NOVGO.NET Movement Nine — What Was Left of Him
He kept the hood, afterward, not out of any particular vanity about how he looked, but because the alternative was letting anyone who passed him see exactly how much of him the gray light now went straight through.
He did not fully understand it — the mechanics of it, the precise arithmetic of what had been taken and what remained — only that some considerable portion of whatever had made him a whole and solid thing, out here, had simply stopped being present, the way a held note stops the instant a hand lifts off the string. He had checked, more than once, in the first hours after, holding his own palm up to whatever passed for light in that stretch of Between and watching the faint, unmistakable suggestion of the ground show through it. Not gone. Not yet. But thinner than a soul was meant to be, and thinning further, he suspected, the longer he simply stood here doing nothing at all to earn back whatever had been spent.
He understood, without anyone troubling to explain it to him directly, that he had not been left this way by accident. Something in the shape of what had happened to him — the precise, surgical quality of the pressure, the sense that whatever had reached into him had known exactly what it wanted and taken only that — suggested a decision rather than an oversight. He was, he suspected, alive because something had decided, for reasons of its own that he was not currently equipped to guess at, that alive was more useful to it than the alternative. For now. Until whatever it was still finishing had finished.
He did not find that reassuring.
He tried, sitting alone in the gray with the hood drawn close, to reach for what remained of his dominion — a small test, nothing ambitious, only the familiar reflexive press toward his own pulse that had answered him instantly and without fail every single time he had asked it to, in Ashra and in every quiet corner of the Between since.
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Nothing answered.
He tried again, more deliberately this time, reaching past his own blood toward the wider, stranger reach his dominion had grown into out here — toward some stray soul's memory of fear, anything, the smallest possible proof that what had made him what he was had survived whatever had just been done to him.
The silence on the other end of the reaching was total, and it was the kind of total that frightened him considerably more than the thinning of his own hand had.
He sat with that a long while, hooded, alone, watching the gray light pass a little too easily through fingers that used to be solid enough to command an entire world's worth of blood without a single moment's doubt about whether the command would be obeyed.
Was it taken, he thought, turning the question over with the same clean, unsentimental patience he had once turned over rival claims and buried treasure both, or was it only put to sleep. And which one of those two things would actually be worse.
He did not have an answer. For the first time in a very long life and a stranger death both, Dravik found that he had absolutely no way of finding one — no stone to consult, no dominion to press against the question until it yielded a favorable path, nothing at all except the gray, and the hood, and the quiet, patient certainty that whatever had been done to him was not finished being done.