Chapter 122: Three Inheritance Trials, First: Cries Of Thousands
The pedestal waited at the end of five hundred meters of cleared graveyard, and nobody said anything clever on the walk over.
The burning bone cup sat exactly where it had sat since the moment they arrived, pale flame licking upward without consuming whatever fed it. Up close, the fire gave off no heat at all. It only gave off attention, the distinct sensation of something watching back through the flames.
"Last chance to say this is a terrible idea," Tom offered from Aidan’s shoulder.
"It’s a terrible idea," Jovan said.
"Thank you." Tom’s tail flicked. "Nobody ever listens to me, but at least someone agrees on the record."
Aidan grinned and rolled his shoulders. "We killed an Overlord-rank for this thing. I’m not walking away because the cup looks judgmental."
He reached out and touched it.
The graveyard vanished.
...
There was no falling sensation and no transition at all. One instant his fingers brushed warm bone, and the next he stood on a floor of polished black stone that stretched into darkness in every direction.
In front of him rose a throne.
Calling it a throne felt almost dishonest. The seat itself sat at a reasonable height, but the structure behind it climbed upward without any visible end, back and armrests stretching into the dark above like the spine of something too large to ever fully see. Aidan tilted his head back and gave up on finding the top after a few seconds.
Someone sat on it.
The figure didn’t move and didn’t breathe. Armor of layered black bone wrapped a frame that could have been human once, and a tattered mantle hung from its shoulders in folds that swallowed light rather than casting shadow. It simply sat there, still as the tombstones outside, until Aidan took one step closer.
The eyes lit.
Two points of pale green fire ignited inside the helm, and a voice arrived from everywhere at once, resonating up through the black floor and down from the endless dark above.
[You stand before the inheritance of Noctelith, the Death Rider.]
"Yeah, I gathered." Aidan slid his hands into his pockets. "The cup was a nice touch. Very ominous."
The green fire didn’t so much as flicker.
[To claim what I left behind, you must pass three trials. Fail any one of them, and whatever remains of you will be cast out with nothing.]
’Cast out with nothing sounds generous for a death god’s tomb,’ Aidan thought, but kept it to himself. "Fine. Let’s hear the first one."
[The first trial is endurance. You will bear the cries of the thousands I could not save. If their despair breaks you, you are unworthy of what despair taught me.]
The throne’s green fire flared once.
And the world screamed.
...
It came from everywhere at the same time, thousands of voices tearing loose out of the darkness in a single overlapping wall of sound. Men screaming as blades found them. Women screaming names that would never answer again. Children screaming for parents who were already among the dead.
The darkness filled with faces.
They pressed in from every direction, translucent and ruined, each one frozen at the exact moment of its death. A soldier with an arrow through his throat mouthed words that no longer had air behind them. A mother clutched something small and still against her chest and howled without end.
The despair didn’t stay outside him. It poured in.
Every scream carried its final emotion with it, and all of it flooded straight into Aidan’s chest without asking permission. Terror that had no bottom. Grief sharp enough to cut. The specific, hollow despair of dying while begging someone, anyone, to make it stop.
A normal Hunter would have shattered inside the first ten seconds.
Aidan stood in the center of it with his hands still in his pockets.
’This is supposed to break me,’ he thought, watching a spectral village burn around him while its people died screaming in his ears. ’Thousands of deaths. Thousands of despairs.’
He exhaled slowly.
’I lived a billion years inside the Darkness of Despair. I died more times than there are voices in this room. I watched everything I loved end, over and over, until endings stopped meaning anything at all.’
The screams doubled in volume, as if the trial had heard him and taken it personally. The faces pressed closer until their frozen agony filled his entire vision, and the flood of borrowed despair thickened into something that should have drowned a mind outright.
It found nothing left to drown.
Despair had already taken everything it was ever going to take from him. What poured in simply passed through, familiar as old rain, and Aidan stood inside a hurricane of other people’s worst moments and felt his own heartbeat stay perfectly level.
Then a child’s voice cut through the wall of sound, thin and small and asking why.
Something else woke up.
It wasn’t grief and it wasn’t fear. It came up from far beneath both, an ocean-deep pressure that had been accumulating for a billion years, and it rose at the sound of that one small voice with the speed of something that had been waiting for any excuse at all.
Anger.
Not at the trial. At every death in this room, at every power that let children die screaming, at every cruel and stupid thing that a billion years had stacked onto a reserve he spent every waking hour keeping sealed.
Gold-crimson light flickered beneath his skin.
’No.’ Aidan’s jaw tightened. ’Not here. Not now.’
The reserve pushed back harder than it had in years. The trial kept feeding it with every fresh scream, and the ocean pressed against its walls until the black stone under his feet cracked in a slow spiderweb.
He closed his eyes.
’Easy.’
He breathed it down the way he had breathed it down ten thousand times before, one slow exhale at a time, forcing the ocean back beneath its surface inch by stubborn inch. The gold-crimson light guttered. Flared once more. Died.
The cracks in the floor stopped spreading.
When Aidan opened his eyes again, his heartbeat was level and his hands were steady, and only a thin line of sweat along his temple admitted the fight had happened at all.
The screams cut off all at once.
Silence dropped over the black expanse, and the thousands of frozen faces dissolved into drifting green motes that rose and vanished into the dark overhead. On its impossible throne, the armored figure regarded him with twin points of unblinking fire.
[You did not break.]
"Told you the cup looked judgmental," Aidan muttered, dragging a sleeve across his temple.
[Others have endured the voices through strength of will. You endured them through familiarity borne by your will that already endured worse than this.] The green fire burned fractionally brighter. [What manner of life produces such a thing, I will not ask. The first trial is passed.]