Those Who Fear the Darkness (BloodRunes: Book 2) (2 page)

*

Images swam before Nat as he struggled to see
above the surface of the murky water. A dark blob floated before
him, standing out in stark contrast to the bright light behind it.
The blurred outline of a woman's face rippled into view. Nat
increased his struggling as his focus started to falter and he felt
himself slipping into unconsciousness. Just as he was sure that his
lungs were going to burst, a pressure let up.

The hand released its hold on him and he
surfaced, spitting out water as he gasped desperately for air.
“Five minutes,” the woman purred. “That's your best yet. You
certainly have been accelerating your progress.” She pulled him all
the way out of the water and stepped back. He stood dripping on the
edge of the stream, shivering with cold. The woman watched him, an
odd look on her face.

The image blurred again and Nathair opened
his eyes in his bathing room, the warm water lapping at his chin as
he dozed in the comfy bath. He raised his hands to the sides of the
tub and lifted himself out easily. He ran a self-conscious finger
over a long white scar that ran across the length of his cheek, and
took a deep breath to regain his sense of the present. He
redirected his thoughts out of the past and concentrated on this
afternoon's meeting.
The Order really is quite a pitiful little
organization,
he mused.
Oh, they survived and even
flourished for some time, but their strict rules and precautions
allow for no evolving with the time. I'd say most of them have no
clue as to the real purpose behind their careful plans
.

It worked well for him though.

Once he had figured out the patterns to their
actions, it was easy to penetrate their inner workings and redirect
their plans to instead accommodate his own humble goals. The Order
was like a bee-hive, hundreds of drones set to the task they were
given by their queen with no further concept of what they were
working for other than the direct purpose they had drilled into
their heads. Their grandeur ideas of secrecy prevented each other
from obtaining any more knowledge than their superiors cared to
give them, but it did not protect against the likes of him. When
all he had to do was pluck the information out of their minds as he
drained their life power from them, it was really quite easy. The
only hard part was distinguishing which lies that the drones had
been told had any real basis in truth and then piecing those truths
together to form the big picture.

'Specimen' such as himself were not supposed
to be able to rise any higher than the lowliest of servants in the
Order to prevent them from realizing just what was being done to
them. He had a momentary twinge of annoyance that they would assume
to think that they were better than those like himself, but he
shook it off.
I
t is pointless to waste anger on such sad
excuses for human beings
. He chuckled, remembering the
dissension he had caused in the secret meeting with his question
implying that perhaps one of them could in fact be the one they
were speaking of. Not that they had any idea what he was really up
to. Why in the world would he want to kill other high talents? He
laughed out loud.

In hindsight, he mayhap would not have
enlightened them to the possibility that he was still in their
midst, as very obviously from their outbreak none of them had had
the wits to think of it themselves. Not that it would matter. The
very basis of their society was to end any action and feign
ignorance if any doubt was cast upon a situation therefore
suspicious behavior would be expected and the very things meant to
protect their secrets would actually protect him from their prying.
Not only that, but he had gotten several leads as to who might be
in possession of the books just by their reaction to Karl’s
assertion that they would have to hide them.

This was the first time that he had had his
guess regarding the reasons for invading Treymayne confirmed. The
supposed goal of the Order was to breed those of his kind into the
‘perfect specimen’, at which time their beloved Sleeping God would
return to them. However, Nathair knew that their real goal was to
breed them for their own uses, not for the re-population of the
world by this superior being as his own great King had planned. He
had found no evidence of it yet, but he had no doubt that while
they were breeding those marked into the perfect specimen they were
also figuring out a way to control that specimen once it was
created. And although he could appreciate their dedication to the
continuance of the Master Race, they were too bold in their
presumption that they should control it.

Nathair knew what the Dark King had planned
for those like himself and he intended to fulfill his destiny. The
Dark King had risen to power ages ago through an ingenious mix of
force, fear, and persuasion and had unlocked the key to human
advancement into godhood. Nathair had read the true histories, and
they had fascinated him so much so that it had become a lifelong
obsession. When he had realized that he was marked as a descendant
of such a god, he had become convinced that it was his destiny to
pick up where the Dark King had left off. In the histories, it told
of how once in power the great King had proscribed a vast cleansing
of humanity, wiping out the unworthy, and in his unshakable
authority managed to cleanse a large portion of the population
before he was overthrown by those too dull to comprehend the
greater goal.

The histories ignorantly claimed that the
purpose of this had been to further promote his perverted sense of
self-importance which slowly grew into a belief that he was a god
and therefore should father the new human race to repopulate once
the wicked were cleansed. Nathair knew that despite the historians
ridiculing of these notions of obtaining godhood, it was the truth.
Having tasted the power that ran in his blood and realizing that it
was only a tiny portion of the power actually available to him, the
Dark King must surely have been a god in his own right.

The Dark King, once realizing that his blood
was indeed godlike, recognized the need to propagate. So he used
his own elite guardsmen, the Bloodguard, to carry out his master
plan of engineering himself as close to perfection as possible and
then ingraining into his blood a mark that would appear behind the
right ear of his descendants so that they could recognize one
another and continue his destiny. With the Bloodguard’s help, he
started spreading his seed throughout the populace, charging it to
them to carry out his mission.

In his devotion to this noble cause, the King
had unfortunately ignored the plight of his people, and failed to
recognize the building threat of revolt from the enslaved unworthy
populace. As his attention was elsewhere, he failed to properly
dispense the needed propaganda, and though the nobles were mostly
happy to enjoy the free slaves and continue their bickering amongst
themselves, using the guise of unworthy to unseat their rivals,
there was much unrest. The common people were not carefully enough
watched and they rose in a bloody revolt which ended with the death
of the great King.

In the official histories, it is told that he
was a crazed monarch who caused a Dark Age with much bloodshed, but
was soon forgotten. But Nathair knew that not everyone forgot him.
The Bloodguard did not forget, and neither did they forget their
duty to the mark. Those who survived worked to preserve the
information gathered, and in the Wordless Book they secretly
tracked the marked individuals to reach the ultimate goal of the
perfect specimen. Like most things, over the years this goal was
evolved from the perfect specimen, to the perfect specimen for
manipulative control. Nathair believed that the Order originally
descended from this Bloodguard, eventually over time twisting and
convoluting their true purpose to a false goal of breeding those
marked for their own use, betraying their knowledge of those marked
and ignoring their god's will.

Nathair planned to disabuse them of this
notion when he carried out his destiny and became the god himself.
He had yet to encounter one truly worthy foe within the Order. For
the most part, he held them all in contempt. Even Jezebel, who upon
first glance he had thought had perhaps more ambition than most had
ended up disappointing him. It had been easy allowing them to think
that they manipulated him onto the throne, when in fact he had
known all along their plan and used it against them. And now, he
would again use them to gain the forgotten knowledge and make
himself into the form that his ancient King and God had intended
for him.

He stood stark naked in front of the mirror
and admired himself. Years of research had paid off, allowing him
to sculpt his body into the perfection that it was now.

He stepped closer and frowned. A freckle had
appeared on his left shoulder right below where the bone showed. He
whisked a robe from the stand beside the mirror and hastily donned
it; perhaps he'd go pay his guest a little visit.

*

Layna led Fly carefully across the gravel
that lined the edge of the stream, looking for a good place to
cross. Though it was into summer and the water was warm, Layna was
still wary of the rushing current after her incident on the ice.
She shuddered at the memory.

She'd much rather remain as dry as possible,
so she picked a sandbar that led much of the way across. She
hurried Fly out of the water. Gryffon glanced back at her and gave
her a reassuring smile as she came up behind him and Charles.

“How are you feeling today?” she asked him
and immediately regretted doing so as she saw the resulting
embarrassment under his mask of indifference.

He had been withdrawing as much as she had
lately and Layna missed their long talks. She could tell he was in
pain, and he was tiring much more quickly than he should. Layna
wondered if he had not properly healed from his ordeal, and that
perhaps they should be postponing their journey.

Time was not on their side, however. Layna
was aware that all three of them felt the ever-increasing urge to
reach Treymayne and petition for their help against the growing
threat of the King. Even though they had to avoid any towns as a
result of Jezebel's spreading tidings of their supposed
wrong-doings, there was evidence throughout the countryside of the
evil that had taken root on the throne.

“I'm fine,” he answered her shortly.

Layna did not press the matter, and instead
changed the subject. “How much farther to the border?”

Gryffon raised a hand to shield his eyes from
the harsh afternoon sun, and surveyed the land before them. “Just
over those mountains and then across the Great River.” He pointed
to the peaks of the mountain range whose tops could be seen above
the tree-line. They were currently traveling through the North
Woods, which Layna had been extremely wary of given Charles’
accounts of the beasts that lived there, but so far though they had
come across a fair amount of wildlife, nothing had been too out of
the ordinary. Certainly no worse than the hellhounds that Jezebel
had sent after them.

“Just.” Layna repeated, and she was rewarded
with a wry smile.

“Well, it’s only a tributary of the Great
River, so it’s not nearly as big as the main portion. It’s more the
mountain pass we’ll have to be careful on, but even that’s not so
bad.”

Their conversation lapsed and Layna's
thoughts once again turned to the dark path that they had been
prone to following as of late. Nightmares had been plaguing her and
she felt as though her eyes were heavy from lack of a good night's
sleep.
What does it really mean to have the mark? Is it, as the
King said, really a sign that I am a descendant of the Dark
King?
Does that mean that I am destined to follow in his
path?
She shivered.
I could never commit the atrocities that
he had though,
she scolded herself, but even as she did so a
tiny voice inside her countered
, but aren't you capable? Why did
the mirror hold you so enthralled? And what about the morbid
pleasure you derived from seeing Jezebel torn to pieces?
She
hadn't admitted it to anyone, not even herself at first, but deep
down she felt as though the horrible woman had deserved it for all
she had done.
But doesn't that make me just as bad? And was the
King correct that I hold the Dark King’s memories? How else would I
have known how to open the door in the tomb?
Layna squirmed at
the turmoil going through her head and for the hundredth time
wished that she had someone to talk to about it.

She jumped in her saddle in surprise as
something bumped up against her foot and then laughed as she
realized it was Weylyn, the hellhound she had rescued. He was
dancing around at her feet, doing acrobatics. His crazy antics
always put a smile on her face to watch, and today was no
exception. She giggled as he twisted in the air and landed rolling
on his back, only to bounce up and look back at her with his tongue
lolling.

“Crazy creature you,” she mock scolded him
affectionately and he bared his teeth, an expression that had
looked fearsome at first until she had realized it was his own
unique smile. Gryffon looked back over his shoulder at them and
smiled as well and Layna warmed at the shared happiness.

It took days to reach the path over the
mountains, a grueling passage through dense undergrowth. When they
reached its peak and the trees cleared to reveal the other side of
the mountain, Layna found herself awestruck. A shimmering curtain
of magic flowed across the landscape, obscuring the horizon beyond
it. It extended as far as the eye could see in either direction,
and its sheer magnitude dwarfed the foliage surrounding it. Layna
was held speechless at the sight.