Michelle Sagara - Cast in Chaos

And more.

And more.

She could jog with her eyes closed, because there wasn’t anything to trip over, run into, or avoid. Sometimes it helped, because the darkness beneath lids felt natural, and this was as close to a dream—albeit boring and featureless—as anything real generally came. Unfortunately, dreams had a way of taking sharp turns or steep drops into nightmare. She opened her eyes.

When her stomach growled, she was almost grateful, because it gave her some sense that time—in a decent interval—was passing, not that she wasn’t often unreasonably hungry at random times throughout the day. But when she heard the second growl—a distinctly external one, she froze. Her legs and arms still ached; nothing short of getting away from this damn place was going to solve that.

She fell silent, listening; she wondered if her stomach’s growl could produce the echoes her natural voice—in tones of Leontine, even—couldn’t. Funny, how little she appreciated the answer. The growl—the only other evidence that someone else was also in this space, seemed to come from somewhere below her feet.

She stopped cursing. Which meant she stopped speaking at all, and started to move.

She could hear the sound of deep and even breathing. Sadly, it wasn’t hers; hers was now shorter and sharper. And quieter. There was no obvious wind—but it felt, now, as if the gray, amorphous endless space was a living thing, and she was trapped inside it. She left off the specifics of where, because it didn’t seem to have anatomy, and any answer she came up with was not good.

She stopped jogging. Stopped running. She kept moving, because it was better, for the moment, than standing still. The bracer was now warm against her stomach, and she thought about tossing it away. Thought about what the Emperor would say—possibly even to her—if it failed to reappear again, ever. Or the Arkon. She had some suspicion that it came, indirectly, from his hoard.

Then again, that would mean he’d parted with it, so maybe that was inaccurate.

She crouched, pressed her hand against the ground. Her palm passed through it, as if it didn’t exist. She hated magic. Her feet, clearly, were being supported by something; her hands, however, couldn’t touch it. She stood, took a step forward, and fell.

So much for exploration.

Falling was like flying without options.

She didn’t scream; it wouldn’t have done any good. But she held her breath for an uncomfortable length of time while she waited for the ground—or what passed for ground here—to rise up and splatter her. When it failed to happen—or at least, when that breath ran out—she swallowed air and opened her eyes. She’d closed them when the ground had suddenly dropped out from under her. It hadn’t made much difference.

The sickening sensation of stomach being pressed up against throat diminished; instead of falling she was now floating. But the growling grew slowly louder, and almost instinctively she began to jog again. Falling stopped, and not the usual way, which involved ground and pain. This was good. But the growling had changed or shifted; it wasn’t directional, and it seemed to bypass her ears and head straight for the base of her spine, where it then traveled up and down like a hysterical child.

Severn!

The silence was worse, this time; it hit harder. The growl that answered—that seemed to answer—the silent invocation was now louder. She spun, hands dropping to daggers, but could see the same nothing she’d seen since she’d arrived.

Severn…

No answer.

This time, she realized that no answer would come. He would look for her, if he knew—but the chances are, he didn’t. He was with Evanton, and the real Garden, in some other place. He hadn’t known that she was coming; he therefore didn’t know that she hadn’t arrived. She had given him her name, it was true: the name she had taken for herself from the Barrani stream of life. But she’d taken no name for him; what he gave her, as always, was acceptance.

She didn’t have his name.

If he called hers, she might hear it—she wasn’t certain, because she had no damn idea where she was. But…he had never used it. He understood that in some ways it felt wrong, to her; it wasn’t her, it wasn’t what she knew of herself. He let her approach. He let her speak, in the silent and private way that Barrani names conferred, and he didn’t pull back, didn’t hide, didn’t offer her fear.

But he didn’t call her. He didn’t invoke what was so foreign and inexplicable.

She swallowed. The growling was louder and thicker; it was one sound, but it seemed to come from everywhere. Closing her eyes, she whispered a single word.

Calarnenne.

Silence. She opened her eyes, and the world was still gray, still formless, still empty. Her marks were the same shade of empty, but the edges of each rune were glowing softly, not that the light was necessary. She looked up, down, and shuddered once as the only other sound she’d heard since she arrived repeated itself.

It wasn’t Feral growling; it wasn’t angry dog; it wasn’t the Leontine sound that meant you were a few seconds away from needing a new limb or a new throat. She’d dreaded all of these in her life, but the sound she heard now?

It was death.

Kaylin personally preferred a civilized, more or less human personification of death, which was the one that usually got into the stories she’d heard as a child. Hells, as an adult. She drew her daggers for the first time since entering the nonworld. They looked pathetic in her hands, but they were all she had, and they were better than nothing.

She began to curse the growling noise in soft, steady Leontine—because that seemed to make no difference, either, and it made her feel better. A little. She threw in an Aerian curse or two, and dropped a few brittle words of High Barrani into the mix; she saved the most heartfelt of her curses for later use.

But cursing, she finally heard something that wasn’t a growl, although it was, in its own fashion, as deadly, as dangerous, and ultimately, as unknown.

Kaylin.

She froze. She had just enough experience with the Lord of the fief of Nightshade to know when he wasn’t particularly pleased by something she’d done, and she’d had twelve years in the fief he ruled to develop a visceral and instinctive fear of his anger.

But she’d had seven living well away from Nightshade, and if her automatic reaction was to drop or hide, she could fight through it and remain more or less calm. Less, today, but she didn’t usually have conversations like this while standing in the middle of nothing.

Nightshade.

You…called me.

She swallowed. I did. I can’t—I didn’t—

You did not mean to compel.

She hadn’t even tried. In theory, she could, if she were strong enough. She held his name. But she’d always doubted that she would be strong enough, and if she weren’t, and she tried, she’d be dead.

I only wanted to get your attention.

Ah. And now that you have it?

There’s a difficulty in Elantra. She swallowed. It was habit; she wasn’t actually speaking. But if she had stopped, the growling hadn’t, and she heard it clearly.

Kaylin. His voice shifted, the sound simultaneously sharpening and losing some of its edge. Where are you?

Funny thing, she began, as the growl grew louder.

Kaylin. Sharper, sharper. Wherever you are, leave. Now. When she didn’t answer, he added, This is not a joke. It is not a matter for your mortal sense of humor. You are in danger. You must leave.

I…I don’t know how. It was hard, to say it. To admit it. Especially to Nightshade. Ignorance was weakness.

No, she thought. Ignorance was only weakness if you clung to the damn thing. Obviously, hours in gray nowhere had unsettled her, and Nightshade’s voice pretty much always had that effect; they weren’t a good combination.