Chapter 30: CHAPTER 30

A conflicting mix of rage and pleasure seared Hydrim upon witnessing the fear that clawed across the imposter’s face.

Rage—because his Tecalica was lost somewhere, and he had only now realized this truth.

Pleasure—because of the terror that emanated from the imposter like a delectable aroma.

“Don’t kill too fast,” Dardajah whispered. “I want to feast after it’s been drowning in that terror for hours. I want it dripping with agony.”

Hydrim’s irritation flared when the imposter flaunting Jalice’s body attempted to uphold their deceit.

“My Sachem,” they said in a timid voice. “I was just—”

Hydrim shrieked as his eyes snapped shut. He swung a clenched fist through the air to command silence. His eyes flashed back open. Dardajah’s guttural voice, confined to his head, screeched with ecstasy at the sight of tears streaming from petrified eyes—Jalice’s eyes.

Hydrim flexed his jaw, drawing his muscles so taut that veins swelled across his forehead. He groaned as he struggled to pinpoint where his emotions and thoughts ended, and where Dardajah’s began.

“She should suffer for this,” the dokojin exclaimed. “Let me feed! Shackle her to my Realm, where I can feast on her aura over eternal hours and dreadful midnights until she’s nothing but void.”

“How did you do it?” Hydrim hissed. His audible words hardly suppressed those of the dokojin racketing in his head.

The imposter trembled like a sapling enduring an unforgiving storm. Its lips moved, but only quivering stutters escaped.

“Rip off its skin,” Dardajah continued to beg. “It doesn’t deserve to wear your Tecalica’s face or to don her body.”

Hydrim indulged the demand. Peeling off its skin was easy, like peeling the skin off an apple. Dardajah screeched in harmony with the imposter’s scream, a frightful song of victim and predator as the aether stripped off the disguise.

The fake skin shot off from the imposter’s body. The ravaged material ripped from underneath the dress and destroyed the garment’s elegance in a split second. The discarded skin slathered the floor along with clumps of hair clinging to shredded scalp. Now a mess of exposed muscle and leftover skin tissue, the imposter swayed before collapsing onto the floor.

Hydrim stared down at the degenerate as it wailed with lacerated breaths.

“Can you feel it?” questioned Dardajah ecstatically. “It tastes better than lost stars dying—forsaken, alone. Keep going! I want to hear it scream louder.”

The disfigured face struggled to meet Hydrim’s gaze. Globs of blood leaked around flimsy slivers of skin still thinly tethered to the body.

“How dare you?” asked Hydrim in disgust.

He crouched down over what had once been a woman but now resembled a feeble animal no longer worth consideration. Yet he needed to know what this filth had done with his Tecalica. The debased woman cowered and shriveled into a fetal position with hands covering her face.

“How dare you prance around as my Jalice?” asked Hydrim. He lifted his chin. “You’re nothing compared to her. She is a flower in the spring, and you’re a fungus, leaching out her beauty. She is a newborn star, and you’re a blackened weed that’ll soon exist as nothing but a tainted memory in the endless expanse of time.” He gritted his teeth. “Look at me!”

Aether forced the imposter’s face upward.

“Where is my Jalice?” he asked. His face contorted with disgust. “This is my fault. I should’ve trusted myself when I felt her far away. I thought it was your fear I sensed. Fear over the attempt on your life.” He sneered. “The attempt on Jalice’s life. You tricked me with my own wards.” His eyes closed, and he inhaled deeply through his nostrils. “I can feel her clearly now. So far away.” His eyes shot open and latched onto the degenerate. “I will find her. I will get her back. Your little game is over, and it’ll cost you existence itself.”

Another wail broke from the imposter’s lips, but Hydrim translated before the sound could lick the air. The Apparition Realm formed around him—an effortless step from the Terrestrial. He ripped the imposter’s aura along with him, forcing them on the journey.

The disfigured body of blood and ripped skin transformed into a canvas of dark expanse littered with miniscule stars. The beautification sickened Hydrim. This woman didn’t deserve to appear so delicate in any Realm.

The onslaught of a scream breaking through his own lungs interrupted the moment of disdain. Pain struck, rippling inside him everywhere at once. The sensation flayed his mind and left his thoughts fragmented.

The act of translating was like turning a lever for him—no meditation or aether drugs required. Aether composed Dardajah in some manner, and that energy made translation swift for Hydrim. But each time, it took a toll. The shortcut to the Realm was too quick for his mind to handle properly, and the vibrational switch ripped at his consciousness, blurring the stages of reality.

Dardajah’s intrusive presence added yet another layer of corrosion to this unraveling effect. In this state, Dardajah reigned. The dokojin swallowed Hydrim, like a leviathan of the deep, threatening to bury him in sediment where only vague impressions of his identity would survive.

Dardajah’s prominence in the Apparition Realm overwhelmed Hydrim’s senses. In the Terrestrial Realm, the dokojin was somewhat suppressed, unaccustomed to the confines of a physical body. But here, in its place of origin, the dokojin rose from the abyss of Hydrim’s soul.

Hydrim struggled to stay in control as Dardajah lashed out. His attention split when the woman at his feet shrieked. Her petrified eyes stared at him in a frozen expression of deranged horror as her stars flickered with erratic tension.

Hydrim had seen that look before. He wished he, too, could behold the synthesis that he and the dokojin underwent when intertwining into a single, tangible form in this Realm. Yet he never had enough control here to do so. Regardless, the chimeric transformation always elicited a reaction that pleased Dardajah, such as the terror that now washed over the woman.

This visual dysmorphia paled in comparison to the emotional onslaught Hydrim endured in the dokojin’s native Realm. Dardajah’s very existence had been cultivated over legions of deaths and eons of violence. The emotional abstractions that constituted the dokojin swarmed through Hydrim like a mass of dying souls taking their last breaths. Unadulterated hatred and a wicked hunger for their prisoner’s demise flooded his thoughts with a sickening obsession that far outrivaled his own outrage.

Battling for his right of awareness, Hydrim plunged into the woman’s memories, which were represented by a glowing orb suspended in the imposter’s head. Dardajah was strung along for the soul coalesce, grumbling dark phrases as it tugged for dominance. Once swimming through her memories, their clash for power intensified. Dardajah wanted to devour her and chanted the demand to feast on the wretch.

Hydrim had other plans. He hadn’t forgotten his Tecalica was still missing.

Tearing through the imposter’s defenses proved easy in her weakened state. No sooner had he broken through than shock seized him. He knew this woman.

Delilee.

His grip on control slipped over the realization.

Dardajah roared as it penetrated his defenses as easily as Hydrim had infiltrated Delilee. The evidence of transition was instantaneous. Delilee’s previously stable aura—a vast, abstract land of foggy scenes of memories that Hydrim now tread through—erupted into a sea of chaos.

The dokojin’s feeding commenced. Hydrim frantically attempted to regain control. A gaping fissure of roiling black void bent Hydrim’s mouth open, instantly creating a vacuum that began devouring Delilee’s memories. Talons of the void lapped like tongues, lashing away pieces of her mind.

“Stop!” Hydrim shouted internally as the dokojin hijacked his mouth. “You’re wrecking her!”

Quickly realizing that Dardajah had no intention of complying, Hydrim used the dokojin’s focus on appetite as an opportunity to regain control. As he crammed Dardajah back into a pit of submission, the fissure of talons disappeared into Hydrim’s throat, returning to him his mouth.

The ease with which Dardajah had commandeered their chimera body left the Sachem distressed. Desperate to return to his body, where Dardajah would be more easily suppressed, Hydrim plunged through the memories. Large segments were missing or damaged as a result of the dokojin’s havoc. He wandered amongst the disarray and was disturbed anytime he stumbled upon moments from Delilee’s childhood. Something about those particular memories frightened him. He thought he heard echoes of voices when near them, and an eerie familiarity paralyzed him until he fled.

When at last he found it, he latched onto the thread pertaining to Jalice’s abduction and marched backwards in time through the scenes. Hydrim fumed as each moment unfolded before him.

Delilee and Annilasia conversing to plot their treason.

Annilasia taking Delilee to an aethertwister—whom they called Korcsha—to have Jalice’s wards replicated and placed on the decoy.

Hydrim watched as the night of the abduction revealed that Delilee had replaced Jalice as Tecalica. They had fooled him. Their trickery at making him believe Jalice was still at the Fortress had succeeded.

Hydrim’s wrath exploded before he had a chance to subdue it. Aether uncoiled like a striking viper and erupted out of him. He shrieked, and a wave of energy crippled the pillars of Delilee’s memories, obliterating every bubble of thought near Hydrim’s presence. The scenes disintegrated around him, leaving him in a backdrop of darkness.

A lingering light caught his eye.

The remnants of a tattered memory rippled in front of him. Children, laughing and playing, moved in slow motion. They ignored him and faded into darkness as the memory eroded. Before they vanished, he caught a glimpse of their faces. Recognition tore through his simmering emotions, giving rise to stark apprehension.

Three girls—Jalice, Delilee, and Annilasia. So lively. Content. Friends.

Two boys. Hydrim recognized himself running alongside the other boy, whose face strangely made his heart sink. For a moment, he thought he knew the boy too. As if that red hair meant something to him. And that delicate half-smile . . .

Aether sprang out, fully banishing the figures into dust. Hydrim wasn’t sure if he or Dardajah had lashed out.

Darkness gave way to swirling tendrils of color as Hydrim emerged from the soul coalesce. The Apparition Realm flooded his vision, and he wasted little time in it. Dardajah’s presence crashed against his soul, desperate to regain control.

Hydrim had time to notice Delilee’s motionless figure lying on the ground. The star in her forehead, a representation of her mind and memories, was now cracked like a beaten rock, with tiny pieces of shrapnel floating around its core.

Concentrating, he summoned forth the invisible tracker wards that had upheld Delilee’s ruse. Agitation at his own gullibility washed over him. The wards were weak and inauthentic compared to those they mimicked. Ashamed to have been fooled by such flimsy trickery, he shattered the aether that held Delilee’s wards. For most aetherwielders, it was nearly impossible to undo wards created by another—in this case, by the aetherwielder Korcsha. But Hydrim’s chimera aether tore through them like they were nothing more than suspended dust.

No more trickery. With Delilee’s wards destroyed, the sense of Jalice’s distance solidified. She was far away—too far away. The tracker wards on her would be of little use now, as they could only give him a vague sense of her location the farther she traveled from him. The effect was more like an instinctual impression than a pointer on a compass. The only clue he gained from the wards was that Jalice was somewhere northwest.

His focus snapped back to holding Dardajah at bay. The Apparition Realm shimmered violently as his mind pressed back into the Terrestrial Realm. Using neither meditation nor aether-infused drugs to ease the transition, Hydrim wailed as he translated from one Realm to the other.

Awareness flooded in, and he found himself back in the Star Sanctuary. He stood over Delilee, whose body lay crumpled on the floor. Although he’d translated successfully, the vibrations hadn’t faded. Hydrim bit down on his tongue until it bled. Beads of sweat dripped down his face.

Make it stop. No more vibrations. No more voices. He quivered with relief as the oscillation slowly calmed and allowed his focus to return to Delilee.

A splinter of guilt pierced him but shrank away quickly. This degenerate had betrayed him. He’d trusted her. She’d begged for a place at Jalice’s side. Due to his childhood bond with Delilee, he had naively agreed to bestow her the duty of decoy.

“Unworthy Bones,” Dardajah mocked from the confines of his mind. “Too tainted by reminiscing emotions. Blind to the deceit spitting right in your face.”

Hydrim’s face contorted into a scowl as he conceded to Dardajah’s accusation. He’d been corrupted by nostalgia. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Crouching down to Delilee’s ear, he clutched the necklace that still dangled around her neck. Glassy white pools stared back at him; her eyes had rolled backwards into her head during their time in the Apparition Realm.

“Your rebellion was all for nothing,” he whispered. “I will get my Tecalica back.” He stood abruptly and yanked off her necklace.

Dardajah let out a frenzied shriek. “Kill it and feed it to me, Unworthy Bones!”

If she’d been any other imbecile, Hydrim would’ve complied. But instead he flinched, disturbed by the fractured memory still lingering from the soul coalesce. Already the faces were fading. He recalled a boy with red hair. Or had there not been one? It all seemed hazy now.

But Delilee had been there. Such a sweet and innocent girl.

Hydrim growled and spun towards the exit. His boots thudded on the stone floor. Dardajah howled, and Hydrim sensed the clash for power inside. Worried the dokojin would influence a change in his decision to spare Delilee a fate worse than death, he retreated from the Star Sanctuary with a zealous focus on his Tecalica’s absence.