Chapter 167: Eigengrau

Chapter 167: Eigengrau

Siobhan

Month 4, Day 9, Friday

In an ironic boon, with Siobhan’s panic at the thought of death had come something else—a very faint burn, a muted rush. Adrenaline. Relief tumbled through her so violently she probably would have felt dizzy with it if not for this strange sensory deprivation effect.

It was enough for her to conclude that she wasn’t dead, and her body was still there. She was simply cut off from the sensation of it. Most likely, the “everybody clear” she’d heard earlier was someone checking before they activated a spell array. It was an effective method to keep prisoners from attempting escape, even after the stunning spells wore off.

She would not have the slightest chance of calculating where they were being taken based on time passed and the number of turns the wagon took.

Even though she had ways to call for help, she could not implement them.

Siobhan did what she could to keep her mind moored, but without any of her senses, existing effectively as consciousness in the void, it was difficult to anchor herself.

She could tell that time was passing, and tried to focus on that certainty, though it was hard to quantify exactly how much without her heartbeat or breaths to compare against. It helped at first, but after a while she began to lose her grip on time, too.

She drifted off for a moment, and when she—metaphorically—jerked back to attention, she had no idea how long she had been in the nothing. ‘How long until I go insane?’ she had to wonder. Perhaps in response to this, she began to see phosphenes in the uniform eigengrau darkness of the abyss. The strange colors and shapes created by her detaching mind were incoherent, at first, any meaning bestowed in the same way one could find recognizable shapes in the clouds.

But after a while, they began to cohere into something recognizable. ‘I’m retreating into illusions to create a false sense of security and keep my mind from spiraling off into insanity,’ she reasoned, noting her surroundings and the too-sharp, too-vibrant sensations of an imagined body. Anything to house her consciousness was better than nothing, she supposed. Though she would have preferred a different setting. Almost any other setting, in fact.

Siobhan stood in a place she remembered well from childhood. She was in Grandfather’s house, standing before a half-open door. Not the metal one, from the magical workshop in the tower, but the wooden door with the warped board that left a little crack just at eye height. When she was a child, would peek through it into Grandfather’s room sometimes.

But now, she was too tall, and would have to crouch down to see through it. ‘At least I am not thirteen again,’ she thought, though the sheer relief of that confirmation seemed strangely powerful. ‘Am I often thirteen, in my dreams?’ She couldn’t remember.

Siobhan usually imagined her nightmares as a kind of physical mass locked away in her head. A slimy, putrid, hungry liquid. Normally, it was contained perfectly, but in sleep—in dreams—she was unguarded, the dream-space undefined enough that the box keeping it all sealed up tight became undefined, too. And so, the nightmare-stuff had a chance to leak out.

If she could wake quickly enough, most of it would get sucked back into the box as reality reasserted itself, leaving only the lingering terror and flashes of strange imagery.

Now, though, without the anchoring of her physical body, things normally confined to dreams started to leak out.

Siobhan had no need to peek through the door. She already knew what was on the other side. ‘My mind could have conjured almost any other scene to keep me from the insanity of sensory deprivation,’ she lamented. ‘But of course it always comes back to this.’

Siobhan braced herself and opened the door. The warding medallion was there on the table, with all of Grandfather’s artificery gadgets and lights and lenses that helped him use tools sized for a little bug. His gift for her, not finished yet.

Grandfather’s corpse was there, too, half his head a hollow. Brain matter and blood, so much blood, pooled in front of the fireplace, its warm flames reflecting off the dark, placid surface.

Just as she had in reality, Siobhan moved past the corpse to the table, picking up the medallion.

She examined it for a moment, feeling the weight of it in her hand, the moldings of glyphs and symbols on its surface, so vivid despite it all being a figment of memory and imagination.

Something rustled behind her, and she spun around, heart leaping in her chest.

Grandfather’s corpse had sat up. One of his eyes was missing, blown away and leaving only an empty, ruined socket. The other watched her with a bright golden iris staring out from blood-red sclera. “It’s not complete, you know. I never had the chance to finish it.”

Suddenly, she was aware of the Conduit the same way she was the beast core.

Relief, fear, and excitement crashed together in a cacophony of physical sensation that sent goosebumps rising over her skin and urged her breaths faster.

She had the Sacrifice and the Will, but she could not feel her own lips or tongue well enough for a verbal chant—the Word.

Taking care to hold the chant and its meaning, they way each word felt and sounded, clear in her mind, she silently recited a familiar chant, thrice over. ‘Life’s breath, shadow mine. In darkness we were born. In darkness do we feast. Devour, and arise.’ With each repetition, she felt a stronger connection to her shadow, until finally it was finished, and there was more of her.

She let out a silent laugh on an exhale. It had worked. She could sense everything her shadow touched. She had thought it might, hoped it would, on the premise that the shadow absorbed light and perhaps other things in the electromagnetic spectrum, and thus through the process of absorption might be able to give her a sense of her surroundings that her actual body lacked. Her Will could ride it just like it rode her physical body.

Her shadow pooled in the angles of her body and beneath her, unmoving, but dense and ready. There was barely any light, and as the spell pulled on her breath for heat instead, her fingers began to ache.

‘There is no difference between light and the rest of electromagnetic radiation. I should be able to use even the invisible light for power.’ The spell gained stability and the ache in her hands receded somewhat as she mentally adjusted its parameters. But she needed more. She ran through her understanding of the more esoteric aspects of light. ‘Heat and light are really two sides of the same coin. Everything that has a temperature is very subtly glowing, well below the level that the human eye can pick up, as the electrons step up and down their levels. Can I suck all of the “potential” light out of the places my shadow touches? The spell already pulls heat from my breath, so this shouldn’t even be that difficult of a conceptual shift.’

The draw on the heat of her breath through her fingers disappeared almost entirely, and her shadow solidified somehow, the sensations it was feeding back to her becoming more tangible, and the metaphorical ink of its form growing deeper, the better to stretch farther and wider.

Siobhan directed her shadow to rise up, embracing her, and let out a tremulous breath. She could feel its chill, like the underside of a pillow. But the sensations it brought were like a fire in the darkness, shelter from a raging storm, or the embrace of her mother’s arms. Though she remained in a different type of absolute darkness, she was no longer senseless or helpless. She was no longer so afraid.

Siobhan spread her shadow further, searching outward. She was in a relatively small room with nine others, including someone she thought was Millennium, but also another small boy. Everyone was lying on the floor unconscious. All were alive, though a few were obviously injured.

The Pendragon operatives had somehow transported them without breaking the sensory deprivation spell, and it was likely that many of the others were not truly unconscious any longer, merely trapped within senseless bodies and the shell of their own minds.

There was a spell array on the floor around them, which was hard to decipher the details of with the ambiguous understanding she could draw from her shadow as it ate the smallest glow of inefficiency that the lines put off.

Siobhan spread her shadow further, and found, to her dismay, a form standing against the edge of the wall by the door, behind her.

The movement of their limbs was too flailing to decipher coherently, as the person—likely a guard—left the room, slamming the door behind them. Which meant she had just alerted the enemy to her consciousness, and didn’t have much time.

She pulled her shadow mostly back in, keeping it in a blanketing shape over where her body once was as she attempted a jerky crawl away. Just in case they tried to kill her, a decoy might buy her a little time.

As soon as she crossed the edge of the Circle, all of her senses rushed back in, and everything she had felt from her shadow disappeared under the barrage of too-powerful feedback from her body. She could smell all the nuances of blood and sweat and mineral-laden water on dank stone, taste her own tongue in her mouth, and feel all the many aches and pains she had accumulated. She could hear screams and the sound of fleeing footsteps. And apparently, she had swallowed the chain connected to Professor Lacer’s Conduit while insensate, leaving the beast core and Conduit much more difficult to retrieve.

Slowly, she slid her hands closer together over her mouth, keeping the Circle intact until one of her hands was making a small Circle of its own within the other. Then, she drew the outer hand away. Despite her adjustment, using only one hand to create the Circle instead of two, the shadow-familiar spell remained steady, its chill form cloaking her with no additional strain.

Feeling blindly under the cover of her own shadow, she felt at her face. Her fake nose was hanging half-off, the connective glue likely torn by her flailing attempts to press a Circle to her mouth. She removed her disguise, slipping the contact lenses and the fake nose into the bodice of her corset, atop the medallion and transformation amulet that were somehow still hidden between the press of her rather meagre cleavage. They must have been protected from notice and theft by the warding spell woven into the medallion, with the amulet going unnoticed by proximity. ‘A warding artifact is much less useful if anyone can take it off you.’ She would have lost the golden artifact long ago if her father could actually manage to remember it existed.

She finished by scratching away the fake wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She knew it was unlikely she could keep tonight’s identity completely separate from the Raven Queen’s, but sowing any little bit of confusion among her enemies could only help her.

She stood stiffly, with a deep moan of pain. The concoctions she had used that morning had all worn off. Her sore muscles screamed once more on top of all the new bruises, a badly battered tailbone, and a wrenched ankle. She allowed the shadows spilling through the room to drop to the floor and then converge on her, slipping away from her face to create a kind of cloak and cowl to cover up her hair. As a final touch, the shadows formed the impression of wispy feathers around the hood.

An overhead light crystal burst to life, painting the room in stark lines and feeding even more power into her shadow. She flinched at the sudden brightness and instinctively guided the thinnest possible shroud of darkness over her face to filter the light.

The one remaining guard outside, visible through the small window set into the door of the white stone room, was still screaming wordlessly, futilely, as she opened her eyes and met his gaze.