Gathering of the Chosen (34 page)

Braim fully expected the Void to attack
him and Ragao the instant he summoned his light orb, but the Void
was silent. He looked around the darkness, wondering if the Void
had some sort of body he could interact with, but it seemed like he
and Ragao were the only two beings in the whole world now. He
couldn't even hear his own heartbeat, which would have frightened
him, but as usual, he didn't even notice it until his mind told him
that he should have heard it. Besides, his heart was still beating,
and that was all that mattered to him.

“All right, Void,” said Braim. He kept the
fear out of his voice because he didn't want the Void to think he
was afraid. “I'm here. Why don't you show yourself?”

Still no answer. This puzzled Braim. The
Void had obviously heard him, so why wasn't she talking to him? Was
she ignoring him? If so, why?

“Afraid of me, Void?” Braim said again,
this time increasing the volume of his voice for effect. “Do you
consider me an abomination, just like Diog did?”

Then Braim heard steps from somewhere
within the darkness ahead. They were heavy, dragging steps, like
someone was limping. It was impossible to tell how far away the
walker was. They might have been on the other side of the Stadium
or two feet away. Sound seemed to travel strangely in the Void.

Without warning, a portion of the darkness
pulled away, like a curtain, allowing Braim to see someone standing
two dozen or so feet away from him and Ragao.

It was a large, muscular man, though Braim
didn't recognize him. The man wore a black tunic. At least, it
looked like a black tunic, until it moved and Braim realized that
it was actually the shadows of the Void covering the man's body.
The man had a large gray mustache and appeared to be middle-aged,
but it was impossible to guess his age for sure in such dark
conditions.

“Who are you?” Braim said. “One of the
Hollech Bracket participants?”

A feminine chuckle escaped the lips of the
man, which deeply unnerved Braim.
This is the body of the man
known as Zaos. He was easily dispatched when I consumed the
Stadium. Now I control his body as easily as a puppet. Not that I
need a body, but sometimes I prefer to do this in order to frighten
my opponents.

“That is pretty freaky,” said Braim,
nodding. “But what about Raya and the others?”

Why should I tell you?
Zaos—no, the
Void—said.
Knowledge is power, after all, and I am not in the
business of granting others power. I take away power, actually,
because the Void consumes everything at some point or
another.

“Yeah, sure,” said Braim. “Keep telling
yourself that. Anyway, I'm glad you actually decided to show up and
face me. Guess you aren't such a frightened little shadow after
all.”

The Void fears nothing,
said the
Void.
The Void fears not the gods, nor the humans or the
aquarians or the half-gods or the katabans. The Void cannot feel
fear. The Void only creates fear in its enemies.

“Uh huh,” said Braim, nodding. He looked
around the shadows. “But I guess the Void also likes to talk,
because otherwise I wouldn't be alive right now, right?”

The Void has its reasons for not
killing you,
said the Void.
You are … unique among
mortals.

“Yeah, I've been told that before,” said
Braim. “Just had someone try to kill me over it, in fact, less than
fifteen minutes ago. What about it?”

The Void always consumes
everything,
the Void said.
Yet I also have a sense of …
gratefulness, I suppose you would say. Because it is your
resurrection that helped to weaken the world's boundaries enough
for me to try conquering Martir again. And this time, there is no
one to stop me.

“I suspected as much,” said Braim. Then he
paused. “Wait a minute … are you
thanking
me?”

I never said that word,
said the
Void.
I am only acknowledging that I am grateful for what you
did. For too long, my desire to consume everything has been denied
me by the boundaries that the Powers set around Martir ages ago. I
believed Uron would be the one to help me, but then he betrayed me
at the last minute. But now, I am once more free to do as I wish,
which is to consume the whole world and all that reside within
it.

“Not unless I stop you,” said Braim.

The Void laughed, which was a strange
mixture of male and female voices that made Braim feel even less
comfortable than he already did.
You are perhaps the third
mortal to tell me that today. Why do you think you are going to do
it when all of the others have utterly failed?

“Because you're afraid of me,” said
Braim.

The Void stopped laughing. Her expression
was blank, but Braim could tell that he had hit a nerve.
What?

“You're afraid of me,” Braim repeated.
“You heard that correctly. You, the Void, are afraid of me, Braim
Kotogs. Can't put it in any plainer language than that.”

I am not afraid of any mortal,
said
the Void.
It is you who should be afraid of me. I am older than
Martir, older than the gods, even older than the Powers. My power
dwarfs the combined might of the sun and the sea. There is nothing
anywhere in the universe that comes close to my power. Why, then,
would I
ever
be afraid of you?

Braim yawned a little. “Because I'm
different from everyone else you've faced. I'm the kind of thing
that you are afraid of.”

I still do not understand,
said the
Void.
I am not afraid of mortals, not even cocky ones like you.
Mortals fear me.

“It's not my status as a mortal that
scares you,” said Braim, shaking his head. “You know, for being
such an all-powerful entity, you sure seem incapable of sensing
implications in a mortal's words.”

Stop insulting me,
said the Void.
Or I will kill you where you stand, you and your stupid half-god
underling.

Ragao actually stepped back, like she
wanted to run away, but Braim gestured for her to stay.

“I don't care much for Ragao, but leave
her out of this, all right?” said Braim. He tapped his chest. “What
you are afraid of is my life. I am supposed to be dead, but I'm
not. I came
back
from the dead—an impossibility by all
definitions of the word—and I don't intend to die again anytime
soon.”

So what?
said the Void.
You are
not immortal. I see nothing frightening about you.

“Still don't see it,” said Braim. He
sighed heavily. “Okay. I'll use simple words and speak slowly so
you get it, beauti—actually, you're not all that beautiful for a
woman or for a man for that matter.”

Get to the point, you stupid
mortal,
said the Void.

“Okay, okay, don't be so rude, geez,” said
Braim. “So anyway, you want to consume everything, right? Plunge
all of reality into an endless darkness or whatever? Extinguish the
spark of life from all of creation and everything?”

If you wish to put it that way,
yes,
said the Void.

“Essentially, you want to make it
impossible for life to return,” said Braim. “You want the dead to
stay dead and for life to end. And, under ordinary circumstances,
that's usually how life and death work. Except for me.”

Except for you,
said the Void.

“Exactly,” said Braim. He gave her the
thumbs up. “Now you're getting it. Anyway, you are afraid that if I
came back from the dead, then
anyone
could, right?”

Of course not,
said the Void,
though she said it a little too quickly.
You are the exception,
not the rule. There is no other way for mortals to come back to
life except through what you did, and that was only under extremely
unusual circumstances. The chances of even one other person coming
back to life are so slim as to practically be zero.

Braim wagged a finger at her. “There's the
catch, though. You
don't
know that there aren't other ways
for people to come back. Until I woke up naked in that graveyard a
few months back, no one in the world, not even the gods, believed
it was possible for someone to come back to life. What if there are
other ways—methods yet to be discovered—that could allow
anyone
to come back to life?”

The Void shifted uncomfortably where she
stood, which was the first visible sign of discomfort that she had
shown so far.
Maybe there are other ways to come back from the
dead. But if I destroy Martir before that happens, then they will
never be able to come back from the dead no matter what.

“Can't be so sure about that,” said Braim.
“The other methods to return to life might exist in the Spirit
Lands, which I
know
you can't touch. And that's what scares
you about me: I am living proof that your consumption of the world
might not be enough. Life could come back, despite your best
efforts. It would mean you aren't as all-powerful as you think you
are. It would mean that you can be beaten, just like anyone
else.”

Shut up,
the Void said.
You
treat me like I am a person, like you, with fears and worries. I
fear nothing and worry about even less.

“You're definitely not human or a person,
but that doesn't mean you don't have any fears at all,” said Braim,
shaking his head. “You're just trying to hide your fears because
you know I'm right. You know that I'm onto something. You can
pretend all you want that I'm not, but the reason you've let me
live so long is because you aren't sure that you can kill me at
all.”

Braim said those last words with as much
finality and emphasis as he could. He looked at the Void as he said
that, looking her in the eyes, even as she tried to avoid looking
at him.

The Void did not answer right away. Her
hands balled into fists, she was making growling noises, but
otherwise seemed to have no words at all to answer his accusation.
In other words, she was totally speechless.

Then, much to his astonishment, the Void's
body collapsed. It fell face-first onto the stone floor of the
Stadium. Braim at first thought that this was some kind of trick on
the part of the Void, so he looked around wildly, expecting its
tendrils to shoot out of the shadows and kill him and Ragao where
they stood.

Yet that did not happen. In fact, the
darkness seemed to be leaving. Braim could see more things now,
such the rules written on the walls, the doors leading to the field
and to the box, and even the stone platform that Alira had stood on
a couple of days ago when she first assigned the godlings to their
respective brackets. The temperature rose as well, back to its
normal height, and the smell of death vanished from his nostrils as
well.

In seconds, there was no trace of the Void
anywhere in the lobby at all. Aside from Zaos's corpse, the only
two beings in the Stadium lobby were Braim and Ragao. This time,
however, Braim felt good about it.

***

R
aya awoke with a start and her
head started aching like she had been slammed in the face with a
mallet. She grabbed her head and moaned because of the pain, which
was almost overwhelming in its intensity. It was the worst pain
that she had ever felt in her whole life, which made her wish it
would just all go away.

Not only that, but her chest was tight and
her stomach rumbled. She wanted to throw up, but her stomach felt
as empty as a dry bucket. All Raya wanted to do was go back to
sleep, but now that she was awake, the pain prevented her from
returning to sleep again.

Is
this
what happens when you
open a portal into the ethereal for the first time?
Raya
thought.
God, this sucks. Who would
ever
want to open an
ethereal portal again after feeling this way?

But Raya managed to look up at her
surroundings, just to see where she was. The last thing she
remembered was falling unconscious earlier, but even a brief scan
of the room she was in told her that she was no longer in the
ethereal.

Instead, she was sitting upright on her
bed in her room in her apartment on World's End. Everything was
silent around her. She didn't even hear her neighbors in their
apartments next door making any noise. It was as though Amare, the
Goddess of Sound, had taken away all of the sound in the world.

Then Raya heard her heartbeat and realized
that it was just very quiet today for some reason. That left a
powerful relief in her heart, but it still left her with many
unanswered questions.

How did I get here? Where is everyone
else? What happened to the Void?
Raya thought, each question
speeding through her mind one after the other.
More importantly,
did I win the challenge? Or did I lose?

At that moment, the door to Raya's room
opened. Her heart practically leaped out of her chest when she saw
Carmaz enter. He looked tired, but was carrying a tray with some
kind of hot soup and bread on it. It was a simple meal that Raya
normally would have turned away due to its obvious plainness, but
because it was in Carmaz's hands, she was more than eager to try
it.

“Oh,” said Carmaz, stopping in the
doorway, his hand on the doorknob, while the other one carried the
tray rather expertly. “You're awake.”

Carmaz sounded neither happy nor angry
about that. He was just stating a fact. Nonetheless, Raya thought
that she sensed something in his voice that indicated he was
pleased to see that she was alive and in one piece.

“Of course I am,” said Raya, ignoring the
throbbing pain in her head. She knew that Carmaz didn't put up much
with weakness, so she tried to appear as strong as she could. “Why
wouldn't I be? We Carnagians are a hearty bunch.”