The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1168: Wind From The Void (Part Two)

No words were intelligible in Ollie’s chorus of the damned. There was no language that could be recognised, no sentences that could be understood. And yet, somehow, the meaning was devastatingly clear to everyone trapped in the oppressive darkness that filled the room.

The voices spoke the tongue of pure emotion, in the universal language of suffering and loss and desperate, clawing need. They were the sounds of souls trapped in the darkness between this life and whatever came after. Souls that had lost their way, or had never found it to begin with, wandering in the endless Void with nothing but their grief and regret for company.

It was the sound of the Void itself, given voice through Ollie’s witchcraft, and it was one of the most profoundly disturbing things that any of the living had ever heard.

Hugo Hanrahan pressed his palms flat against the table, his breathing shallow and rapid as he fought against the overwhelming urge to flee. He couldn’t see anything, not the table, not his own hands, not even the faint outline of the people sitting next to him. The darkness was so complete that it felt almost physical, like a weight pressing down on him from all sides, suffocating him with its presence.

But it was the sounds that truly terrified him. Those whispers and wails and sobs seemed to come from inside his own skull as much as from the air around him. He covered his ears with his hands, desperate to block them out, but it didn’t help. These weren’t sounds that travelled through the air to be heard by ears of flesh and blood. They were something else, something that slipped past his fingers to whisper directly into his soul.

"Sweet merciful light," Hugo breathed, though his voice was barely audible over the chorus of the dead. "How can anyone bear this?"

At the opposite end of the table, Liam Dunn had his hand on the hilt of the dagger at his waist before his mind had even registered the movement. It was pure instinct, the trained response of a warrior who never slept deeply when he marched with his armies and was already to defend himself against an attack, even when he should have been safe in camp.

And yet, the moment his fingers closed around the fluted wooden hilt of his dagger, he felt incredibly foolish. What good was a sword against this? What enemy could he fight with a simple knife when the threat was nothing but sound and darkness and the terrible presence of the dead? Could the dead be slain again? And if they couldn’t, then how could a man fight back against a foe like this, who truly had nothing left to lose?

Still, he didn’t release the hilt of his dagger. He held onto it like a drowning man clutching at driftwood, letting the familiar feeling of a weapon in hand balance anchor him against the tide of fear that threatened to overwhelm his reason. His heart hammered in his chest, and he could feel sweat beginning to bead on his forehead despite the coolness of the underground chamber. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

Sitting next to Ollie, Diarmuid’s hands were clenched so tightly in his lap that his knuckles had gone white, though he couldn’t see them in the darkness. His entire body had gone rigid, locked in place by a terror so profound that it paralysed him more effectively than any chains or fetters ever could.

He had asked to see this. He had wanted to know what lay in the Void, had hoped to find some answer that would help him reconcile his faith in the Heavenly Shores and the paradise that awaited the faithful with the truths that Ignatious and Lady Nyrielle were revealing.

But now, experiencing even this small taste of what existed beyond the veil of death, Diarmuid found himself confronting a reality far more terrible than anything his imagination could have prepared him for.

This was the darkness that scripture spoke of. This was the place where souls wandered when they failed to find their way to the Heavenly Shores. He had always imagined it as an abstract thing, imagining the journey through the darkness as a trek through the dark of night, guided by the stars in the heavens above as souls charted their path to the next life.

But this, this was real. Unbearably, horrifyingly real, and there were no stars here to guide him to safety. No beacon of light shining from the Heavenly Shores. Just endless darkness and a howling wind filled with the voices of the damned.

Like Diarmuid, Loman Lothian sat frozen in his chair, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything but listen to the voices crying out from the Void while his carefully constructed understanding of the world crumbled into dust around him.

This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. The Church taught that the faithful who died in grace were carried directly to the Heavenly Shores by the light of the Holy Lord of Light. They didn’t wander in darkness. They didn’t suffer like this. They were supposed to be safe, protected, rewarded for their devotion with eternal peace and joy. He had been a faithful servant of the Church for his entire life.... That should have protected him from this.

But there was no protection for him here, and when he screwed his eyes shut against the cold, howling winds and the darkness that was deeper than night, it only let him hear the voices more clearly... The voices of acolytes who promised to serve as arrows in his quiver before Loman’s ’miracle’ reaped their lives, and the anguished cries of human soldiers and demons alike as they fell under the rain of luminous arrows he’d unleashed.

His victims were here in the darkness with him, and they’d brought all of their pain, their resentment, and their unfulfilled hopes and dreams to whisper into his soul so that he could never forget the people who paid the price for his miracle.

Those people hadn’t been rewarded for their sacrifice. They hadn’t been carried away to the shelter of the Heavenly Shores or rewarded with rebirth into a life of privilege and opportunity as noblemen in exchange for losing their lives in the struggle against demons. Instead, they wailed at him from the depths of an endless darkness from which they could never escape.

And if those men, those brave souls who had died to his miracle at the Battle of Hanrahan, had suffered such a cruel fate, then what did that mean for all those who had died believing in the Church’s promises? What did it mean for his own mother, who had fallen to the ravages of sickness years ago, certain that she would be welcomed into paradise to await her husband, who had earned his own place on the Heavenly Shores by fighting against the demonic hordes?

Was she out there, somewhere in that darkness? Was her voice among those crying out in anguish and regret? Was she lost, wandering, suffering, while he sat here in the world of the living, helpless to save her or even to know her fate?

The thought was unbearable. Literally unbearable. Loman felt something crack inside him, some final bulwark of denial and resistance that had been holding back the full weight of everything he had learned and experienced since the Battle of Hanrahan. And with that crack came a flood of emotions too powerful to contain, grief and rage and terror and despair all mixed together into a toxic brew that threatened to drown him entirely.

His hand went to his face, covering his missing eye as though that could somehow protect him from seeing the truth. But there was nothing to see in the darkness, and no protection to be found anywhere.

"Make it stop," Loman heard himself saying, his voice breaking on the words. "Please. Make it stop!"