Rythe Falls by Craig R. Saunders Page B

like...
                  It's not him , she thought, and in the same instant thrust her arms up to protect herself, maybe her remaining eye, like a person might. Their weakest place, natural to want to save it from further harm.
                  She couldn't see at all, now, in that second, other than to get a sense of something tearing inside her.
                  She'd gone high. He'd gone low.
                  Reih looked down and saw a long, curved blade inside her. The temple was going dark...or her sight was. As she slid back from the blade, the blade coming free, her blood hitting the golden stone, she saw the man's face.
                  Sventhan , he said, and she'd thought it true, for just a moment...but it was not.
                  The creature's face was long. The hair atop that narrow head was lank and the pale skin taut on sharp bones. And the thing's eyes were blood red.
     
    *
     
    'Everything is as it should be, is it not?' said the creature, drawing the curving blade from Reih's chest. Blood pumped from the wound no more. One instant she'd been a living being, capable of love and hate, good, evil, indifference, even. Now, she was no more than a shell, her life's blood spread out across the stone floor and the altar, too.
                  The red-eyed creature did not smile at her death, nor at the Seer, sitting within the heart of some force atop the stone altar.
                  Smiles were denied the thing. Not because of the blight - it had that affliction, without a doubt. But because the creature that stood, head cocked to one side, had little more than a ruin for a face. Scorched, bones broken, pustules in the deeper scar tissue that wept and would never heal. Humour denied it, perhaps, but it was no discontent.
                  A protocrat was, after all, bred to pain. The blight heightened this, to the degree that pain itself was just another facet of pleasure.
                  He peered at the Seer, sitting serenely enough at the very heart of Sybremreyen. The Seer's bright white eyes stared back at the protocrat, unflinching at the sight his awful face. Blind she might be, but she saw on different levels to the rest of humankind. She saw through all spectrums...not just those of mortals.
                  'Everything is as it should be, yes,' she agreed, speaking within the monstrous thing's mind. 'It was always to be this way. I was to come, to open the heart of Sybremreyen. The blood link for those of the Kuh'taenium spilled across this very altar. The red light, the Return...it was always to be this way. Ordained for millennia...But then you know this as well as I. You have become something akin to me...you are the Crossroads...the Crossroad of Knowledge...the universe knows you, sees you...and so do I.'
                  The Seer, who Tirielle had named Sia, and in doing so given a little girl hope, did not look afraid as the Protocrat with the hideous face placed his nub of a nose close to hers and stared into her depths, as though with such proximity he could steal her power.
                  'I die. I am not afraid. No longer.'
                  Sia even managed to smile, and the Protocrat stepped back, as though afraid that mirth and pleasure might be catching, too.
                  'You die, girl. You die. In screaming agony.'
                  'Quick, slow, matters not. All is as it should be, and soon, you too will simply...cease to be. Things happen and mortals cannot change them...though sometimes immortals set their own traps and pits, do they not?'
                  'Whatever. You are a power...of course...but you are still but a little thing. You will not be here to see my demise.'
                  'Fool,' said Sia with her last smile. 'I am the only thing, contained in this small body...I am