Shades in Shadow

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Nahadoth

wants.

Want is a thing. Nahadoth has never lost the habit of attempting to classify things, because things were once so difficult to understand. At the beginning. Time is a thing, too; Nahadoth knows this now, has accepted the conceptualization of
beginningness
and
endingness
and
whereness
and
whoness
because these are all things that make life more interesting, though it is also interesting to discard them.
Whatness
, however, is always hard. Nahadoth is everything, after all.

No. Nahadoth—he?
He
, per Itempas's decree, how predictable—
he
is not everything. There was a beforetime in which Nahadoth encompassed all that could be perceived, except that which was Maelstrom. But that time is long past, and he does not miss it, because now there is another he and for a time there was a her and after that,
many
. Among and apart from them all, he has become the whatness that is called Nahadoth.

He savors his name again for the several quintillionth time, marveling again at its whole round syllables, its perfect appropriateness. He has loved this name, this thing, since Itempas first bestowed it upon him. His name is a good thing, and he likes it.

Itempas was a good thing, too, once.

Nahadoth wants and does not know what or why.

The boy is not lost the first time he comes. Many mortals stumble upon Nahadoth's chamber and just as quickly flee. This one sought him out. That is a new thing, though not interesting in and of itself. Simply different.

Nahadoth's chamber is a room in a place. The body into which Itempas has chained Nahadoth resides here, anchoring him in the mortal realm, so it is fitting that the room is at the bottom of a building. And within the room is a chamber—a pit, really, into which the mortals have thrown him. How poetic. Perhaps it is better called a well. It has a wall. And he
wells
at the bottom of it, a living spring gushing forth everything that they hate—even though if he did not do so, they would cease to exist. By keeping him here, they hope to contain the curling, liquid eddies of substance that appear on those occasions when the world spins into shadow, and the body leaks some fraction of his darkness. (The body sleeps at the bottom of the dark well by day. He has no power over it, other than that, but he is too jealous of what he has to give even that up.) He stays where they have put him because he does not care. One place in the mortal realm is as bad as another. But he is also out, about, roaming, because that is what he is, and all wheres are everywhere to him. He is Nahadoth, and that is everywhere and everything, except wherever and whatever the Maelstrom is and wherever and whatever his siblings are.

Sibling
. Just one now. That is a thing, a familiar one, but not a good one.

He is contemplating this loss when the boy comes, and perhaps because of this Nahadoth does not notice at first. Another mortal, another day. This one says something, or maybe whispers, or maybe laughs. Nahadoth pays no attention until suddenly the boy thrusts his face into him.

A trivial distinction. The room is dim. The boy was already within him. But the boy breaches the surface of the well's blackness, and that is different.
Different
is interesting, so Nahadoth does not remove the boy's face. Yet.

“So it isn't true.” The boy, who has bent to plunge his head into what resembles a pool of relentless black, laughs a little. (This tickles.) “They said…Well, they say a lot of things about you.” He straightens, wiping his face without thinking, then looks surprised to find his hand dry. Then he chuckles again.

There is something in the boy's laugh that Nahadoth understands. That unsteadiness, with a core of emptiness. That little waver, as if the laugh teeters between humor and hysteria and utter falseness. There is a black hole in this one's soul.

“Haangratsajim,” the boy says, bowing with a flourish. “That's my name, if you're wondering. No one here can pronounce it—it's Ostei—so I'm just Haan now. It's on the papers they gave me. Haan Arameri, bought and paid for, all proper.”

Ostei no longer exists. The gods' warring destroyed it and its inhabitants, save for a handful of survivors. Nahadoth remembers seducing a princess there once, before Itempas's madness. That princess had been a wild creature, irresponsible and full of joy, who had drawn Nahadoth's attention by standing on a cliff and shouting at the moon. For no particular reason, she'd said, when Nahadoth manifested and drew her close and kissed more shouts out of her. Because life. Ostei had been full of wild ones like her.

This one is different, Nahadoth senses—a cold wildness, rather than hot.

“Bought and paid for,” the boy whispers, and then his face changes. He turns as this happens, so that his back is to the well and his face is out of sight. Or he would be, if the room's shadows were not also Nahadoth, and if Nahadoth actually needed eyes to see. So Nahadoth sees the sudden bloom of teeth in the shadows and understands that the boy is smiling a hunter's smile.

“I am a thing,” the boy says softly. “That's what they've decided I am, and so that is what I will be. A thing need not bother with human niceties, yes? So now they will see.”

This is more interesting than Nahadoth had assumed. He settles in to watch, glad of a respite from the boredom.

The boy goes away eventually. Nahadoth chooses not to think for a time.

But he roams, because he cannot help himself. Everywhere there is darkness, Nahadoth exists. (In the language that Itempas has created,
Nahadoth
is the word for things that cannot be perceived, cannot be comprehended, can only be unleashed.) He does not pay attention to most of what he detects via the dark that is his ears and skin and teeth and guts. Most of it is routine, and supremely boring. Stars—sparkle flare sparkle. Planets—spin shatter spin. Life—chatter chitter chatter. The unutterable tedium of a breathing, beating universe.

(But it is more interesting than the universe before Itempas, so he does not complain.)

Nahadoth supposes he should pay attention to the locality that encompasses his flesh more often, since most of him will be confined here for the foreseeable future. He is aware of this whereness, peripherally, because the body occasionally demands his attention. It hungers; it itches; someone has poked it. It sleeps and tries to dream, though his presence within it sucks the dreams away into a dark place. Remarkably irritating, these interruptions, as much by their constancy as their banality. Perhaps Itempas means to annoy him into submission.

Anger. That is a thing, too.

He reverberates with anger, then snarls and makes himself stop when he inadvertently harmonizes with the vibration of the universe. The universe is an angry place these days, but he does not want harmony of any kind. Itempas can force him into a kind of union, into the shape of this flesh, but Nahadoth will not join with Itempas again
willingly
, which is what Itempas wants. (
Nahadoth
also means “that which cannot be controlled.”)

Yet as the resonance of anger fades, he becomes aware of an echo nearby, so close that he almost failed to notice it. For a moment, it felt like part of himself. Pounding anger, hand-shaking anger, anger that fires the blood and embitters the mouth and screams and screams and screams…

Someone commands him to stop screaming, and the chains drag him into silence.

The boy again.

“I did it,” he murmurs in the darkness of the well chamber. His voice is deeper now; time has passed and he is older. “It's done.”

Nahadoth has no idea what he means and does not care, though the boy's satisfaction is like a small star radiant within the darkened chamber. A lovely addition to this private universe. Then the boy says:

“How do you stand it? Knowing that no one wants you?”

The words cause Nahadoth unexpected pain. Also, he's not sure how to answer because he
can't
stand it.

The boy—Haan, a name too small to encompass the whole of him—shakes his head, long sleek hair shimmering like a curtain. The tips of that hair brush the surface of Nahadoth's substance, gold vanishing into blackness. “My father sent me here, you know. Because he was afraid of me. I never did anything to earn that fear, not there. Propriety, and all. Never shit where you sleep. But I think he knew what I was capable of, and I think that's why he sold me to our illustrious cousins when they came around and ‘suggested' that all Arameri should live here.
He
would not give up his life to come, but he offered his only begotten son.”

Haan puts a hand to his face beneath the curtain of gold hair and utters another of those soft, wavering, empty laughs. “Such a sacrifice! How noble it made him seem, and how it raised him in the esteem of the Central Family. He's a wealthy man now. All his prestige has been bought and paid for with the flesh of his heir.”

Not all parents love their children,
Nahadoth thinks.
And this child, plainly, loves no one.

“Now I am heir to nothing. A menial servant. I am assigned to Lady Sessara's chambers. I clean up her messes and I pour her drinks and I fetch her documents when she has visitors. And when the visitors are done, she tells me to go make sure the bed is warm.” Another laugh. “That's fun, at least. She makes the sweetest little sounds. Then when she's done, her husband comes. I like his sounds, too. But both of them command
me
to be silent. I may give pleasure, but I am permitted none of my own.”

Nahadoth is beginning to lose interest. He was the one who gave suffering to mortalkind, after all, and this boy is just another suffering creature. The mortals amaze him sometimes with the creativity of their cruelty. Yet…it
is
interesting, how little the suffering seems to affect Haan. This boy does not feel pain, or humiliation, or regret—just anger. And glee? Something like.

Still boring. Nahadoth drifts awhile, spinning within a magma bubble somewhere far below while the boy keeps talking. Something about Lady Sessara's new heir, who of course looks like the boy, because the boy is pretty and breeding is important. That is probably why they brought him here. It's only been a hundred years since Tempa gave the power of gods to mortals for safekeeping, and Shahar's descendants number only in the dozens. Not safe, should there ever be a need for them to wield the Stone of Earth; they'd burn through all the unimportant family members in moments and be forced too quickly to kill people who matter. There is no reason for them to need Enefa's power, no possible reason, but they
have
it and the possibility intrigues them. They want to be ready—just in case. Eventually they'll find excuses to attempt it, and they'll need experimental fodder when the time comes.

“But this thing that I am, it is not harmless,” the boy says, whispering now. The whites of his eyes almost have a glow in the dimness. “That's all I am to them, a thing. And when they do not need me, I am free to wander as I please. I wandered into the library one day and researched the herbs I needed. So easy, while they were each using me, to push a little needle in here and there. So sad, when they were later found on top of each other, both dead, that they expired in such a humiliating way.”

Oh. This is interesting suddenly. Do the Arameri have any idea what sort of wolf they've let into their fold? Probably not.

The boy has fallen silent now. Nahadoth waits, hoping he will say something else interesting. But then the boy says, soft and a bit desperate, “Will you ever speak to me?”

“What shall I say?” Nahadoth replies.

The boy gasps and stumbles back, his expression sick with horror. Because no one—not even the boy—ever expects a
thing
to talk back.

He flees, and Nahadoth drifts again.

Eventually something pulls him back to this where and when. The boy, the boy, always the boy. How irritating. Why does he interest Nahadoth at all? He's just another mortal, only marginally more vicious than the rest. His murderousness isn't even novel, because all mortals kill in one way or another. It is their nature, as Enefa bade them.

The boy stands on the parapet of a tower, which is the last remaining mortal-built structure in the body of the whereness called
palace
. He is holding by the wrist another mortal, who cries and pisses and kicks feebly, above a drop of several hundred feet. The imperiled mortal is as pretty as Haan is, younger and also a servant to judge by his plain garb, and with only that glance it is easy for Nahadoth to intuit what's happening. Haan is older now, not a boy at all anymore, and the power he once held by being beautiful and desirable is fading. He must compete harder for the favor of his masters, and he has taken that competition very seriously. More seriously than his younger rival, in any case. So easy to weave the illusion of suicide. And because the person who has died is only a servant, it's unlikely anyone will look closer to find the truth.