Chapter 263: Dream Of Absolute Darkness

Vorren came off the throne he was sitting on with both of his giant black wings open behind him like an angel of death.

Or perhaps a demon.

"You picked the wrong sleep to walk into," he said, immediately acknowledging that something was wrong.

This wasn’t a standard dream invasion.

Kalon did not answer him with talk. He didn’t need to.

He lifted one hand and let the new ink affinity move through his body.

In the dream every affinity had been awakened, and ink came easiest of all since it had already been on his mind.

Black fluid formed in the air around his fingers like wet script, then shot forward in thin spears. Vorren cut the first two aside using the edge of his wing. The third punched through his shoulder plate and left a dark hole that did not bleed red. It bled ink, as though the substance has invaded his body.

Vorren stared at the wound.

Kalon already made the next shape of ink before the man could realise what was happening.

The ink on the floor rose in ropes and wrapped Vorren’s ankles, then his wrists, then the base of both wings like he was some sort of prisoner.

The raider tore one arm free with raw strength and swung for the approaching Kalon’s head.

Kalon stepped inside the swing and pressed a palm to Vorren’s chest. A black handprint sank into the armour and kept sinking, writing pain straight into the dream-body underneath.

Vorren shouted and flew sideways.

The courtyard bent with him. Dream-logic tried to give the owner control. Kalon did not let it. This dream was now his.

He flooded the stones under Vorren’s feet with ink until the surface turned soft. Vorren sank to the knees in black fluid that held like honey.

Every time he forced a wingbeat, more ink climbed the feathers and made them heavy. The more he struggled, the deeper the hold became.

"What is this?" Vorren snarled.

Kalon didn’t answer. He raised both hands and wrote a cage.

Bars of hardened ink dropped from the broken sky and locked around the raider in a tight column.

Vorren smashed one bar with a plated forearm. It cracked, then resealed. He smashed another. Same result.

He tried to force the bars apart with both wings at once and only drove the ink tighter into his feathers.

Kalon walked a slow circle around the cage and changed the ink again, thinner this time, needle-fine, and drove a dozen points through the gaps into Vorren’s wings.

Black feathers flew off of his body in clumps.

Vorren’s scream came out raw.

Kalon pulled the needles back and turned them into a single heavy blade.

He stepped through his own bars as if they were smoke, which they were for him, and cut across Vorren’s guard. The ink-blade did not behave like steel. Where it touched, it left writing.

Lines of dark script crawled over Vorren’s armour and into his skin, and each line carried weight. The raider dropped to one knee inside the cage, breathing hard, eyes wide with a fear that had not been there at the start.

Kalon dismissed the blade and opened his hand.

A cloud of fine ink burst into Vorren’s face.

The raider choked on it. In the dream the ink went into mouth, nose, and eyes at once.

Vorren clawed at his own head, wings thrashing hard enough to shake the courtyard. Kalon let him suffer in it for a few seconds, then dragged the cloud back out as a long black chain and wrapped it around Vorren’s throat.

He pulled.

Vorren slammed face-first into the ink-soft ground.

Kalon put a foot on his back between the wings and kept him there. More ink rose from the stones and sealed over Vorren’s hands, then his mouth, then the joints of both wings until they were pinned flat.

The raider could still breathe through his nose, but that was about it.

Kalon continued to experiment with the affinity.

A thin ink drill bored into the meat of Vorren’s right calf and left a smoking black tunnel. A flat ink plate pressed over his spine and forced his body into a deeper arch. A set of small ink hooks caught the edges of his remaining flight feathers and pulled them out one by one.

Vorren’s muffled sounds turned desperate.

Dream-blood and dream-ink mixed under him in a dark pool. Every new shape taught Kalon something about how the affinity answered when he pushed it hard.

Kalon crouched beside his head.

"You tried to break my island. You attacked children and women. Your burnt down what men long before you have created. This is punishment."

He put two fingers to Vorren’s temple and pushed a final mass of ink straight into the dream-self.

The fluid flooded bone, thought, and nerve in one hard wave.

Vorren’s body seized. The courtyard lights flickered. The looted throne split down the middle. For a moment the whole dream tried to reject Kalon, then failed and went dark.

Then the dream ended.

...

Vorren Shadewing woke in the seized upper room on Caelum Spire’s east rise with a scream trapped in his throat.

His real body was intact. No missing feathers. No holes in the armour stacked by the bed.

That almost made it worse.

His system interface stuttered when he tried to open it, screens cracking into black static, skill routes refusing to answer cleanly.

Whatever had been done to him in sleep had left the structure behind his power shaky and wrong. His hands trembled on the sheets. His wings ached as if they had been torn and returned. When he tried to stand, his knees nearly went out from under him.

He rolled off the bed and reached for the door.

"Help, I need help!" He called.

Help didn’t arrive.

A shadowy figure was already standing in the room.

It was Kalon.

Vorren froze with one hand on the latch, black wings half-open, and stared at the same wingless foreigner from the dream now solid in his stolen territory, awake, and waiting.