Chapter 40: CHAPTER 40

Find Jalice.

This singular goal, encapsulated in those two words, pierced through Hydrim. Unlike most other things lost after the siege of his body, the need to find Jalice had never left. Even with Dardajah’s raw translation between the Realms shredding Hydrim’s mind, his need to retrieve her persisted until it was consuming him like a fire. The mental battering from Dardajah eventually broke down all logic and thought, and Hydrim wasn’t even sure why he needed to find Jalice anymore. The desire simply existed and fueled every remaining part of his diminishing aura.

Oddly enough, Dardajah wanted her too. The possibility that she knew about the Decayer device in Vekuuv bothered the dokojin—enough that Hydrim was aware it was searching for her. The dokojin’s reasons didn’t matter to him in the end though. Not when it meant Hydrim might have her again. With an aligned agenda, the two interlocked souls—one crippled in a limbo of darkness, the other frantic and foaming with agitation—yearned with conflicting motivations for the same outcome.

Find Jalice.

The mantra had led to frequent translations between the Realms, journeys that had slowly eroded Hydrim’s sense of time. Not every Realm held steady to that particular dimension, and bouncing from one to the next eventually led to a misconstrued conceptualization of its measurement.

Nor were the translations all between the Terrestrial and Apparition Realms. The various Realms blurred together in the end in Hydrim’s memory, but some swam more vividly in his mind than others.

One such translation was to a particular Dreamless Realm, where Hydrim had overheard an exchange between Dardajah and another dokojin. Two dokojin conversing—the idea alone was enough to drive Hydrim mad. He’d heard other voices too while in that Dreamless Realm—human voices. One had sounded like Annilasia. The other more panicked voice belonged to the aetherwielder Korcsha, whom Dardajah had souldrained after hijacking Hydrim’s body.

Another trip that returned to his broken mind had occurred in the Apparition Realm. Dardajah had summoned a host of mangled souls, which were welded by some unfathomable curse into an amalgam of animal and human. As if unsatisfied with their current disfigurement, the dokojin had bathed these tainted souls in fire, forcing Hydrim to listen to the shrieking howls until the chimera acclimated to the searing heat and pain. Only then had the dokojin dismissed the summoned souls of these unfortunate beings.

What purpose any of this held eluded Hydrim. He knew Dardajah had used Korcsha’s wand to track down Annilasia, and somehow that had led to the summoning of the demented souls upon which the dokojin had inflicted fiery punishment. But how the wand or the tortured chimera helped with finding Jalice, he knew not.

Find Jalice. That was all Hydrim wanted in the end. The wand, Annilasia, the chimera souls—whatever got him to Jalice didn’t matter. They just needed to find her.

Hydrim’s aura recoiled under the immense pain that swept across him as Dardajah translated once again. Even imprisoned within the dokojin itself, like a consumed grub sloshing about in a beast’s stomach, he had no cushion from the translation’s toll on his sanity.

While recovering from this, Hydrim realized he now assumed an altered state. Moments earlier, he’d slouched in the depths of a nameless pit within his own body, cast aside when Dardajah had gained full control over Hydrim’s vessel.

This time, the translation ended differently than those before it. Instantaneous with their arrival at the dokojin’s destination, Hydrim’s aura tore from the depths of the pit like a loose thread yanked from a cloth. Wherever Dardajah had taken them, they were no longer within the confines of Hydrim’s body. When the voyage ended, Hydrim found himself able to see a bleak room twinkling with star-like lights.

The fragments of his mind struggled to form coherent words.

“Where are we?” asked Hydrim. Despite his newfound ability to see, he was in no more control than in the pit. Dardajah controlled whatever shell now hosted them both.

Shapeshifting, Dardajah transformed the shell that mimicked Hydrim’s physique into the dokojin’s true form of horrifying glory. Black-feathered wings unfurled the full length of the room, dripping with blood that belonged to long-lost souls of its conquest, while limbs of gnarled cartilage flexed.

Dardajah’s shapeshifting affected nothing of Hydrim’s existing discomfort within the space he’d been forced to occupy. Unlike in the pit, here he existed with all senses functioning. What Dardajah experienced, so did he. Yet he remained a prisoner—gagged and invisible to any who might behold Dardajah’s chosen form.

The musky scent of the forsaken room, along with the array of panels swarming with burnt out orbs and dim lights, flooded Hydrim’s restored vision as the dokojin surveyed their surroundings.

“I hear their steps pattering across the earth,” Dardajah wheezed with anticipation. “Hearts beat with fear of death, and unknown to her is the fate of a trap, for I soon devour.”

Hydrim’s thoughts swirled in an incoherent mess, still fighting for resolution amid the chaos induced by the translation. Dardajah’s musings were lost in the sea of this mess. Yet as logical consciousness slowly settled, a cruel familiarity nestled in alongside it.

He’d been here before.

“You recognize it, Unworthy Bones?” Dardajah snarled. “Your place of demise? How truly atrocious it is that it should be the site of your betrayer’s end.”

“What is this place?” Hydrim asked. Although his words left no audible waves in the space they inhabited, his voice reverberated around him, like that of a man buried alive in a coffin beneath the earth.

“My cage for so many years,” replied Dardajah. “Until your jealous wench crawled in and gave me your body to twist and snap.”

Like his own words, the dokojin’s response didn’t break the silence of the room either. It seemed their conversation would remain private and unknown to any who might approach.

Dread suffocated him as recognition of the room struck with the dokojin’s cryptic hints. “No, no, no—get me out of here!” Hydrim’s voice cracked with terrified sobs. “Take me back to my body!”

Dardajah ignored him, instead inhaling deeply until a shiver of delight caressed its hideous embodiment. “Can’t you smell her? She is close.”

Hydrim ceased his blubbering long enough to catch the dokojin’s meaning. “Wait. Who’s close? Who are you talking about?” He regretted the questions when they elicited a vile sneer from his captor.

Dardajah chuckled, the sound of suns imploding in unforgiving maelstroms. “Your Tecalica. Can’t you feel her when she’s so close? Bones and blood, under such flimsy skin, here now to come to the slaughter.”

Hydrim’s aura quivered. “No . . . don’t do this . . .”

Dardajah’s malicious jibing flashed to anger, his unseen teeth gnashing at Hydrim. “Witness her death, so that it might kill the last embers of your hope.”

Dismissing its victim’s whimpers, the dokojin crept towards the sole exit of the room, folding its wings in.

“Let’s remind our dear Jalice of her glorious role in this play, and how it ends with her dying along with any knowledge of the Decayer.”