The Lightless Dark

The Yesael Route

Tito burst from the surface of the sea like a merman and caught hold of an Ancestral Fish.

The journey had gone smoothly so far. He was long past the coastal waters the trilobite men held, and well into the middle stretch of the Yesael Route.

These waters lay within the Demon Abyss Kingdom already, a realm belonging to the monsters that crawled up out of the trenches of the deep sea.

He had run into no small share of trouble along the way. At the border of the Demon Abyss Kingdom he had even crossed paths with a patrol of prawn knights. Every time, careful preparation and quick wits had carried him past the danger.

Tito was a man who planned well, and on this journey that had counted for a great deal.

"An island?"

Still gripping the fish, Tito caught sight of an island rising in the distance.

He took out his stone map and checked against it until he had found the island's position. It was the site of a trilobite town abandoned long ago, an island where the trilobite men had gathered many years past.

His interest woke at once. To a poet at work on an epic, the sight of such ancient ruins was what a feast is to a starving man.

He swam closer to the island, and it was then that he noticed something was wrong.

Rows of stone stakes covered the island, and something had been tied to every one of them, though he could not yet tell what.

He swam nearer for a better look, and could not help drawing a sharp breath.

Bound to the stone stakes, one after another, were corpses, and a single glance was enough to tell they were trilobite men.

"Not good."

He turned to go, but the water behind him had already begun to ripple.

The poet gave up any thought of turning back at once, and drove straight up onto the shore instead.

He knew exactly what was coming.

He drew his sword and set himself on the island, ready.

Going back into the water now meant certain death. On land, at least, he might stand some chance.

His courage and his cunning were both considerable, but a fighter he was not. And what faced him now were the blood-hungry people of the Demon Abyss Kingdom, killers seasoned by years of slaughter.

One after another the People of the Abyss broke the surface, their long, powerful tails sweeping behind them, spray flying as they cut through the waves like little boats racing along the island's edge.

They ran along the shoreline, but they did not charge straight at the poet.

Once a few of them had pulled the poet's attention their way, a few more on the other side cast out a net together, and it dropped over Tito and left him with strength he could not use.

"It's over."

Tito had heard countless stories of these monsters' cruelty, and those were the words that rose in his mind at once.

Soldiers of the Demon Abyss Kingdom went through his pack. They ringed Tito without a word, and yet their long antennae kept striking against one another, and Tito understood they were speaking to each other in their own peculiar way.

Tito thought they might be discussing how to kill him.

Perhaps they were even discussing how best to eat him.

"What's a person of Yinsai doing all the way out here?"

"Lost his way, probably."

"That sword was forged from a Ruhe Beast. He's nobody ordinary."

These People of the Abyss did not kill Tito. They took him back with them instead.

They took him down into the deep sea, and there, in the middle of a cluster of reefs, ancient cups, and ferns, he caught sight of an undersea city that looked more like a nest than a city.

And he saw, too, the master of that undersea city.

The sunlight that reached this place had bent and refracted its way down through the water above. Inside a structure built of massive stones, a monster lay upon a stone throne and watched him with curious eyes.

It struck Tito that these monsters were not quite what he had imagined.

Strangely, the look in those eyes was not so different from a trilobite man's own.

Perhaps they had already stopped being monsters the moment they regained their wisdom.

Then what were they, exactly?

Could they, like his own people, be something closer to human?

"I am the lord of the Sal Domain of the Demon Abyss Kingdom. You who dared trespass upon my territory, person of Yinsai, declare who you are and what you have come for."

The voice passed straight through his ears and rang out inside his own mind instead.

Tito understood at once that this was a Person of the Abyss who possessed wisdom ability. Generations had passed since King Eli's Bestowing of Power first granted that bloodline to the kings of the sinful people, and among their descendants more than a few had since awakened the power of ability on their own.

Tito said nothing, and yet the other could read his thoughts straight out of his mind all the same.

"Your name is Tito!"

"A poet? And carrying the royal bloodline of the people of Yinsai, no less!"

The monsters' lord picked up Tito's pack and turned his gaze on the bone tablets inside, and never noticed the faint flicker of light from the weathered cup pressed beneath them all.

"Did you write this?"

Panic seized Tito at once. He was afraid the other meant to take the Divine Cup.

He struggled forward, bubbles spilling from his mouth.

Through the water his voice came faintly. "Give it back to me!"

The instant the words left him, Tito froze. He had just made a fatal mistake, and he knew it.

He thought of wisdom ability. The other had only to read the thought rising in his mind to learn that the Divine Cup existed at all.

At once he tried to force down every thought of the Divine Cup, to empty his mind of anything at all, late as it already was.

Strangely, though, the other made no move at all.

His whole attention stayed on the verses Tito had written instead.

Somehow the other had caught not the faintest trace of the Divine Cup in his mind, as though some unseen power hid its very existence from anyone who might try to know of it.

Tito tried speaking to him in his mind, steering his attention back toward the poem he had written.

"I am a poet. I mean to search for the God-Given Land of legend."

"I am planning to write a great myth, a myth of King Redlichia."

"It is not only a myth about the people of Yinsai. Your own ancestors and your own origin have a place in it too."

The lord of the People of the Abyss studied Tito, as though weighing whether he was joking.

"No one has ever seen the God-Given Land. It is nothing but a myth."

The lord liked the poems Tito had written, and he admired the man's gift with words.

At the same time he wanted Tito, who carried royal blood, to join them instead of chasing after the God-Given Land.

"Stay!"

"I can let you live. I can even make you a subject of the Demon Abyss Kingdom."

"From this day on you may compose our chapters here, and set our words down in writing."

For nearly a month Tito lived in the Sal Domain of the Demon Abyss Kingdom, carving murals for the lord in the palace day after day.

Sometimes he wrote verses in praise of the Demon Abyss Kingdom as well, and set them down on pillars and buildings.

The lord was busy every day, and did not stand over him watching what he meant to write.

One day the chance came at last, and Tito fled with his pack.

But he had not gotten far before a troop of the Sal Domain's monster soldiers set out after him.

Out in the open sea the blood-hungry monsters caught his scent, and it was not long before they found him.

Tito was dragged back.

This time he had truly angered the lord.

"Are you so desperate to escape me?"

"Was I too merciful with you? Or do you people of Yinsai simply not understand what gratitude is?"

Tito said nothing, but the lord could hear his thoughts regardless.

"This place is not mine. I have a calling of my own."

The lord's arm, sharp as a spear, lashed out in one smooth motion, and the water stirred, and Tito's blood along with it.

"Ah!"

Tito wanted to cry out in pain, but the moment his mouth opened underwater the sea came flooding in without end.

He dropped to his knees in agony, both hands clamped over his own eyes.

His world fell into total darkness. Seawater burned in the wound, and he thrashed in agony, and still not a single sound could tear its way out of him.

The lord leaned close to his ear, and his voice rang out directly inside Tito's mind.

"Have you ever seen the Bottomless Abyss?"

"Do you not love writing poetry? Yet the poems you write about us have no soul in them at all. They fall so far short of your Yinsai Epic."

"How could you ever write a perfect verse about us, when you have never once felt our fear, our pain?"

"Tito, come and feel our pain and our fear for yourself."

"That is what the dark is like there. Dark enough that not one thread of light remains."

The lord spread his arms wide. "Welcome..."

"...to the God-forsaken world."

The lord did not look at Tito again. He turned to his soldiers and gave the order. "Throw him onto the Island of the Dead."