Hari didn’t ask for any more stories for the rest of the day. In fact, he barely spoke for the rest of the day except to tell Darkos not to speak.

“Hey so—”

“Don’t. Just. Don’t speak.”

It went something like that.

By the next day, Hari had allowed Darkos a few grumbles. By mid afternoon— or whatever the void equivalent of it was—Hari had stopped threatening Darkos when he spoke, but it would take another two full days before Hari actively addressed him. Darkos would have to remember this degree of sulkiness were he to press on that sore spot again. Ruffling Hari’s feathers—and there were now more than Darkos could count in his hat—was fun, but it wasn’t fully worth just how boring the Void Realm was in silence.

“Alright, Darkos, I’ve made up my mind.” Hari didn’t spare Darkos a look as he trundled behind, still occasionally tripping through the smoggy floor.

“Should I… is that, like, a threat?” Darkos bent his knees a bit, waiting for the potential attack as he combed over Hari, looking for a sign.

“No, Darkos, it’s not a threat. I can’t imagine Noirela being happy with me if I brought you back to it in three pieces.” Then Hari’s head tilted a bit, feathers wobbling contemplatively. “I take that back. It would still be happy that I’d even found you. But it prefers you alive and corruptible. So, no, that’s not what I meant.”

Darkos didn’t quite relax his stance but his shoulders did untense. “Okay so what’s the big decision? Figure out where we’re stopping for lunch?”

“How did you—” Hari stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Darkos.”

“Hari.”

“I want you to tell me why Geela hates Krakens.”

Hari was, apparently, back on the scent that Darkos had somehow been purified by Geela. Or anti-corrupted, since it was hard to imagine Geela purifying anything. But this was good cause it meant he’d more than less likely leave Darkos’s parents out of this.

That said, Darkos didn’t really know the answer to his question.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “That was before we met.”

“Mmm.” Hari twirled a curl of hair airly around his finger. “I’d say I don’t believe you but that would mean my verity chain isn’t working, and I’m not going to entertain that.” He paused, finger still looped around a lock of midnight black hair. “But you knew she didn’t like them before coming to our islands, yes?”

Darkos nodded.

The two walked along in silence for a few more moments before Hari looked over his shoulder. “Darkos?”

“Oh. Oh right.” He nodded again, this time with Hari facing him, so he could see.

Hari’s lip curled in irritation, an expression that only grew more pronounced as a cheeky grin spread on Darkos’s face.

“Alright alright then. Do you know for any interesting reason? I refuse to waste my turn on something as stupid as ‘she told me she was’.” Hari stared deep into Darkos’s eyes, and it took all of Darkos’s strength to resist saying ‘she told me she was.’ Technically, it was true, Geela had told him. But if he could get Hari to use up his turn on something useless like this, he got a free ask without risking Hari learning anything important.

“Did she ever tell you about when we encountered a Kraken?” Darkos asked. “I imagine you learned from a Barney letter that she didn’t like them but did she ever mention getting killed by one?”

Hari’s eyes sparkled at this. “Oh did she now?”

Darkos gave a heavy sigh. “It was probably the hardest part of our first journey together.”

~~~

Geela wrings her fingers, big green eyes darting around the moat as Darkos slowly prepares the boat. The moat is no small stream surrounding the castle. Rather it’s as if the entire mountain her castle sits on is emerging from a massive lake. At its narrowest, the moat is over a mile across and, according to Geela’s ‘general best guess,’ at least two miles deep. Darkos had initially laughed off her dramatic estimate, but now it weighs on his mind every time he looks over the side at the inky depths. It’s sunny out but that light vanishes after a dozen feet, and the idea that there could be miles of water down there makes his stomach churn.

The other thing that makes his stomach churn is watching Geela. She’s clearly trying very hard not to cry but it’s not really working and more and more tears sparkle in her eyes. She wipes them away furtively every time, but they’re back sooner and sooner each time.

“I’ve just never been in a boat,” she whispers, trying for a laugh, which catches in her throat. “Every time I’ve ever—well, that is, I usually go under. Water. Under the ground under the water. Whenever I encounter water. Which isn’t often. Nevermind.” She takes a shaky breath. “I’m such a baby.”

Darkos brushes this off. “I’ve never been in a boat either, don’t worry.”

This does the opposite of reassure her, however, as her expression freezes on her face. “You… haven’t?”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry!” He holds up a hand, but she looks even more worried. “I know how to row one! Promise. Nothing is going to hurt you.”

“But there are monsters in the water,” she says, voice a tiny whimper now. She’s taking steps backward on the dock, eyes growing wider with each step. “Huge monsters. Krakens. A terrible idea. I don’t know what she was thinking putting it in there. It’s a terrible idea.”

Darkos lets out a sigh and smiles. He puts the oar down and starts walking towards her. “Geela,” he says, “I know this is scary stuff. I get it. But I’ve fought monsters before. And you’ve mentioned the kraken. I’ve got an idea of how to fight it if we get there but I think as long as we use our heads, stay alert, and tread lightly, we should be okay.”

Geela swallows. She doesn’t look too convinced, and takes another step backward.

And that was a very bad step, because that step took her off the dock and into the water.

~~~

“I’d been kinda lying about knowing how to row a boat because why would I have known that?” Darkos shook his head, chuckling. “In hindsight it’s kinda funny but it wasn’t at the time.”

“It’s simply absurd,” Hari said, maybe more to himself, “hearing stories about her pretending to be so emotionally weak.”

Darkos’s smile slowly slipped off his face. Yes, it was funny to think about damsel Geela, but that actually really hadn’t been her acting. Geela on the dock of that boat, crying about krakens, well, that had been very similar to Geela on The Scilatia crying about krakens. But Darkos wasn’t going to dish that Geela was just as scared now by krakens as she’d ‘pretended’ to be back then. He would defend her honor as best he could.

“Then what?” Hari asked. “Did it get her?”

Darkos wrinkled his nose. Was gonna be hard to defend her honor while describing the horribly violent way she was killed by the monster.

“Ahhh… yeah it got her.” Darkos winced, remembering the ear splitting scream from Geela as a tentacle wrapped around her ankle and yoinked her in the moat before Darkos could even scramble after her. “It got her in a couple pieces, actually.”

To his anger, Hari’s eyes lit up at this. “Go on, go on. Tell me every single detail.”

Maybe Hari was just trying to find a weakness in details of her most gory death. Maybe it was because it was Geela, Hari’s sworn enemy. But if Darkos was being honest, it was because Hari loved death. He loved death and dismemberment and pain and agony. It was because Hari was a foul void spawn and was all things evil, all things Darkos would hate to be and all things Dakros was most afraid of becoming.

Hari was getting his revenge on Darkos now. With every disturbing detail Darkos had to actually, verbally say out loud, Hari was revelling in Darkos’s discomfort, the same way Darkos had revelled in making Hari uncomfortable about Terha’s secret keeping.

Geela didn’t really talk about that day much, for obvious reasons. She hated krakens and it had been particularly graphic. According to Geela, she wasn’t afraid of pain. After so many decades, she’d grown a bit desensitized to it. No, she didn’t enjoy it (she had given Darkos quite a nasty glare when he’d asked) but it didn’t cause trauma the way pain often did for ‘mere mortals.’ That said, they still didn’t talk about it. Darkos didn’t tell her about how he rowed like a madman just to keep the kraken in sight. He didn’t explain how he killed it. He didn’t give any detail over all the crying and praying he’d done while completing the most stressful jigsaw puzzle of his life.

They didn’t really talk much about how she’d come back to life, though that bit wasn’t as bad.

~~~

“Geela? Geela Geela Geela come on. Come on.” Darkos inhales another massive breath as he looks over his calamity-ridden companion. She’s all knit together in one piece now but isn’t breathing or any of the things she’s supposed to be doing. “Come on!” He puts his hands back on her and recites as fast as he can. “Bless my hands that they might bring back the health you so graciously bestow upon us, the mindless beasts of the realm. Bring back the spirit that has tragically departed this wretched mortal before their time. Bestow upon them life anew, so that they may spread your word on their tongue and in their actions.”

Finally another huge surge of power unleashes itself from him and he flops forward, face down, on top of Geela, completely winded and so dizzy he’s afraid he might faint. For a moment he’s so numb he doesn’t feel or notice anything. Then he notices he’s gently moving up and down with the rhythm of her sudden, panicky breathing.

“Geela!” he says, still lying limply across her.

“Darkos?” Her voice is light and weak and a little muffled. “Did we do it?”

He smiles, even though she can’t see. “Yeah. Yeah I killed it. We’re on the other side. We got through. I got you.”

“You saved me. How?”

His voice chokes immediately as he tries to explain. “You… you didn’t. You didn’t make it through, I had to bring you back, I had to…”

As he breaks off to cry a bit, Geela shifts underneath him. “Did you use the kiss of life?”

~~~

“She knew I hadn’t.” Darkos could never decide whether that was funny or whether it bothered him. “She knew I was a priest and was powerful enough to resurrect her, even though that was the first time. I guess she can read power levels.”

“Mmm.” Hari had grown a bit less interested since they’d moved from Geela’s grisly first death, but he was still paying attention. “Was she just trying to damsel it up?”

The annoyance won out this time. “Nooooo. I’d fallen on top of her… chest. My face was burning as I tried to say no, I hadn’t kissed her on the… well, you get it. And she pretended to be flushed too, but now I know she was just teasing my naivete.”

“Oh Darkos. You really fell for her tricks, didn’t you?”

“Hey, that’s not fair.” Even if he’d known Geela was as wicked and cynical as she was, it would still be total whiplash to go from piecing together her body on the sand to blushing over a sex joke. “You wouldn’t have expected it either,” he said, voice dropping to a grumble.

“I guess I wouldn’t. I would probably not use my powers to resurrect anyone though.” Hari paused, contemplating. “Okay, obviously one of my siblings. But I’ve never had a minion I’ve cared about enough for that.”

Darkos considered this. “So you can, right? Heal, resurrect, all that?”

Hari let out a disgusted sigh. “Yes yes. I mean, we can. We can do lots of things. That’s a bastardization of our powers, though. How did you even learn to use it that way? That’s so perverted.”

There was exactly zero point in contesting Hari’s use of the words ‘bastardization’ and ‘perverted’ here, so Darkos skipped over his skepticism with Hari’s word choice. “Because I wasn’t interested in killing people or leaching out their souls or anything gross like that? Honestly, I didn’t even know I could do that.”

“Darkos, please. I respect—or no, wrong word.” Hari waved a hand. “I despise, but understand, your fear of all things darkness and filth, but I don’t believe that you intuitively just learned how to use void magic for good.”

Darkos was about to remind Hari that it had been their eldest brother whose curriculum taught Darkos his priestly ways, but he hesitated. Hari didn’t seem to have put together that Darkos had been a priest of Alerion. Actually, given Hari’s general ignorance of his siblings’ plans, he might not know much of anything about ‘Alerion’ in general. Maybe Darkos could bait out another question of Hari’s just by getting him to ask more.

So instead of appropriately throwing Mal under the cart for Darkos’s education, he decided to give Hari the old ‘ah, ah, ah, that wasn’t part of your question.’ Something stopped him, though, just as he opened his mouth. Actually, a couple things stopped him.

The first was that Hari had stopped. That was, all told, a pretty small part of what cut Darkos off mid-thought. The second was that the tunnel opened up ahead of them. That was a much larger part of what caught Darkos off guard because they’d traveled over a week and had yet to find anything that wasn’t tunnels.

The final thing that really forced the jaw drop on Darkos’s face was the sheer amount of light that filled the massive cavern Hari had stopped in the mouth of.

“Oh don’t look so stupid,” Hari said, nose wrinkling disdainfully. “There wouldn’t be light if it weren’t for our apparitions, so don’t try to make any smart comments.”

“I wasn’t gonna, I just didn’t know that there was anything in the void realm beyond, just, void.” He craned a neck around Hari, trying to see further into the large, illuminated space. “I thought it was just tunnels.”

Hari looked at the tunnel behind them, giving it a single sweeping gaze. “You thought we were stopping for lunch in just more tunnel? Really, Darkos? What sort of pathetic meal are you accustomed to?”

Darkos was about to defend Geela’s cooking, especially given how she could make anything from a roast goose to a peanut butter cookie to a bowl of tomato soup with fried cheese sandwiches special, but he thought twice because there was something else here far more important to ask.

“We’re actually stopping for lunch?” A million miles away, his stomach growled, and Darkos wondered if he’d have wasted away to a husk. “Am I gonna starve back home? It’s been months or whatever, right?”

Hari just squinted at him. “You really have no idea how this works, do you? Our bodies are in stasis but not immortal to starvation. Very resistant though. Anyway, it’s not terribly important but I want the sustenance and figured, since we were in the neighborhood, it would be nice to stop by.” He took a few steps forward, before pausing again. “It makes a lot of sense, in hindsight, that you hadn’t actually guessed where we were stopping for lunch. For a moment there, I thought Geela might have actually told you something about this place.”

“Gotta say, voidic pitstops were pretty low on the list of everything she wanted to teach me.” Darkos did truly mean everything too. The only thing Geela didn’t seem interested in explaining to him was alchemy, which honestly, was to both of their detriment.

“Voidic pitstops. Is that what you think this is?” A new smile was on Hari’s face at this. Not one of derision, not mocking, not victorious. No, it was a smile of pride. “Well, I hate to disappoint you, but this is something far worse. Far more dangerous. It’s a place unlike any in the realm. A place of beauty so deadly, none could rival it on any realm, any plane, anywhere. It’s the only place in the void worth looking at, if I’m being honest. Oh, and speaking of which—” Hari snapped twice and the verity chain vanished. “We’ll finish the game after our meal. I don’t want to be coiled the whole time I’m in there.”

As Darkos’s eyes adjusted, he could start to make out specific details within the room. Large, glowing rectangles hovered near the floor, the walls, the ceiling, but between them flitted smaller, sparkling red and purple and blue things. There were towers, each dotted with lights, and the colored objects traveled to and from them. All of these things, from the small blobs to the towering structures to the massive squares of light were all far far too numerous for Darkos to count, and he was starting to get dizzy, following them all with his eyes.

“What… what is this place?” he said, his voice regrettably hushed and reverent.

“This…” Hari stretched out both hands wide before stepping backwards into the cavern, “is mine.”

---

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