“What is that dark thing?” he asked, referring to the mound or pit (he still couldn’t decide which it was) that lay before them.
“You call them congruence points. There are none to this plane from your world, which is why I brought you here.”
“Which plane?”
“Your kind usually call it Hell, not that any humans have seen it to make such a judgment.”
“Wait, what?” Will’s words went unheard as the Cath Bawlg leapt forward and dove into the nebulous darkness. The world shifted, and Will gasped, shocked by a pitch-black sky that hovered above a brown landscape of stone pillars and shattered boulders. The air burned his lungs as he inhaled, and he began to choke. At the same time, Will noticed that the Cath Bawlg was also covered in silver flames, though he wasn’t producing them. The goddamn cat was protecting himself.
“Keep your energy focused on the demon-armor spell,” cautioned his mount. “The basic essence of this place will erode your flesh and melt your bones if you don’t vigorously resist it, and that includes the air.”
His turyn was rapidly diminishing as the flames that surrounded him flickered and began to thin out. He might have panicked if he had been in the same situation a few weeks ago, but times had changed for him. Will had survived a worse drain on his turyn at the dam, he’d endured the worst pain of his life at the hands of the king, and his sanity had been tested by the sight of both himself and his friends being taken for food by creatures too vile to exist.
Put simply, Will was done with panic—at least for the time being. Give me a few years of rest and relaxation and maybe this will bother me, he thought grimly as he expanded his outer shell and ramped up his turyn absorption. Between the demon-armor and the small additional drain of the climbing spell, he still only had to push himself to roughly half of what he considered his maximum absorption rate.
Better still, since he was absorbing and converting a portion of the void turyn before it reached the demon-armor, he actually lessened the amount of energy it took to maintain. The strain was more than bearable, and Will found himself enjoying the challenge. A rough smile appeared on his face. Every day I get thrown into the fire, and every time I emerge stronger, he thought. His control of turyn, both within and without, had grown to a degree that he could now feel the difference. Much of the growth had happened slowly, over the past year, but the tests of the present had brought the changes into the light where he could notice them.
“This is nothing!” he yelled into the air—air that could no longer hurt him. A slow rumble built between his legs before erupting into a complementary roar from the goddamn cat.
Unlike the Shadowlands, Hell was easier for his brain to make sense of. The realm had an understandable geometry that didn’t threaten to twist his mind into knots. It wasn’t pretty, but aside from the fact that every part of it was utterly inimical to life, it was knowable. There was a sky above, stony soil below, a host of rock formations, and occasionally strange black, red, or orange plants.
If one could get used to the bizarre color scheme, it might even be beautiful in places. “This isn’t quite as awful as I expected,” said Will aloud.
“The wilderness isn’t as bad as the populated regions,” replied the cat. “But all of it is hideous because of the basic nature of its existence.”
“Which is?”
“The realm is parasitic. It feeds and grows by stealing matter, turyn, and all other manner of resources from other planes.”
Will was shocked by the revelation. It simply didn’t fit within the model of reality that he had constructed over the past few years. “How can a plane steal from other planes?”
“Through the governance of the demon lords, but the truth is that they’re a product of the realm too. The Shadowlands weren’t always as you saw them today. My home was once beautiful. What remains is a hollowed-out husk, the unwanted remnants left behind by the predations of demon kind.”
Will fell silent, unsure what to say. The goddamn cat had made no secret of who his enemies were: the fae, the elves, and demons. Now Will could understand why he hated demons so much. He mulled it over for several minutes, then came to a new question. Were there similarities between the Cath Bawlg’s enemies?
“Is Faerie the same?”
“As what?”
“As Hell,” said Will. “Is it parasitic too?”
“An astute observation for one so young,” said the demigod. “Faerie is a disease, but unlike Hell, it doesn’t destroy and kill its hosts. It connects to multiple realms, growing slowly and poisoning everything it touches.”
“Is that why you hate the fae?”
“One reason, yes,” admitted the demigod.
“And the elves?”
“I hate the elves because they knew better.”
“Better than what?”
“Keep growing, wizardling. You’ve impressed me today. Eventually you’ll understand enough to ask the right question, as you just did regarding Faerie. If not, ask me again in a century.”
The refusal to answer was frustrating, but Will also felt a faint glow of pride. He’d never heard a compliment from the goddamn cat before. “Do you think I’ll really survive a century? I barely survived the last week.”
“That depends entirely on you.”
Will thought about that for a moment. “I think there’s a lot of dumb luck involved too. There have been plenty of times when things could have gone just a little worse and I wouldn’t have been able to survive no matter what I did.”
“Trust me, that will never happen.”
“How can I believe that?”
“Because I’ll make sure of it,” said the Cath Bawlg. “There will always be a way.”
The goddamn cat had spoken to him on so few occasions that Will didn’t know whether to believe the demigod or not. On the one hand he had never known the cat to lie to him, but on the other, the fae never lied either, and he knew how their advice worked. The best evidence he had to go on lay in what had occurred just the previous night. He’d been on the verge of giving up, until the goddamn cat had shown up.
Not that he fucking helped or anything, thought Will sourly. But he did make me mad enough to keep trying. He resolved to ask Arrogan’s advice on the matter later. After all, his mentor had a great deal more experience with the Cath Bawlg.
Something bright made the horizon glow ahead. “What’s that?” asked Will.
“Our exit back to the Shadowlands.”
“Why is it so bright like that?”
“It’s one of the tears that the demons use to drain the vitality from my home, much like the one we entered through.” Another growl issued from the demigod. “It appears someone has anticipated our destination.”