“In my last moments, I cast him away, but he will return. Then you will join me in death.”
“Then help me work against him.” This echo would have no control over the labyrinth, but he could still guide Lindon.
“What do you hunger for, young Sage?” Subject One asked, and there was a kind of dark humor in the question. He pointed to Lindon’s arm. “You put my power in your body, so your desire must be great indeed.”
“I am honored that one of your stature would ask about my needs. But I want to grant the wish we share. How do I defeat Reigan Shen?”
Subject One slowly strolled around his own throne. “Yesterday, I tried mindlessly to devour you. But I find that after death, I have control of myself again. At last.”
“Apologies, but I feel that every second is vital.”
“My nightmare is that I have been trapped here only hours, and that it simply feels like an eternity.”
“I hope it is a comfort to know that nightmare is only a dream.”
“Not entirely. Because it means that the destruction I have seen my successors wreak is reality. The countless lives they have destroyed…the great power they have consumed…”
Subject One shuddered, and the white in his eyes flashed, but he re-focused on Lindon. “To foil Reigan Shen, you must know the truth about us. Those you call Dreadgods.”
Lindon sharpened his attention, and even Dross didn’t interrupt. This was the answer they had come here to find. “How do we kill them?”
Papery lips fluttered up into a smile. “I don’t know what the Monarchs have allowed you to know, but it should be no surprise to you to learn that hunger aura isn’t a natural force.”
Lindon nodded, but it was interesting that the conversation had started with hunger aura. Everyone assumed that hunger madra was just a corruption of pure madra that had escaped into the wild long ago.
“It is a corruption of the natural order of Cradle,” he went on. “A manifestation of ambition, of selfish desire. Created by the presence of the Monarchs.” Subject One met Lindon’s eyes and spoke clearly. “The Dreadgods will die only when there are no more Monarchs.”
There was much Lindon wanted to learn here—How was aura created or corrupted? Was there a mechanism that decided which aspects of aura were allowed and which weren’t?—but his time was clearly limited. The white light was steadily fading, and Subject One’s presence grew weaker with every word.
Lindon could put more madra into the technique, but Reigan Shen was growing closer. He couldn’t waste time.
“What’s wrong with the Monarchs?” Lindon asked.
“They are too much for this world. A great weight. Sages like yourself are only half-ascended, which is within the scope of a world like ours. But when your body and your spirit have both grown too great for this world to contain, you must escape to a place that can contain you.”
Dread grew in Lindon’s heart. “Do the Monarchs know this?”
“They must know. It is a fight against the Way to stay in this world at all. And they have stayed not for hours or days, to say farewell to their loved ones, but for centuries.” Subject One bared his teeth. “What do you know of the days before the four great hunger beasts roamed the surface? The four…Dreadgods?”
“Apologies. I’ve never heard of that time.”
“Of course not,” Subject One said heavily. “The Monarchs would control their records. Hunger aura drifted all over the world, and where it moved, all other aura weakened. It corrupted everything; Remnants, natural spirits, sacred beasts. Even humans. Many of them were powerful enough even to threaten Monarchs.”
He took a rattling breath. “We came to this labyrinth as a secure location to perform our research. We were looking for a way to control the hunger aura.”
That was the least surprising thing Lindon had learned so far. Even he had immediately started thinking of all the ways he could use hunger madra the moment he had learned of it, and one hunger spear had allowed an ancestor of the Jai clan to dominate the Desolate Wilds.
“This site was old beyond memory, even to us. We used it as a trap to focus all the hunger aura in the world. Instead of running wild, it would be concentrated here, controlled by ancient seals. We researched fusing hunger bindings into animals, whose power would be suppressed by the great formation.”
He laughed quietly, until Lindon couldn’t tell the difference between laughs and sobs. “We thought we had it under control.”