The Sovereign’s grey eyes went wide, and it was as if I saw something other than cold calculation in them. Was it confusion or anger? I did not know, but I knew fear. I had felt it more than I would ever want to, and I could see fear in his eyes.
"What are you?" he whispered. "You are not insane, you are speaking to something, there is nothing there... and now I hear it. I am the Lord of this domain. Nothing moves in my darkness without my knowledge. Nothing breathes without my permission. Nothing..."
He stopped, and his eyes tracked the empty air beside me again, the space where the fox sat comfortably on my shoulder, and they found nothing. His hand came up, and a wave of darkness swept through the chamber, probing, finding nothing.
The fox bared her teeth at the empty air. "Blind and old, how dare you say we should kneel to you?"
"Something I can’t see," Sid whispered.
The pressure around me began to change. It stopped pushing me down and became reaching through the whole chamber, as if the darkness was hunting through space, and I could not move, even if I wanted to. It was as if the Sovereign was scrutinizing every single atom in this place.
I felt his darkness pass over the fox and find nothing, and my senses almost felt raw as if the weight of his probing was rubbing it raw. It was one of the strangest and most uncomfortable things I had experienced up to this moment.
When this darkness could not find anything inside this chamber, I felt it reach inside me. His darkness went past my skin and flesh until it touched my channels, and the sight of it drew a sound of surprise from him. I thought it should have drawn more, but he only brushed past my channels and went deeper... and he was not able to find it either.
The Sovereign went very still, and I nearly screamed in pain as I felt my body being stretched and my bones creaking as darkness poured out of me to reform itself beside the Sovereign... and the darkness took my shape, and in front of my eyes, this shape took flesh, and another Elric stood beside the Sovereign.
With a swipe of his hand, the skin on this clone vanished, showing all of my inner musculature, and layer by layer, flesh began to peel off from the clone until there was nothing left. The Sovereign did not seem to find what he was looking for. He turned towards me, and there was madness in his eyes.
"In my domain," he whispered. "In my darkness. There is something in my domain I cannot sense."
The Sovereign was holding himself as if he was cold, but I could feel a frightening wave of power brewing inside his body that made me feel as if I was about to explode, and the madness in his eyes took a new dimension.
"Eight thousand years!" His voice cracked the air; the vats rang with it. "Eight thousand years I have held this darkness, and nothing hides in it that I cannot know." Then his voice went weak, as if he was in pain, "It is the one thing that is mine, the one thing they left me, my domain, my sanctuary, my..."
The darkness convulsed, thrashing everywhere and striking at every shadow in the chamber, hunting the thing it could not find, and the pressure came off my back for a moment, as the Sovereign was tearing his own territory apart, looking for the intruder he could not sense.
"...it is SACRED!" Sid screamed. "It is the last thing in this cage that answers to me, and you have brought something into it that does not, and I will find it, I will find it..."
He was not talking to me; in fact, he had stopped looking at me, as if I no longer mattered, and he needed to resolve the uncertainty that was breaking his mind. He was a god having the last certainty of his prison taken from him, and it was breaking something in him that eight thousand years had not.
Then something changed in the air, the Sovereign froze, and in this moment, it was as if the air of a god had vanished, and all I saw was a tired old man who had lived for eight thousand years too long, and had been slowly unravelling as time passed.
His grey eyes flickered, and I thought I saw his face... tired, ancient, afraid. Then it was gone.
His eyes turned yellow.
The tentacles came up out of his mouth, splitting the old man’s jaw with a loud crack, a nest of them tasting the air, and the thing that spoke through them was not screaming about sanctity, but was delighted.
"Oh," Sad said, stretching into the space its master’s breakdown had left it. "He has gone and lost himself. How lovely. And left me the boy."
The darkness steadied under Sad’s hand. I could immediately feel that the demon was holding this darkness in a much clumsier fashion, but although it lacked the expertise of Sid, it more than made up for it with raw intent.
"Boy... you could escape your nice bath, spectacular! But what did you say to the old fool that made him curl into a ball? I cannot pry anything from him when he is like this, and I don’t want to wait the centuries it would take to pry it from his teeth... so tell me, boy, I promise to bring you back to your warm bath, and this whole thing would be placed behind us. Far, far, behind us...eh? You may not know me, but I promise, I have been knowing you well for a while now, and you can trust me."
The pressure that had been pressing me down had vanished, so I could straighten, looking at the demon whose limbs were extending, stretching the five-foot body of the old man to twelve. I just snorted in disdain.
Sad paused, perhaps it thought that its appearance could frighten me or break my mind. I may not have spent a lot of time with this creature, but I knew that it was incredibly sadistic, and so my casual disregard of his power would lead to one outcome... anger!
"You are going to..."
"Save it, dipshit!" the fox called out, and the yellow eyes of Sad narrowed in suspicion before it slowly oriented towards my shoulder, "What is that thing you carry?"