All That Is Evil Is Not Dark/Chapter 5

Myr felt incredibly cold. The world was darkness, but far from the comfort the communicant normally took in darkness, this was something else. This was a negation. Myr pondered this for a moment. Some defined darkness as an absence of light. Others defined Darkness as a substance to itself. Myr recognized that at times both definitions fit. Certainly, shadows formed whenever light was blocked, but anyone who spent time among the shadow stuff knew that it had a substance separate from anything that was light. Yet somehow, this darkness remained different from that, as if it had an existence altogether different, but lacking the capacity to perceive it or at least to understand it, his mind provided an illusion based on something familiar. Fortunately, it chose something that, while disconcerting to many, was comforting to Myr, as a communicant of the Shadow Lord. This allowed Myr to analyze that something, at least until he came to the realization that it was truly alien. The closest comparison that he could draw was that of undeath. There was life and death and then there was undeath: these creatures were neither alive nor were they dead; they existed in some other state that fell between and was somehow a negation of both life and death. This felt similar: the thing he perceived was unlight, neither darkness nor light but some violation of them both.

Not only was this thing alien, but it was also somehow violating, as if its very essence was invading his body, his mind, and even his soul; as if this thing could read him not only mentally as his god and the other communicants could, but at some very basic level of substance: read him, take him apart mentally, and put him back together in some other combination as befit him. It was in these musings that Myr became convinced that either the unlight itself or something within the unlight possessed sentience. There was, in fact, a mind here, a mind that fell outside the realm of Myr's comprehension! Myr felt a great chill, for the only minds he had ever felt of this nature belonged to the powers. Yet Myr could not place this mind in any frame of context whatsoever.

It was then that the searing pain began and he heard the distinct sound of twinkling laughter. It was then that he felt his body being torn apart and reassembled repeatedly just as he had imagined it. It was then that he felt his soul violated and corrupted and his mind pillaged and plundered. He felt his mind and soul violated and reorganized just as his body was at whim. A dark sense of great dread overwhelmed him for a moment and then to his conscious horror but subconscious delight the feeling was CHANGED from without from dread into pleasure. His actual thoughts were mutated. This thing surveyed his fears and changed them into his joys. Surveyed his joys and changed them into hates. Surveyed his loyalty and turned it into treachery. With a sinking sense of dread, he found himself thinking how wonderful it would be to kill Xander and the rest of the city and eat their corpses while resurrecting their souls as undead. He felt this sickening twisting. Then at once the feelings subsided and he returned to himself, but he was given a certain knowledge that if the effects were allowed to remain he would change. His conscious mind would struggle with his subconscious drives for a while, but in the end those animal drives would take victory and Myr would become what he imagined. This knowledge and sensation filled Myr with a sense of such personal violation that he just walled up within himself.

‘I have free will,’ his mind insisted furiously. ‘I cannot be made into something I do not desire...’

To Myr's utter horror the laughter returned, a sound at once deep bellowing laughter and high musical chortling. It was a laughter that was as much a contradiction as the unlight.

‘Indeed,’ a voice returned, ‘you cannot be made into anything you do not desire or have the capacity for. It cannot be done. Yet what already resides within, that can be magnified and expressed. Your own tendencies toward frustration and competition with your friend Xander? Your own sense of power at gaining while others lose. You once were and ever are a cheating, lying thief. Deep down, you know that you are EVIL, that you have no goodness or purity. That you have no love. That all of these things are layers and layers of illusion. I cannot make you do anything. I can only bring to Light that which you already harbor inside, that which you already nurture and wonder about.’

The voice faded as it spoke and at the end, its proclamation of Myr's ultimately base nature had become a deep whisper. The voice was alien, something completely foreign to his experience, yet to Myr's mind it could only be a god. What other then a power could have such strength and will? Myr could not place it; try as he might, he could not convince himself that it was any power he encountered in his service to the temple. For all its malevolence toward Myr, personally, he would suspect it for being the Lord of Light, but it mocked the light and chided Myr for it. None of the other elements fit within this thing's nature. It was not water, nor fire; it was neither wind nor energy. Indeed, as Myr considered the thing, he found that in this creature there was some negation of all of these, a sense of non-energy: a sense of empty coldness that defied fire, and hollow flame that mocked ice. This thing had and used all of them but twisted them all into its own image, its own reflection. However, what or who could it be?

Myr could not reflect for he was jarred by the withdrawal of the unlight and an awareness of the world around him. He felt the cave floor beneath his body a moment before waking from his unconsciousness and looking about. He glanced around himself and considered the scene around him, and it was then that he began to feel true and complete terror...