Leviathan
The veil between life and death shattered. Davlin’s astral form had a mere fraction of a second to brace itself before it fell into the lightless depths of the everafter.
There was no splash to mark his arrival, just that same shock of cold he’d felt all those years ago. He tried to push the memory aside but fragments still drifted past: The shattering of the ice, his hair drifting lazily around him, the crack of a rib as his mother desperately tried to restart his heart.
His heart restarting.
He opened his eyes. His hair bobbed around him again, silver now, but as buoyant as it was in the memory. He’d never spoken with another necromancer long enough to learn whether death itself always had an aquatic theme, or merely his death. He could make out the glimmering forms of fresh souls in the shallows around him. Experience told him that those souls were useless as minions. Most were too fresh to realize they were dead, least of all forget who they were.
He’d have to dive deeper for that.
He pivoted in the space, bracing his legs against an intact part of the barrier and kicking off into the void beneath. His speed didn’t dissipate the way it would in water. If anything, it always seemed to gradually accelerate, like there was something at the bottom pulling every soul towards it. He didn’t want to consider what that thing could be.
He remained in his pose, weightless, the only reference for his speed being the occasional blur as he whipped past a fragment of soul. Any one of those pieces would’ve made a good enough catch for a simple husk of rotting meat and bone, but the vessel he’d prepared above required more than figments of thought and feeling.
It required a Leviathan.
He wasn’t sure how many people, ever, had known that such things existed. The fragmentary references to it that he’d found were literally antediluvian. Part of him wondered if the deluge had been called down to suppress the knowledge of them specifically, or if it was just one of the many sins that needed to be buried under mountains of water.
He saw it. Not the thing directly, that was still miles beneath the surface, but the whirling accretion disc of souls it was in the process of devouring. He forced mana into his palms, expelling it in shaped spikes of heatless force, and was surprised to find how much effort it took to begin slowing his descent. The pull that he’d felt towards the bottom was changing, and he realized that this may be the source of the afterlife’s gravity.
The cloud rushed up to meet him, and he was surprised at the vastness of it. Even the ancient tomes hadn’t described the monster's feeding zones as this vast, but he supposed a lot of death had happened since the age of the First Men. He barely had a moment to prepare himself before he ripped into the sea-glass tinted cloud, explosions of false memory jolting through him with every touch. The outer ring was a kaleidoscope too chaotic to even interpret, a cascade of sunsets, deathbeds, and quiet moments in ancient fields, but as he neared the center, the memories all became common: Water filling lungs, a starless, cloudless sky that rained without end, cities filling like basins, men climbing mountains only for the floodwaters to crest the peaks. Death, again and again, and again, by water. For so much of the disc to still be souls from that era, the amount of death that the flood had brought must have been incomparable. Almost as many people must have died in that one cataclysm as had lived in all the years after. The memories filled his mind like water had filled his lungs, pushed him out to the point that he wasn’t sure if he could be after this. How would he tell which of the people in his mind was him?
The cacophony broke, and his mind, now freed of the endless stream, returned to its default shape. He was Davlin, the drowned boy. He was Davlin, the curious man. He was Davlin, the greatest necromancer since the dawn of the Sarkics. He was Davlin, and he was now the first person in twenty-thousand years to look a Leviathan in the eye.
He was surprised to see that it could stare back.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected at the center of such a maelstrom. A gaping maw perhaps, some thoughtless hunger, but if the outside of the shell was a galaxy of whirling souls, the inside was a starlit sky of eyes. Bands of silver metal ranging from thicker than his torso to thinner than a hair swiveled endlessly, each studded with countless legions of unblinking perfect orbs. The cloud seemed to be weaving itself into this alien metal, melding without being consumed. What he’d mistaken for hunger from the thing was really a sort of perfect concentration, like it was building a house from splinters. Building a God from the ashes of a million forgotten souls.
The countless eyes all swiveled to look at him, as if more perturbed by the last thought than by his physical presence. He braced impotently for the pressure of its attention, knowing his best efforts would amount to nothing.
Not a God.
Three words that could crush a mountain. The cloud was nothing compared to this. Chaos was tolerable, something you could dissolve into, lose to. The mind here refused to accept him into itself, even as it crushed him from all sides. There was nothing he could do but feel the pressure of a psyche that covered his own like ten fathoms of water. Death would have been a release compared to this weight.
His memories reacted with the ones of the thing. However impermeable the boundary between him and it remained, there were no secrets to be hid from such a potent vice. He wouldn’t have known half of these memories himself, without the pain to remind him of their existence. Pain always had such a fascinating ability to dispel ignorance.
He reached for the Leviathan, anything to escape the agony of the deep. His pain was echoing into it, like a mirror reflecting a mirror, and he struggled to find more than dim reflections of his own suffering.
It took him too long to realize that not all of the pangs were just echoes. The surprise of it would’ve taken his breath away, if it hadn’t already been forced out of him. It knew what it was like to be crushed like this. To have oceans laid atop it. It knew it atomically, with the memories of the countless drowned it contained, but there was a holistic knowledge to it as well. This ocean of souls hadn’t always hung over it. They were its own flood, a tidal wave of death that had followed the tidal waves of water.
When the ancient Gods had imprisoned the souls of the damned here, they had imprisoned this thing with damned souls. Each one another pebble on a mountain it could never dig itself out from under. A relentless diet of pain and anguish and water that rose on and on, without meaning, without end. What exit could there be from death?
Davlin knew the answer to that.
He sank his fingers into the fabric of the world and ripped. Hairline cracks pulsed through the void around him, before the pressure of dead souls was too much for even the laws of nature to hold back. The little hole he was used to punching grew into something greater, like a hole in a dam, and neither he nor the Leviathan could resist the current that pulled them out.
---
Davlin awoke to a ruined body. He was prepared for that. Death corroded life, and being submerged in it that long-
He was lucky there was anything left to him at all.
He rolled over to look at the masterpiece he’d made. Fangs and claws and scales. His fleshweaving was enough to make the thing look seamless, but after his journey to the depths it looked awfully trite. There was nothing to it. Wherever the Leviathan had gone, it wasn’t there. Probably too much soul to fit. He’d have needed another twenty years to make a body that could fit something like that.
He took a ragged breath, tasted blood on the exhale. He’d picked a pretty enough spot to die, at least. The mount of sacrifice had a beautiful view of the emerald sea.
He felt a drop of rain strike his cheek and looked up at a starless, cloudless sky.
