Chapter 292 - Army of the Undead part 4

I do not dream often. Sleep, for me, is like Poe's little slices of death, an insensate darkness into which I plummet, like a stone into a lightless shaft, the very moment I close my eyes, and it has been that way since the night I was made into an immortal, with very few exceptions.

But I dreamed that day.

They were not my dreams. They were the dreams of the god king of the vampires. I had stolen a taste of Khronos's blood during our battle in Fen'Dagher, and so a little of his soul had taken up residence in my mind, like a rat in a cellar.

When I slip into my deathlike slumbers, that little piece of his soul is free to roam the chambers of my mind, a disembodied spirit drifting through the winding halls of some forsaken castle. He is there now, along with all the others I have Shared with throughout the millennia, a little more contentious than the rest certainly, but nothing to worry too much about. He is an impotent revenant, a figment of my imagination, unable to cause even the tiniest twitch of a finger when I am asleep, much to his frustration.

But I was speaking of my dream—or perhaps I should say his dream.

It is hard to describe the dream, mainly because his mind is so hard to describe. He was not fully human, the God King of the blood drinkers. Not even very much like us, his immortal descendants.

When the Strix, that terrible alien ovum, merged with the mortal Khronos, they became one being, but they were not perfectly joined. They were not a smoothly blended whole. The God King's mind was like a violent whirlpool, a swirling vortex of red and black currents. The reds were the remnants of his human personality. The blacks were the remainders of its alien intellect. Those two disparate fragments orbited the insatiable void that was the heart of their fused minds, and that rapacious maelstrom was the Hunger, which howled unceasingly and without thought at the center of their conjoined souls.

I dreamed that I was trapped in an alien world, an ugly disjointed universe where everything was unnaturally separate and discrete. This world did not blend smoothly from one thing to another, as was the natural way, and everything was maddeningly solid. The ground did not yield beneath my feet. The mountains did not bleed into the heavens. Even the water, the lifeblood of this world, the thing most like the universe from which I'd been ripped, flowed around my body when I plunged into it, rather than passing though it. When it wept down from the heavens, it did so in a million distinct globules, tiny rondures that raced down the flesh of my host, touching but never joining with it.

This alien world was a desolate prison, a place with air so poisonous I had to hide within the body of the native creature I had taken as my host. If exposed for very long, the chemistry of its atmosphere would take me apart, particle by agonized particle. Only in the hollowed out body of my host was I safe from the corrosive nature of this world, and the blood of the creatures who roamed this strange realm was the only substance that was safe for me to eat. The only substance that could actually nourish me.

I had a name once, an identity, and a place in the collective mind of my world, but I had lost all of those things when I was torn from heaven and cast down to this hell. Name, self, soul, all had been stripped away from me when the universe ruptured and sucked me from my home. All that remained was instinct and hunger, the drive to consume and reproduce, to devour and be devoured. It was the natural order of things, the way the world was supposed to be, mirrored only faintly by the lifecycle of this alien world.

Running concurrently with the Strix's wordless presence was the God King's mortal thoughts. They were more familiar, yet somehow just as alien, bereft of any kindness or human compassion. Khronos's mind was like stone, broken to jagged shards by the circumstances of his life. He was driven by ambition and greed, sought only to conquer and possess. The domination of others was the only thing that gave him pleasure, whether it be the domination of his enemies, or the domination of the women he claimed from time to time as his mates.

The conditions of his mortal life had made him this way, as coal is made into diamond, by millennia of unceasing pressure. But excuse is not expiation, and even as I dreamed their ravenous dreams, I knew that I must destroy them.

Their chance encounter, and the terrible thing they had become because of their joining, threatened to consume the whole world, and all that I loved with it: Zenzele, Ilio, and my mortal descendants, the Tanti. To save them I would have to depose the king, destroy our unholy father, and bring his rule to an end.

But how?

That was the question pulsing in my brain when I awoke.

How do I kill that which is unkillable?