<u>12</u>


    As gates went, it wasn’t… but he should have expected that.  High Lord Arvendahl’s hatred burned unabated.  So long as Valerian lived… Well, His Lordship had no intention whatever of letting a fugitive Tarandahl persist breathing.


    Val stepped through that shimmering portal with Filimar, leaving the deck of the Vancora, going… nowhere at all.  Instead of emerging in Karellon, the two young elves found themselves plunged into icy, swirling, chaotic darkness: the void-between. The shadow below their reality.


    Valerian seized Filimar before his friend could be swept away and forever lost.  A million things clearly had been.  As they drifted, the elves glimpsed husks of people and creatures… dead, inert airships… what looked like half of a shriveled tarrasque… all of them withered by vacuum and cold.  An endless stream of drifting figures, coming from nowhere, receding to nothing; their final gasps and faint shrieks still resounding.


    This stranding ought to have killed the two elves, but Val had been there, before.  He’d found himself thrust down to this same awful shadow-place, after the trouble at Starloft.  Then, he’d wrenched himself free of Gildyr and Cinda to end up in Burrough.  Felt sure he could bring them through, now.


    Only, as he formed a shield for himself and his friend, fighting to peer through darkness to Karellon, something happened.  Bits of nothingness gathered, like the hollow-black opposite version of sparks.  These motes of the void seemed drawn to the drifting young elves, shooting in from all directions to construct a sort of shell.  With black-lightning speed, these anti-sparks locked together, forming a bubble that next filled with light and reality.


    Valerian and Filimar dropped to an actual surface that shifted and buzzed beneath boot soles and palms.  They got up, looking first at each other, then at the curving wall of their cell (Valerian’s second, in less than a day).


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    “Can’t say I’m surprised, really,” said Filimar, pulling a smile out of somewhere. “That treacherous warg-son never lets anything drop, except heads.”


    Val smiled back, bumping shoulders with Filno.


    “I note that our heads remain firmly attached,” he remarked.  “And I intend to see they continue to do so.”


    Bold words and possibly empty ones, for their cell had begun to change.  Not its shape, exactly.  More that the dark inner wall facing them was now… writhing.  Contorting.


    Filno and Val looked on with gallows interest as the wall tried various conformations, looking mostly like nothing they recognized.  <u>Finally</u>, it settled down to a blocky, simmering face, bigger than either elf was tall.  The visage was made of millions of motes, so it was foggy and indistinct at its edges; constantly seething with motion, like inky boiling water.


    Having better manners, Filimar bowed before his friend did, inquiring,


    “Our host, one presumes?”


    Valerian rose from his own bow, and it was to him that the fizzing-dark face made reply.


    <u>-Pain.  Destruction.-</u>


    A swarm of the motes broke free of their wall, buzzing into the space before Val and Filno.  They formed a rapid series of solid images, using vibration and flashing lines to show color, make noise.  What they revealed was a void even greater than this one.  Somehow, the space between worlds.  Showed that great vessels from elsewhere were plunging through it like fiery spears; cutting, tearing, laying waste… and killing the motes with every traversal.  It was as though the intruders were misty-stepping enormous distances, with great mass and terrible purpose.


    <u>-We perish-</u> whispered the face, shifting its billions of motes.  <u>-Aid.  Assistance required.-</u>


    Once again, Filno and Val exchanged glances.  Then,


    “How?” asked Valerian.  “What can we do to save you?”


    A thin, seething tendril of darkness streamed like a vine from that jittery wall.  It extended itself, painfully crossing light and air to touch both young elves on the forehead.


    <u>-Awaken-</u> it pled. <u>-Act.  Locate Etherion.-</u>


    And then, before either elf could reply, the motes began dying.  They turned grey and they powdered like dust, having created a toxic oasis in which to deliver their plea. Filimar and Valerian were thrust back into that life-draining void.  That should have been all.


    But there was plentiful dark, grainy manna here in this non-place and… now a bit rested… Val took hold and bent it.  Clasped Filimar’s hand wrist-to-wrist as their cell burst apart. Then, reading the negative shadow of their own world, he opened the way into Karellon, City of Golden Light.