THE JEALOUSY OF JALICE

The few who witnessed Hydrim’s flight from the Fortress on the back of a centepedda—a giant cretaceon that mimicked its tinier counterpart—watched in stricken awe as the steed darted into the night with a startling screech. Jointed legs pounded the earth and shook the forest with a rhythmic quake. Branches snapped underneath its tarsus while tree trunks splintered as its exoskeleton crashed against the bark.

Hydrim straddled the steed as he stared off into the darkness, conjuring bleak plans to execute on the unfortunate soul at their destination. Restless whispers from Dardajah, full of dark musings and aggravated chatter about the Decayer device, littered his thoughts.

Dardajah’s earlier fury had shifted to agitation over Delilee’s knowledge of the Stone. The dokojin insisted that her knowledge implied she might know about the construction of the Decayer in the Vekuuv territory—a possibility that apparently troubled Dardajah.

Hydrim dismissed these crazed, pestering thoughts. The decoy was lying on the floor and probably dead by now. Her demise rendered her possible knowledge of the Stones, and of the Decayer by association, irrelevant.

It didn’t take long to find the tent despite the deceptive cloaking ward that masked it. Hydrim smirked at the weak handiwork as it shattered at a lick of his aether, unveiling the meager housing. He imprinted upon his steed to remain nearby after dismounting, and the centepedda responded with a clicking sound before creeping away.

Foreign aether lashed out at Hydrim in a wave of invisible energy that crashed around him, sending leaves and branches sailing through the air.

The attack hardly startled him. Hydrim had worked out the trap—lure him into thinking the wielder lay vulnerable and unaware in the tent, and then spring a fatal blow to the Sachem in his ignorance. Pathetic.

He let the wild aether envelop him and tested the emotions lacing it. Corruption and deception—the obvious fuel of the wielder’s wand. Hydrim drank up the emotional waste, gathering it into his own aether. When the burst ended, the amassed cloud of plasmic energy swelled around him unseen.

“You stupid bag of bones,” he muttered.

Hydrim twisted faster on his heels than his prey could retreat. The massive trunk hiding the coward splintered into hundreds of pieces that peeled through the air. Dardajah’s garbled howl bubbled inside Hydrim, and he allowed the deranged sound to travel through his vocal cords and past his lips. The synthesis of his own aether and the dokojin’s coursed through him, fueled entirely by a thirst for vengeance.

Wielding Dardajah’s aether blistered Hydrim’s aura yet fueled his drive to unfurl it on his victim. He embraced the malignant poison of aged hatred, further inflamed by an insatiable appetite to keep using it as fuel.

Hydrim realized the lunacy in tapping into Dardajah’s aether. The entity was a force born on the cusp of collapsing stars from the dawn of time and the evolution of violence. Hydrim’s exposure to this primordial aether left his mind cracked and ready to break. No one was meant to host this kind of raw power that was laced with so much hatred and abhorrence. It shouldn’t have even been possible without a glass wand.

Yet none of this gave Hydrim pause. He poured out the tainted weapon, felling the forest around them and sending tree limbs soaring through the air at the wielder. A scream of euphoria rippled from his lungs and mixed with Dardajah’s curdling shrieks.

The chaotic energy and its tainted waste should have terrified him. Yet terror had no power to displace the intoxication of this abominable forging of man and dokojin.

Pieces of timber fell like comets, crashing into neighboring trees. Hydrim remained steadfast and unfazed by the shrapnel. None of it would touch him. The arrogance twisting in the aether ensured that. His eyes caught movement—a thin, gangly figure draped in a shadowy cloak. There was a flick of the wrist, and Hydrim glimpsed the rudimentary glass wand.

Hydrim strode through the wielder’s second attempt at an attack. The opposing aether bent around him. Some of its plasmic tendrils managed to trickle into his own again. He tasted the panic echoing off the wielder’s threads and smiled at the feeble attempt to erode his defenses. The foreign aether emitting from the wielder dissolved within seconds, overwhelmed as it was by the powerful composite of ancient emotions fighting against it.

Dardajah wanted to keep playing. As the dokojin put it, a feast that was marinated in the knowledge of encroaching doom tasted better than a rushed death. But Hydrim preferred not to waste time. Jalice was out there waiting for him to rescue her.

Intending to end the chase, a final gust of his aether pinned the wielder to the ground. Some of Dardajah’s frenzy escaped, and a barrage of needle-thin slivers of bark sliced the wielder’s skin, eliciting a sharp cry from the victim. Sheer panic wafted from the writhing body, provoking Dardajah’s hunger further.

“The sin!” Dardajah barked. “Smell it, Unworthy Bones. Let me lick its aura.” Its voice escalated with frenzy. “I promise to make it beg and scream!”

Hydrim stood over his victim. He recognized the aetherwielder as Korcsha, from Delilee’s memories. Long hair, silver and black, matted zir face. The wielder breathed heavily as zir chest heaved.

“What do you want?” Korcsha rasped.

“I want her back,” demanded Hydrim.

Korcsha’s eyes widened. “Ah . . . the Tecalica. I don’t know where she is. That rude tillishu took her. She tried to . . . involve me. I said—” The words split into a scratchy wail as invisible aether tortured zim. Korcsha’s face contorted in agony. Zie gasped for air, bulging eyes darting wildly about for an escape.

“Spare me the details,” muttered Hydrim. He didn’t want to hear excuses. Listening to anything else from Korcsha would waste time and distract him from his objective to find Jalice. The world shimmered as he shifted himself and Korcsha into the Apparition Realm, just as he had done with Delilee. He needed to know what the wielder knew of Jalice’s location. This imbecile had to know something. Zie had been aiding Delilee and Annilasia after all.

Korcsha screamed, unprepared for the raw journey from one Realm to the next.

Rising from the abyss, Dardajah struck without warning. The Apparition Realm had hardly finished molding into place when the dokojin bucked wildly. Hydrim panicked. He’d been too entwined with the wielder’s secrets to consider Dardajah’s presence here.

Control slipped to favor the dokojin. Hydrim cried out, but this did little but invigorate his opponent. Razor-tipped fingers clutched at his aura, sinking in deep. Hydrim attempted to translate back to the Terrestrial Realm, but it was too late.

Dardajah’s voice bled through him, violating the air with a multitude of agonized voices that strained in an endless shriek.

“You stupid bag of bones,” Dardajah said. “Did you think you could control me indefinitely? I have been waiting for this moment.”

A powerful weight grabbed at Hydrim’s aura from beneath, threatening to suck him into a dungeon. Claws dripping the venom of malice pierced his mind. Hydrim’s vision of the world ducked sharply, and he fell backwards into a bottomless pit. Dardajah swelled around him and pressed him further down as it hijacked their chimera body.

“What are you doing?” cried Hydrim. “Stop!” The words fell flat in the echoless chamber of darkness.

When the dokojin spoke next, Dardajah’s voice reverberated. Realization slowly broke over Hydrim. Dardajah was in control now. The dokojin, not Hydrim, spoke through their shared body. He listened, stunned, as the parasite screeched in the Apparition Realm.

Stripped from the throne of his own body, Hydrim could no longer see. Still connected, he was aware of Dardajah’s movements and animalistic grunts. The dokojin gave chase to its prey while Hydrim remained helpless. It was a short game, ending poorly for Korcsha, but Hydrim witnessed none of it. Instead, he stayed suspended in the bottomless pit.

Still, there was no mistaking the point where the chase ended and the feeding began. The wielder’s frantic shriek never ceased, stretching on in one horrible cry of insurmountable pain. The sound of a souldrain outrivaled any cry of death or torture.

Only when Dardajah relented in feasting did the agonizing sounds cease. Despite his banished state, Hydrim’s entwinement with Dardajah permitted him the knowledge that some small, insignificant remnant of Korcsha still existed. The souldrain had dried up most of zir essence, but the dokojin had permitted the wielder’s survival, albeit in a degraded form.

Before Hydrim could contemplate why Dardajah had left Korcsha alive, the dokojin translated. Hydrim yelled from the lack of warning,forced to endure the damage this wreaked on his consciousness.

“Silence!” snapped Dardajah. “Or do I need to souldrain you too, Unworthy Bones? My appetite is far from quelled. Perhaps it will be your precious Jalice that I consume next.”

The dokojin laughed, a sound that echoed for what seemed like eternity around Hydrim in the endless pit of darkness.