Callsign: King - Blackout

41

Fickle luck decided to throw King a bone. In addition to being broad and relatively intact, the passage was lit at intervals by battery-operated emergency lights and exit signs. He sprinted down the corridor, glancing back every few seconds to see if the basilisk was following. The third time he did this, he saw that it was.

The thing was a moving wall of darkness, filling the height and breadth of the hallway, rolling forward like a ponderous but unstoppable tsunami of night. One by one, the emergency lights were engulfed in its mass and the scant illumination behind King dimmed.

He put on a fresh burst of speed, taking a left turn at an intersection-as indicated by the arrow on the exit sign-without slowing, and once again, briefly lost sight of the basilisk.

A few more turns brought him to the exit, or rather the place where the exit door had been. Now, there was just a gaping hole where the entire wall had collapsed inward. He picked his way across the rubble, painfully aware that the delay was erasing his lead, and vaulted through the opening into the night.

Muted light issued from the breach in the wall, and as he ran out across the courtyard, he glanced back, waiting for the moment that the light would be eclipsed by the basilisk’s bulk.

Several seconds passed, but the light did not change.

Something was wrong. The basilisk wasn’t following him anymore.

King felt a new rush of fear as the realization hit home. If it wasn’t chasing him, that could only mean…

“Fiona!”

The entity had no memory of its past, but it comprehended this new threat.

The manifestation had nearly reached the man who carried the last fragment of its consciousness, but that was no longer the entity’s primary concern. The word resonated through every particle of its physical being and it understood what would happen if the speaker of the word was not immediately silenced.

The entity was not defenseless. The word stimulated it in a way that the creatures of this world would understand as pain, and just as pain triggered a violent, instinctive reaction in those fragile beings of flesh, so too did the harmonic vibrations cause the entity’s essence to respond with furious intensity.

Raw matter spiraled into the entity and was changed. Its mass increased…doubled…and doubled again.

The steady hum of the word faltered as the world around the entity shook, but the reprieve was short-lived. The speaking resumed and the pain returned.

Though it did not understand the subtleties of intangible realities, the entity experienced fear.

Filled with primal desperation, the entity turned the manifestation away from its pursuit and summoned it back with a new purpose.