The Endless Solvent

He looked so different from what Nilda remembered she almost didn’t recognize him. Vartu looked to have degraded even further from the last time they met at the entrance of this office. He was now rail thin, his hair greasy and clumped together, his cheeks hollow and deep dark bags formed under his haunted eyes. His tunic was filthy and stained with blood and the sword he usually wore proudly at his hip was no longer there. Everything about this version of Vartu was wrong.

“What are you doing here?” Nilda asked. His eyes looked at her at the sound of her voice. “Vartu?”

The duel master hunched slightly as if something pained him. His eyes were glassy and wild and did not meet her gaze, as if he couldn’t really see her.

“It closed,” he said in a pained voice. “The Gate closed even though I did everything right. I wanted to make it right, you see.”

“What did you do, Vartu?” Nilda’s voice rose, dread gripped painfully at her heart. He couldn’t have… She looked wildly around the room. It looked nothing like the Gate in the pictures. “You… Did you open a Gate?”

He blinked at her and seemed to gain a bit of lucidity, but his expression grew confused. Vartu looked at her, then at Rask beside her. “Why are you… Why are you still like this?” he asked.

He then frowned and started towards her. Nilda noticed the runes drawn in blood glowed as he stepped on them. She clenched her hands and drew a long spike of stone pointed straight at Vartu’s heart and he stopped in his tracks to blink down at it.

“Did you open a Gate?” Nilda asked. The spike grew slowly to prod against his skin as a painful warning. Her hands were tense and shook as she waited for his answer. “Did you kill our lord?”

He took a long time to do so. He stared at the rock, then as if finally processing her question, he looked at Lord Leton’s bloody corpse.

“Answer me.”

Something flickered past Vartu’s glassy eyes, something akin to fear mixed with frustration. “I’m sorry, kid,” he finally said.

“That’s not a fucking answer!”

Vartu shuddered at her voice and seemed to double over in pain. “I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“You should go before…” Vartu groaned with pain and staggered towards Lord Leton’s body. “You should go…”

“Careful,” Rask’s harsh voice spoke up at her left. “He’s up to something.”

Vartu grabbed a polearm from Lord Leton’s body, then returned to his previous spot. Nilda thought he would attack them with it and so surrounded him with stone, ready to trap him if he tried anything. Except the duelmaster never tried anything; he carefully arranged the polearm to a specific position. Then strange white runes lit up Vartu’s skin.

“No,” Nilda said. “You’re not going anywhere, you’re not doing anything. You’re going to answer to Taurin and me for what you did.”

“Nilda - ” Rask’s voice rose warningly. The light grew in intensity on Vartu’s body, the small opening she kept for his face growing brighter and brighter.

“Lord Leton gave us so much. What did he do to deserve this?” Nilda demanded. Her breath hitched in her throat. “I thought… I thought you were better than this...”

Whatever was happening to Vartu seemed to stall, the glowing dimming slightly. He looked at her from his stony confines. His expression changed as if he recognized her, which was strange because they had been conversing. “Are any of Gaia’s children better than this?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly clear and calm - Nilda thought it sounded strangely different from his regular voice despite the words coming from his throat.

Narrowing her eyes, Nilda clenched a fist to apply pressure around Vartu’s body with the stone. Enough with the cryptic questions, the cryptic answers. She wanted to squeeze the truth out of him.

She realized too late that along with the polearm, the spike that she formed and the rock confining him, she inadvertently created an assembly that looked like a Gate, albeit a very roughly shaped one. She didn’t have time to wonder if the haphazard shape would suffice for the spell as the lucidity disappeared from Vartu’s eyes and the glowing continued. Within his stone confines he head rolled back and his body started twitching as if in the midst of death throes. He opened his mouth and it horrifyingly split open wider than it was supposed to. Wider and wider, until Nilda could hear the crunch of his jaw breaking and the rip of the flesh at the edge of his mouth tearing.

Then a sound came out. It was much too high pitched and came in four, five different tones so realistically she knew Vartu could never have produced those noises. But it came from his throat nevertheless. From Vartu’s overstretched mouth, an unnatural song came forth and the solvent swirled along with the sound. With every multiple tone note that cried out in dissonance an added feeling of fear chilled her Solute.

She looked down to see the blood runes on the floor glowing, first a pale pink then with a white light like Vartu’s body. On the ceiling directly above Vartu, a strange glowing circle of red formed. It was small, just the size of her fist but she could see it grow in size.

“It’s a Gate,” she screamed over the noise. “He’s opening another one!”

She had to stop him. She had to before a portal fully opened and demons spilled out to devour them. The most complete way of stopping someone is killing them, kid, she could practically hear the old Vartu say to her.

Don’t think. Don’t feel.

She couldn’t do it. Everything was wrong. Everything’s falling apart. Vartu grew brighter and brighter in his stone confines and his face was a beacon of light out of the face-sized hole. She had to do it or both she and Rask would die. She had to do it.

Don’t think don’t feel don’t think don’t feel don’t -

Rask ran past her and rammed his blade tipped staff right into the blinding light where Vartu’s face was. The light quickly died; Nilda could see it was rammed into the roof of Vartu’s mouth and through his skull, his self-detached jaw hanging loose underneath. He had stopped glowing, stopped moving, stopped singing - Vartu was dead.

This song also dwindled to silence. There was nothing left but the scent of blood. Lord Leton was dead, Vartu was dead. It was all wrong.

They turned to leave. Nilda struggled to move properly as all her limbs felt numb and cold. Her eyes passed by the strewn furniture at the corner of the room as they passed by and spotted a pile of jumbled books. One of them was tossed down the side of the pile and ended up opened to a page with a map on it.

Nilda couldn’t even process what map it was. She didn’t care. She grabbed the book and ripped the page out and shredded the page. Then she took the rest of the book and ripped those pages out too. Faster and faster, with anger and heat growing at her hands until she ran out of pages. She threw the leather cover away, then rammed a rock covered fist into the wall. The outer wooden panels splintered to show the stone brick under it. She didn’t soften the stone and continued punching it until the layer protecting her fist crumbled to dust, leaving her knuckles bloodied.

Punch, punch, punch. Her ragged, rough gasps of breaths ripped through her lungs. Pain was something she knew. Pain was something she understood. It burned at her fist and down to her heart.

She felt Rask’s hand on her shoulder to hold her back yet again. He said words that she did not hear. Without looking at him, she flung his hand away and left.