Chapter 75: Darkness fading into Darkness
Kei peeked from the fissure .
The bleed bark held him in its widened wound , the slow red sap weeping past the lip of the opening , and through the narrow gap he watched the forest floor where he had made his feast . He kept his body still inside the dark of the fissure , the twin blades held low and unmoving , the poker face composed into the specific emptiness it produced when watching was the only correct action and any motion at all was the wrong one .
Along the seam of the joined trunks , two other fissures had risked the same peering . The High Cleric watched from his concealment with the controlled stillness of a Master practitioner gathering intelligence — the eyes moving , the body not . Corvyn beside him , the Scholar Rite Cleric’s careful attention crossing the scene and filing it , cataloguing the thing in front of them with the discipline of a man who had learned that the things most worth recording were usually the things most capable of killing the recorder .
Tula’s True Sight had stopped .
It had held for three minutes — the ceiling the Shadow Novice stage permitted , the bloodline ability sustaining its clarity for exactly that span and no longer before the fracture-eyes slid back to the ordinary register . For three minutes she had seen the creature whole , the only one of them who had . Now she saw what the rest of them saw , and what the rest of them saw was a thing their eyes refused to agree on — a length that read as serpentine to one and as a mass of writhing filament to another and as a segmented , ribbed anomaly to a third , the creature presenting a different self to each set of eyes that tried to hold it , the way it presented a different self to everyone who had ever lived long enough to describe it .
Doctor’s face held a smile .
The specific smile of a small boy handed a delicacy . The warmth gone bright and greedy at its edges , the inked feather poised above the parchment , the gleaming quality in his eyes catching the bloodglow as he waited for the thing he was about to witness to begin . He was not afraid . Kei had registered , across the time he had spent in Doctor’s proximity , that there were a great many registers Doctor’s face could occupy and that fear did not appear to be among them . What appeared instead , now , was appetite — the appetite of a scholar who had been promised a demonstration and was about to receive one .
On the forest floor , nine paces out , the apparitions had begun to stand .
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Five of them .
Five of the twenty-four had finished forming — the first five , risen from the kill sites where the dying bodies had released them , each one a volatile darkness pulling itself upright into the shape a derived apparition held once it had finished becoming . The other nineteen were still coming . Still gathering across the forest floor in their scattered places , the darkness collecting slow at the sites where the beasts had fallen , the ten-minute interval producing them one and two at a time , the table that Kei had set still in the act of setting itself .
The five that stood were new to standing .
They adjusted . Acclimated . The volatile darkness of each one shifting and resettling as the apparition learned the biometry of the new shadow-form it had been reduced to — the specific disorientation of an entity that had been a shadow beast ten minutes ago and was now only the shadow of one , the biological half burned away in the dying , the derived remainder discovering by degrees what it had become . A moment of rebirth . The slow uncertain first occupation of a body that had not existed when the night began .
The Choir-Eater did not grant them the moment .
It was hungry , and hunger in a thing that size did not wait on the courtesies of rebirth .
The translucent black chitin of its length wriggled across the forest floor — the segmented body propelling itself in the rolling continuous motion that the eye still wanted to call serpentine and that the truth beneath the eye was not — until it reached the nearest of the five . The two maxillipeds set just behind its head opened and closed upon the volatile darkness , the forelimbs catching the apparition and holding it fast against the floor , and the mouth at the front of the creature opened into the circular serrated pout it produced when it fed , and it drew .
The darkness flowed .
The apparition’s new-formed body thinned as the current pulled it toward the aperture — the rebirth undone before it had finished being a birth , the shadow drawn into the creature in one thin continuous line , the volatile dark surrendering itself segment by segment into the mouth that had come for it .
" Gorgeous , " Doctor said .
To no one . To himself . To the parchment under his feather . " And so poetic . Darkness fading into darkness . Hee hee . " The feather moved in quick economical strokes , hurried , the documentation racing to keep pace with the thing it documented , Doctor’s voice low and bright along the seam . " A thing made of shadow , unmade into shadow , by a thing that is also shadow . The whole of it returning to the one substance . Gorgeous . "
Team Noctis watched in silence .
A spectacular hunt , displayed nine paces from their concealment — the apex of the deep west path working through the feast that one of them had set , and the four of them holding their breath inside the bleeding tree while it did . Kei watched it the way he watched everything , the operational eye measuring , filing , pricing . The High Cleric watched it as a Master measured a thing he had heard of and never seen . Corvyn watched it as a scholar . Doctor watched it as a man watches the thing he loves .
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The other four apparitions sensed the death .
The one in the maxillipeds thinning toward nothing , and the four still standing registering the ending of one of their own in whatever register a newborn shadow entity possessed — and they tried to run . Their forms slow . The disorientation of the unacclimatized body making the flight clumsy , the volatile darkness lurching rather than fleeing , four new things attempting to use limbs they had not yet learned were theirs , stumbling outward across the forest floor in four directions .
The Choir-Eater noticed .
The clusters of pale human eyes set along its segments — the ones not occupied with the feeding — turned toward the fleeing four , and what showed in them was not the satisfaction that had brightened them a moment before . It was fury . The specific fury of a thing that had found a table set and would not suffer a single course to walk away from it .
Its lower trunk thrashed sideways .
And half a dozen segments shredded from its body .
They came away in a single violent motion — six sections of the creature separating from the parent length and falling to the forest floor , each one roughly a meter and a half of segmented chitin , and each one landing not still but already moving , already alive with the borrowed hunger of the body it had been part of .
" What is it doing , " Kei asked Epoch , the question mental , the eyes never leaving the gap .
The VDU answered .
*[ SHADOW MOLTING . A PRIME ATTACK BEHAVIOR OF THE CHOIR-EATER . THE CREATURE SHEDS SEGMENTS WHICH BECOME AUTONOMOUS FOR A PERIOD AND HUNT INDEPENDENTLY . NOTE : THE SHED MASS IS NOT FREE . THE PARENT BODY’S LOCOMOTION DEGRADES WITH EACH MOLT — REDUCED LENGTH , REDUCED SPEED . ]*
Reduced speed .
Kei filed it beneath the spectacle the way he filed every useful thing — the cost under the capability , the price the creature paid for the buffet it would not let escape . Six segments shorter . Six segments slower . An apex predator diminishing itself , spending its own length , slowing its own body , for the sake of not losing four newborn apparitions it could have let go — and not appearing , in any register its pale eyes showed , to weigh the trade at all . The thing was greedy . The greed had a price . Kei noted the price and held it , unspent , the way he held everything the night had given him .
Epoch recorded all of it through the VDU — every motion of the creature , every segment shed , the molting and its cost , filed against the Umbral Archive knowledge for whatever use the record might one day serve .
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The shed segments scattered .
Each of the six wriggling across the forest floor in the rolling autonomous motion the parent body had bred into them , scattering in the directions of the derived apparitions — the fleeing four , the still-forming nineteen , the volatile darkness wherever their borrowed senses found it . They moved with purpose . Not the parent’s purpose exactly , but the same hunger expressed in lesser form , six independent hunters loosed across the kill-ground to do the work the slowed parent could no longer do alone .
Each segment lunged for an apparition .
The four fleeing ones first — a segment reaching each , the chitin closing on the volatile darkness , and where a segment caught an apparition the apparition stopped . Pinned . Held in place by a meter and a half of autonomous chitin that gripped and did not release , the four newborn things arrested mid-lurch , caught , waiting now for the mouth that would come to them in its own time . Two segments remained without prey , wriggling on across the floor toward the forming nineteen , patient , in no apparent hurry , hunting the courses that had not yet finished arriving .
The Choir-Eater finished the first apparition .
Nothing remained of it . Not a thinning shape , not a residue — the volatile darkness drawn entirely into the circular mouth and gone , the place it had occupied simply empty , the rebirth completed into nothing at all . The forest floor where it had stood held only the bloodglow and the bleeding light and the absence where a thing had been .
The creature lifted its forward eyes .
And it wriggled — slower now , six segments slower , the molting’s cost present in the degraded roll of its propulsion — toward the second apparition , the nearest of the four , held in place for it by one of its own discarded segments . The maxillipeds reached . The mouth opened into its pout . The drawing began again .
The buffet feast continued .
Nine paces out , the apex of the deep west path worked through the table that Kei had set — eating , and molting , and slowing , the shed segments pinning the next course in place while it came to them one by one — and the nineteen apparitions still unformed went on gathering across the forest floor in their scattered darkness , the table still setting itself , the feast with far more still to come than had yet been served .
Team Noctis watched from the bleeding tree .
Every shadow domain among them subdued to nothing — Kei’s , Corvyn’s , the High Cleric’s , every affinity pressed flat and silent , every practitioner holding the one discipline that kept them off the menu . Five beings made of flesh , concealed in the wounds of a fused tree , surrounded by a creature that hungered only for shadow and a feast of shadow that one of them had made — safe , for exactly as long as the dark in them stayed dark .
And Doctor wrote , and smiled , and watched the darkness fade into darkness .
