him with Mother’s eyes. Her expression was the same as Mother’s when he’d found a clever answer to one of her riddles or arithmetic problems, “You certainly don’t need to ask my permission.”

  He’d made hands a hundred times with the void. Best to start there.

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