PART THREE
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
OR SOME TIME THERE IS only darkness, a nothingness everywhere and nowhere all at once and not at all. There is no movement. There is no feeling. It is a moment that stretches in all directions indefinitely. It is a shadowland without definition, a gloom without purpose, a void without beginning or end. This bleak, bottomless nonexistence will not be bargained with. It will not be reasoned with. It simply endures, and somewhere in this nowhere land, I am floating through obscurity. Disoriented, adrift, lost in a sea of incorporeality, my mind focuses on a single thought, a desperate clawing question that surfaces from the depths of panic:
Where am I?
THUNK!
A spotlight, harsh and unforgiving, slams down, trapping me in a circle of absolute brightness. I am born again, but rather than a joyful entry into a loving world of warmth, it’s a violent expulsion into a grim new reality that feels alien and unwelcoming. I squint my eyes and shield them with my hand as a throbbing internal pressure builds inside my skull to an unbearable crescendo. The pain makes my stomach lurch and dry heave, forcing saliva laced with bile up my esophagus into the back of my throat. I swallow the burning, bitter taste back down and groan with my teeth clenched.
Under the shade of my hand the harsh light softens, allowing my vision to clear and adjust to the brightness, and I realize I am standing in the center of a wrestling ring.
But something is wrong. Terribly wrong. The canvas is stained and ripped and the fabric frayed thin, revealing cracked and splintered wooden slats. The ropes sag lifelessly like a strand of abandoned spiderweb. The turnbuckles are torn open, stuffing spilling out of them like entrails, exposing their rusted metal skeletons. I breathe in heavy air stinking of stale sweat, dust, mildew and something else… something acrid and ancient, like ozone and decay. It’s the smell of violence, forgotten battles, and death.
What lies beyond the ring, the cracked concrete floor and rusted barricades is unknown, hidden behind a wall of shadow, but there is an immensity bearing down on me from what’s hidden, hinting that beyond the veil there is a massive arena looming above the ring.
THUNK!
The spotlight cuts out and darkness rushes to envelope me. Afraid that I’ve been sent back to a formless perdition, I start feeling over my body to reassure myself that I am still here, wherever here is. My anxiety recedes, replaced by a rushing wave of anger.
I shout into the darkness, “I’m done with this shit, you hear me? We had a deal. You were supposed to leave me alone if I did what you wanted. This is my body and my life and I’m taking it back.”
What was that? I spin around, certain I heard something. It’s faint, hardly noticeable at all, a breathy ministry of subtle sighs and exhalations and suppressed chitter-chatter.
“Who’s there?” I ask, turning my head to direct my ears towards the source, but every time I get a bead on it, the sound travels in another direction. No, not in another direction. It isn’t moving. It’s everywhere, all around me, at once.
This must be a test. Perhaps a riddle that I have to solve to get out of this accursed place. Desperately I search for answers in the ambiguity. There must be something more to this than cruel sensory manipulation. My eyes strain, unblinking, trying to pierce the darkness… the absolute impenetrable…
A shape catches my eye, slowly intentionally bleeding through the dark veil, drawn forth through the sheer fabric which seems to almost be… thinning… stretching apart at the molecular level to allow the scantest of light to eek through the space between the atoms.
More shapes then emerge, at first without definition, like unformed nightmares lurking in the shadows, but details begin to crystallize, forming curves and angles that merge, sharpen and resolve into faces. My face, but… twisted, distorted, and multiplied hundreds, no… thousands of times, row after row, rising to the top of a black-drenched colosseum, creating a horrifying mosaic of my own fractured psyche.
But they aren’t me. They are echoes of who I am, variants of my life captured in moments solidified into a Yelena-form. There are Yelenas in wrestling gear, ripped and stained, their faces bloody and brutalized. Yelenas in elegant designer dresses, their expressions haughty and disdainful. Yelenas in ragged street clothes, sickly and gaunt with desperate hunger. Some are weeping quietly. Some have their hands clamped over their mouths, trying to suppress laughter. Others simply stare blankly ahead with an expression of utter emptiness. These are the failures. The discards. What was it that the Entity called them? The proletariat. The ones too weak, too fragmented, to ever seize control.
They're all watching me, wordless and oddly subdued, their eyes a monstrous constellation of milky white mirrors shining aglow. Staring and waiting… but waiting for what?
THUNK!
Light once more bears down on the ring, forcing the dark to retreat beyond the sharp, angled edge of the beam and thicken to hide the army of faces from my sight, though I can still hear their subtle, muted chatter, like insects skittering in the dark.
But there’s something else now, a great presence has forced itself into the arena, an invading force that causes the very air to swell with an immense pressure. I am saturated in fear—terrible, dreadful fear—a psychological horror that’s buckling, bending and distorting my thoughts.
I can feel… cracks splintering across the foundation of my sanity. My hands grab handfuls of hair and I shout, “Get out!… Get out of my head!” Fear flays away strength and will, layer by layer, until I am nothing but an exposed nerve being plucked like a splintered string on a tortured violin.
Then comes a great and dreadful voice, a shattering bellow from every single direction. It’s everywhere, resonating in the very fabric of this impossible place—but not from the outside… from within.
Welcome, Vessel, to the arena of your soul. To the place where choices are made and unmade.
My head… distorts around the words… like stillwater displaced by a stone… ripples spreading through every fiber of my being… the loudness… unbearable… a howl of dissonant sounds crushing my mind.
Above me, a darkness protrudes into the light in the form of a writhing mass of tentacles, like ink swirling in water, constantly changing and never settling. Vast and impossible, reaching and grasping. Shimmering with the fractured rainbow of an oil slick. As I stare at the nightmarish mass, a vision comes to me. A vision of… stars. Millions… trillions… an infinite tableau of burning points in a boundless, technicolored space, with clouds of nebulae and swirling galaxies. It’s almost… peaceful. I’m a child gazing at the night sky with her first telescope, lost in wonder at the mysteries of the universe, marveling at my own insignificance in comparison.
But then they appear.
Colossal, planet-sized geodes drift in the interstellar medium like mountain-sized crystalline shards that blaze with shifting reflections of cosmic light. There is a beauty in the geometry, and the rough surfaces cratered by long forgotten impacts, but beneath the dull luster and satisfying angles are distortions of space, and faint hints of some things trapped within. They pulse with a slow, discordant hum that resonates to the core of my very being. What are they, I wonder at the risk of my own sanity, and to my dismay an answer blooms like a diseased pustule in my mind.
They’re prisons, ancient and impenetrable, holding entities that have no names.
Is my Entity one of… them? Is this the closest my human mind can come to grasping the raw, unformed chaos of Its true nature? I know now that the Entity is not another broken piece of my psyche. It is completely and utterly alien.
Cold, paralyzing terror cripples my shrieking urge to scream, to run, to fight. I am trapped beneath the spotlight like a specimen pinned to a slide under the watchful, hungry presence of my captor.
“What are you?” I manage to choke out, the words pathetically small, like a mouse squeaking in the face of a god. I can feel Its amusement, or rather that’s how my ill-equipped rational brain calculates the discomforting undulations
I am the appetite that stirred the first hunger… the song that serenaded the birth of the universe… and the symphony that will score its unmaking.
My knees give and I fall forward onto my hands, staring down at the rust-stained canvas. I can’t… breathe… can’t… think… The air feels thick and suffocating and no matter how much I take in, I still thirst for more, heaving my chest until ache radiates down my spine. My carefully constructed reality crumbles around me, burying my world, my very sense of self, beneath a rubble that is no more significant than a speck of dust.
And yet your own sun began as nothing more than specks of dust in the chaos, individually meaningless but necessary in its creation. Your insignificance is not without purpose. A single diseased seed can give rise to a blight that starves a continent. You are the seed, carefully cultivated and strategically placed, and I am your corruption.
My eyes hesitate to rise from the canvas, to look upon Its terrifying visage once more, to be drowned in the sickening majesty emanating from Its presence. “What purpose do I serve?” I ask with a meek, uneasy mew.
The same your brother served, and your father before him, and his mother, and her father, going back generations, centuries, millenia. A purpose woven in the fabric of your being by a needle threaded by your forebears. You, Vessel, are the conduit through which my grand design shall be made manifest, and the doom that follows its culmination.
My brother? Father? My entire family? Is that why dad lured Nathan to The Box? Is that the real reason my brother inherited everything, to ensure it was him, and only him, who would find it? Was my father trying to spare me from this fate?
Yes, though it was not always so. You were meant from the beginning to be my Vessel.
“So what changed?” I ask, with a sliver of defiance that is quickly met and crushed by Its dissatisfaction. It does, however, answer.
Your father became distracted. And willful. And failed to fulfill his purpose as my Vessel.
“You killed him,” I suddenly say, not as an accusation but a statement of fact that I know in my heart is true. His cancer never made sense. After a bad fall at home his doctor ordered a full neurological workup. There was no sign on any of his scans of a tumor. Headaches and confusion continued, however, and grew worse. Less than two months later another MRI revealed a five centimeter glioblastoma devouring his left frontal lobe. Inoperable, they said. Within weeks, his entire body was riddled with cancer. Not long after, he was dead.
Once a pact is made, it can only be ended with the Vessel’s death.
“And Nathan?…” I didn’t need to ask. I already know the answer, but I needed to hear Its admission. I needed to know for certain.
Nathan showed great promise initially. Unfortunately, he turned away from his purpose. He retreated to the comfort of a mother he never knew and rejected my grand design, just as he rejected you. He became weak and turned to medications and alcohol to suppress my connection. That was… upsetting.
A memory flashes across my eyes. Nathan’s memory. I can feel the burn of alcohol in my gut and feel my brain swimming as he walks the sidewalk in Las Vegas, yelling into his phone at his lawyer about me. Cursing me. Threatening to turn me into the police. The bus is rushing towards him, towards me, the one he failed to see before he stepped off the curb.
I scream, a raw animal sound torn from my throat with the taste of metal. I feel the bus hit him, through flesh down to bone, as though I am the one it collides with. As if I am flung like a ragdoll into a light pole. Broken. Twisted. Pain, unbelievable, awful pain racks every nerve in my body.
I offered him mercy more than once. I promised to heal his broken body and return him to his rightful glory. Still he refused to honor the Pact. Still he refused to be my Vessel. And so I retreated, and watched. I watched you, Yelena, as I have since you were a little one, grow into a powerful woman. A woman who wields great strength and immense authority in her own right.
“With your help,” I say between pathetic, broken sobs.
Yes, I was there to guide you, to protect you, to save you.
More memories spark across the surface of my mind. My memories. Captured fragments of my life that I witness all at once, in a concurrence of moments folded together. Not viewed, but experienced. Relived at the most basic emotional state in a single, fleeting shard of time. Me and the Other Me, The Entity, hand in hand, together forever, at every pivotal moment in my life. At every medal ceremony. At every wrestling match. When I took my first life and my last and every one in between. When an assassin aimed a gun at my head and all I could do was breakdown in tears. Spiral was my father, but the Entity has done more for me than he ever did.
No, that’s what It wants me to think. “It has been you,” I say quietly. “Always you, but not because you care for me. I am a tool to be manipulated, and that is all you have ever done, to turn me into your servant.”
Yes, but does the motivation matter if your desires are achieved? Without my support, you would have nothing. No money. No influence. Do you think Marisol would be with you if you were the same moneyless immigrant from Moldova?
No.
She has her own appetites. Her own needs. Because of us, together, you are what she desires.
A thought enters my mind, so obvious I wonder why it only now occurs to me, but of course I know why. It didn’t want me to realize that this pact requires my agreement. I have to submit to It freely. If that is true, then maybe there is a way out of this yet.
I am… disappointed.
A deep, sawing thrum beats with the diminished harmony of cicadas, not singing in a summer field, but burrowed into the hollow chambers of my skull. A crawling, maddening buzz vibrating in my teeth and bone like a drill bit boring into my brain.
Hope is a weakness of the human mind. A comforting lie your species tells itself to endure the unendurable. It chains you to miserable existences, blinding you to the truth of your circumstance. It makes you accept the unacceptable, tolerate the intolerable, and cling to lives that are not worth living. Hope is the cage you build for yourself.
And you know better.
“I’m sorry,” I say with the desperation of a rabbit caught in a snare. “You’re right! Please… make it… stop…”
The drilling, the grinding, the noise, it all ceases. Abruptly. Completely. The silence that follows is almost as jarring as the sound itself. A wave of relief, fragile but real, washes over me. Muscles unclench, breathing slows, and the crushing pressure recedes from my brain cavity, leaving behind a throbbing ache but also space. A momentary, quiet space where I can exist, however briefly, in peace.
The Pact has already been sealed, Vessel. Your body is mine to compel, with or without your willing submission.
“I never agreed,” I say simply without emotion, afraid of incurring Its wrath once more.
You did, the moment touched Thul Ro'Dûr.
“The Box,” I whisper, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. The memory of fire, a stairwell, cold stone etched with strange symbols, the dead animal eyes—it all seems distant, unreal, like the last strands of an unraveling dream.
It has had many names. In the old tongue it was christened Skapker by your ancestor, Harald Hardrada. You may call it the Chrysalis, as your father did.
“What is it?”
A black, viscous substance, like congealed shadow, drips from the tentacled creature above me, gathering in a pool on the canvas, not spreading outward but upward, shaping itself into a replica of the six-sided, void-smooth prism I now know as the Chrysalis. With liquid-grace, it swirls in otherworldly tendrils of hazy pitch.
Before Thul Ro'Dûr, I directly inhabited my Vessels but mortal flesh cannot endure my presence indefinitely. Eventually they were consumed from the inside out, torn asunder and unmade. Thul Ro'Dûr acts as an intermediary between us. Through it I may pluck your strings to a melody of power and madness without shattering the instrument.
“An instrument. Is that all I am to you? All these years you spent pretending to be me. Pretending to care about me.”
The spotlight flickers, not completely shutting off but dimming enough so the many faces once more seep through the darkness, their harrowing, glazed eyes fixated on me. The Entity’s voice turns silken, seductive, like a serpent’s hiss in my ear.
Look around you. Look at the audience. They are all you. All the paths not taken, all the desires unfulfilled, all the fears embraced, all the potential wasted. They are your weaknesses. Your fragmentations. Your failures.
I force myself to look, to direct my eyes past the edge of light and face the sea of my mirrored reflections. Still restrained, still quiet, still craving. The Entity is right. They are me. Or they could have been me, and they still can be.
The Entity whispers, the voice now a purring promise, a balm to the choking chaos of this cursed realm.
I can silence the storm of their rebellion, all you have to do is willingly serve as my Vessel and I will unsevere our mind, reintegrating all of you into a merged self. I will make you whole.
Reintegrate… merge… Is that unity or annihilation? This version of me will cease to exist, and my consciousness, my very being, overwritten by something new. Something vast and terrible.
But the promise of peace, an end to the constant struggle, to the fear and the whispers, to the siren song luring me towards the rock—I cannot deny the appeal of never again feeling how I felt on the airplane, waking up to discover Another Me had forcibly seized control without my consent.
Of course I know the question I must ask but I’m afraid to hear the answer.
“What if I refuse?”
The Entity pulsates. Its darkness deepens and the air grows colder around me, cold enough to cause my breath to frost. Countless bumps are drawn from the surface of my skin from the fear that settles all around me, when I look up again to see the eyes in the audience burning with alien fire.
Refusal is a temporary amusement. There are, after all, so many other versions of you who are more than willing replacements.
Replacements. Not just threats, not just potential futures, but alternatives. I'm not special. Not unique. Not even necessary. I'm just one of countless possibilities, one that the Entity is more than willing to discard for the next candidate.
My gaze is drawn, irresistibly, to the front row where I now see Lethargia’s eyes, usually half-closed, now wide and hungry; Ira’s face a mask of uncontrolled rage; Gula’s mouth watering, as if anticipating a feast; Covetous’s gaze like a hyena staring at another animal’s kill; Desi shivering in anticipation; Avaritia’s hands wringing in a habitual stim; and Mândrie’s expression of utter contempt and a desperate yearning. They want me to refuse. They want control.
I don’t need to ask what happens to me. I already know. I’ve been there. When Gula ordered my jet to Denmark. When Mândrie drove me to my father’s castle. I don’t remember where it was or how I felt, because it was nowhere and I was nothing. That is what will happen to me if I deny the Entity. My fate will be an eternal nothingness worse than death, because they will get to take over my body.
My teeth clench and a sob builds in my throat.
There is no choice, Yelena.
Its voice softens, becoming almost gentle, almost kind, but beneath all Its subtleties is an overwhelming weight that crushes my urge to resist and my will to endure.
Let me take away the burden of your troubled mind. Accept the Pact. Become my Vessel and together we will show them, the one who watches from within, the true meaning of power.
You. It's talking about you.
In this moment, surrounded by the ruins of a wrestling ring, facing a creature beyond human comprehension, I understand. There is no escape. No victory. Only surrender.
My head dips in reverence. I surrender my body, my mind, my very being, to Its service. Words are not needed. This is not an agreement made in any spoken language, but a submission of the mind and the soul. I offer it willingly, and It accepts. The darkness shifts, and for a fleeting moment, I glimpse a monstrous, distorted face form from the inky mass, a parody of my own, with eyes of burning yellow and an understated smile.
Trepidation and worry—fleeting, fading remnants of a self that is no longer mine to bear—are no more than whispers in a tempest, drowned out by the rising tide of a cold, vast indifference. I look upon The Entity without the shackles of fearful humanity and welcome in the comfort of Its darkness with my own branching grin.
“What do I call you?” I ask.
The words quake in my head, guttural clicks and hard consonants that echo with the unfeeling emptiness of the space between stars, a language of shadows and unmaking, spoken only in the deepest voids. But there is one word that I do understand, that vibrates in my very core…
VORAZD.
In the front row, the Other Yelenas engulf in shadow, only to reappear behind me. I don’t need to turn to see them with my eyes. I can feel in ways that sight cannot convey. They come forward, one by one, but not towards me. Into me. These individuals, each a discrete perception of my life, my experiences, my emotions, my wants and needs, are now converging.
It’s not a physical sensation, not in the way a human would understand. There is no pain, no pressure, no impact, only a reintegration of our collective awareness.
Lethargia's apathy is no longer a shiftless indifference but an irresistible desire for oblivion. Ira's rage surges, once a burning fire but now something colder, more calculating, a want not to not only destroy but to nullify. Gula's hunger, Covetous's greed, Desi's lust, Mândrie’s pride, Avaritia's insatiable greed—they all fuse with my own desires, amplifying them, twisting them into something monstrous.
Before, we were a chorus of conflicting melodies, a diminished lamentation of disharmony. Now we are blended into one, unified note of profound certainty.
But there are more.
A pressure builds within me, an intense, inward-pulling force—a gravity well blossoming like a singularity in the void. Then I hear them, the murmurs, the whispers and then the screams of the proletariat. Thousands of Yelenas fighting and clawing to stay in their seats. Their absorption is not peaceful or voluntary. I can feel their primitive, instinct-driven minds being torn asunder, unable to grasp why they are crumbling into flaking black clouds, until one by one, their voices cease with the finality of a guillotine blade.
A vortex of shadow begins twisting around me with the force of a collapsed star and the remnants of over twenty thousand Other Yelenas are inexorably pulled into my event horizon. Every potential Yelena, every fragmented possibility, every discarded self, all being reduced to a singular point of flesh and consciousness, until only I remain.
I am no longer Yelena. I am no longer anything. I simply… am.
HE MAELSTROM RECEDES FROM like a dying storm, dissipating like fetid clouds into the cold atmosphere of the hidden room beneath my father’s castle. The esoteric chanting in my head fades but not into silence. Silence implies absence. I am graced with a gentle, humming serenade, a comforting reminder that I am not alone. Vorazd is with me. It will always be with me.
The room feels… different. Or perhaps I am different.
The roaring fire of the hearth, the shadows dancing across the perpetually-scowling faces of the trophy mounts, the strands of cobwebs hiding in the dark corners, the pits and valleys of brushstrokes of the perverse, grotesque paintings—I see it all with a clarity the naked eye was not designed to experience, but it isn’t only my vision that has improved. All of my senses are elevated, strengthened, and honed. I can smell the wood slowly decaying. I can feel the disparity between the heat from the fireplace, the chandelier’s candles and the coldness of stone. I can taste the mildew in the trapped air and I can hear… thunder from far beyond the confines of this room, through layers of rock and earth, to the world above where the gentle rain has now turned into a raging storm.
But there’s more. More than what physical awareness can perceive. An intuition has come to me that delves beyond biology. I know this place, and its history. From the hands that broke the ground and chiseled the black stone into a table of authority, to the powerful men and women who sat in these chairs. I can see their faces and I know their names. I see the line of my people back to the first man bestowed with the honor of being called Vessel.
I touch my face, as though it were the first time. The skin feels… strange. Tauter. Smoother. Colder. My hands hold out before my eyes and I see they are still mine, and yet not. The fingers are slightly longer, the nails sharper. To my attuned gaze, the skin luminates in the dim light, allowing me to see below the surface, past fat and connective tissue to perceive the network of vasculature and nerve endings, and attached to every fiber of my being, is a faint, pulsing darkness.
The Chrysalis rests unchanged on the table exactly where I found it. The silent black hexagon is still humming with an otherworldly power but no longer does it feel strange or haunting. In it I sense only familiality because it is part of me, and I am it.
A smile curves across my lips, a slow, predatory expression old Yelena would have worn. My hand reaches out, this time without hesitation or fear or resistance, and closes around the cold, smooth surface of the Chrysalis. It fits perfectly in my hand, as if it were made for mine and mine only.
I lift it from the table. Its weight is surprising. It isn’t heavy, not in the physical sense, but dense with power that resonates in transcendental waves, a power that is both terrifying and exhilarating.
“Allez, toi,” I say to the Chrysalis. “Time to go home. We have so much to do and I can’t wait to introduce you to Marisol.”