The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [195]
Deirdre was weeping now, gripping her bear claw necklace. “May we meet again, if not on this world, then in another.”
However, Hadrian said nothing. He merely watched them with haunted brown eyes.
Travis raised his hand, to tell them all thank you and good-bye. But before he could speak, the fairy spread its arms. The gate expanded, growing outward, encapsulating them in shimmering light.
Colorado dimmed to a shadow, and was gone.
65.
Nothing. All around Travis there was nothing. A vast, aching void without end.
He tried to scream that something had gone horribly wrong with the gate, but he had no mouth, no lungs—no body at all. He had been reduced to a single point: a buzzing spark of energy, like a gnat so minuscule it was all but invisible.
He tried to search around him for the others—for Grace and Beltan and Vani—but there was no sign of them. Only the empty grayness. Yet even calling it gray was granting it too much substance. Gray was a blending of light and dark. This place was the absence of both things, of all things. And as far as he could sense, it went on forever.
Even as he tried again to scream, he became aware of something coming toward him. No, somethings. He could not see them; they were bodiless, just as he was. Instead, a distortion spread through the colorless fog in their wake, like the wrinkles made by insects as they skim over the surface of a puddle.
Then it hit him, surging before them like a wave. Hunger. Vast, ceaseless hunger. A primal desire to consume. The empty fog warped and flowed around him as they closed in.
This way.
Travis didn’t hear the voice. All the same, he felt the words resonate through him like the music of bells. He tore his awareness away from the approaching things and saw it: a shining circle in the middle of the nothingness. And on the other side of the circle was … light. Real, golden light.
The grayness roiled around him. The ravenous specks buzzed and darted like stinging insects, ready to suck away his very being. Travis willed himself away from them, stretched toward the glowing circle—
—and tumbled onto hard stones.
“Oof,” he said, and both sound and pain let him know that he was alive.
Three more oofs, and three more bodies tumbled to the stone next to him. And a whisper, like a gentle wind passing through a snow-mantled forest.
Travis sat up and stretched out cold, trembling hands. His clothes and skin were covered with a layer of fine frost. He lifted his left hand, moving it from shadow into a slanting beam of honey-colored light. For a moment the frost crystals shone like gems. Then they melted and were gone.
There was something in his hand. Travis willed opened stiff fingers. On his palm was a round, mottled, gray-green stone. Sinfathisar. He closed his fingers around it again.
They were in some sort of alley: a dim, narrow space between two white buildings. Here and there, wayward rays of sunlight fell down from a blue shard of sky above. Vani was already on her feet, her black leathers gray with frost. Grace and Beltan huddled against one wall, skin faintly blue, hair and eyebrows prematurely white with ice. Grace opened her eyes, and snow fell from her eyelashes. There was no sign anywhere of the gate.
It took Travis a moment to find his voice. “What was that place?”
Vani slipped the obsidian artifact inside her jacket. “It was the void between the worlds.”
“And you … you passed through it before, when you journeyed to Earth?”
“Yes.”
How could she have stepped through the gate knowing what was on the other side? Or rather, what wasn’t. Travis didn’t think he could bear that again, not without going mad.
“What …?” It was Grace, although the word was barely a croak. She swallowed, and this time her voice was clearer. “What were those things in the void, Vani?”
“They were morndari.”
Beltan frowned, cracking the ice that clung to his scruffy gold beard. “Morndari?”
“Those Who Thirst,” Grace breathed.
The knight’s green eyes were still confused; Travis would explain it to him later. When speaking was not such an ordeal.
Vani stalked