Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

Beatrice’s Mission. They brought her here, to their secret place, to torture and vivisect her, to try to steal her miraculous power and potential. Owen had tracked her here, and together he and Hazel had wiped out all the Blood Runners, in a hot savage fury. And they had seen the end of this place, its final destruction, escaping only moments before it disappeared forever. But that was then, and this was now.
    Hazel had created this place. Owen knew that, as certainly as he knew anything. The nature of the place was clear to him, the stone corridors all but talking to him, whispering her name. He could even sense the place’s history, as though laid out before him on one of the ancient handwritten scrolls he had studied so long ago, when he was just a scholar and minor historian. Steeped in her madness, driven by loss and need, Hazel had reached the end of the line when she ran out of time, so she dropped out of the time and space that had failed her, and created a secret place of her own, a pocket dimension to hide and plan in. There was no telling how long Hazel had spent here; Time worked differently here, when it worked at all. But slowly Hazel changed, growing and evolving like a caterpillar in an insane cocoon, finally to emerge from her stone chrysalis and burst back into space and time, reborn as the Terror. An almost elemental force now, with little of Hazel’s consciousness in it, driven by a need and a longing and a madness it could barely remember the reasons for.
    Disconnected from Hazel’s history, the Terror had lost all track of space and time, and reappeared long ago and far away, in the galaxy of the Illuminati. And there she began her long journey back, heading home, following instinct as much as memory, goaded on by the loss of something it could no longer name, heading back to the Heartworld of the Empire, because . . . because it was responsible for her loss. The Terror started the long journey back, forgetting exactly who or what it was looking for, but compelled to search anyway. Perhaps sometimes the name Owen arose, but the Terror always forgot it again. It went where it had to, not caring who or what it had to destroy in order to raise the power necessary for its journey. It ate souls, and worlds, and civilizations, grinding them up to make its bread. The civilization of the Illuminati was the first to face the Terror’s hunger, but it wasn’t the last.
    It took time to produce the herald, that could travel in space while the Terror occupied its own hidden place, and longer still to produce the herald’s ravenous spawn, but once the Terror had found a method that worked, it settled for that. It may not have been the best or most efficient way of doing things, but it was as good as any other to a mad mind with limitless power and no restraints or conscience.
    Owen stood very still in the middle of a corridor, bent over as though about to vomit, his arms wrapped tightly around him to keep himself from flying apart. The maze of corridors was full of information, like a library full of books all shouting at once. Here, Time was just another direction, the corridors existing simultaneously in Past, Present, and Future. And it was the only physical existence the Terror had now. Hazel’s original, human body had disappeared long ago, eaten up by the terrible energies it generated and processed. The place that was not a place was the Terror; the herald and its maddening spawn just aspects of the greater whole, projected into three-dimensional space, like a fingertip pushed through a sheet of paper.
    This place was the Terror, and it was slowly becoming aware of Owen’s presence within it. Owen could sense something like a great eye, sealed shut by eons of sleep, cracking slowly open to peer within its own self. There was a sound, like a sullen silver bell ringing in the heart of a stone forest at midnight. A slow gusting breeze in the corridors that might have been something breathing. Beads of sweat rolled slowly up the corridor walls, and the floor trembled under Owen’s feet. Something was coming his way, something vast and utterly dreadful.
    Hazel d’Ark came walking down the corridor towards him, a memory from the past. She looked just as she had when Owen first met her, so long ago on Virimonde; young and vibrant, red-haired and sharp-faced. She looked the way she used to, back before all the death and war and madness. But at the same time, she was so much more than that, there