nine hilts of his blades were like nine stars surfing the space about him, a silver gleam of power. Three on his back, two at his chest, two adorned his forearms, and two sat at each hip. They were the Nine Blades of Daví, and no other thing known to man had sharper teeth.
Vohro dismounted his horse, and when his boots touched the ground it was as if he landed on a mass of cotton, for that was his skill, silent as a grave in the ground.
“Wait for me here, Dahkar,” said Vohro to his beloved companion. “As tough as you are, it’s best you keep away from this darkness.” Dahkar whined in defiance. “No, good horse, be ready to flee if it comes to that. Steady your heart; keep your eyes open, for I feel the threat isn’t just inside this house.”
As he approached the front door, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being led into something that had existed long before the mysteries of the seen world. He put his hand to the door and entered.
Expecting the room to be full of children, he discovered nothing akin to it. Instead, he found quaintness, candles--and death. Speedily, he grabbed for his long blade on his back and unsheathed it, and there was a singing of metal as it caressed the inner linings of his sheath. A row of candles lined the walls of the room, and their flames bounced off the blade’s smooth steel, and the sword flared like a hot orange anvil against the blackness of the rider’s clothes. He looked down on the dead body adorning the wooden floor, facing downward and oozing black blood. Alerted, he stepped away from it and took some time to soak up his surroundings.
Though the room was lit up with warmth and coziness, with the many chairs and tables lying about, the air inside was below freezing, and Vohro could see his breaths escape his lips in rhythmic fashion. He surveyed the room and everything seemed normal, actually too perfect, as if the house was staged to be showcased as something normal.
“Where are you, children?”
As an answer to his plea, they spoke. Over here, stranger!
But it did not good to Vohro, for he was deaf and couldn’t hear the children’s cries without putting his eyes on their mouths. It didn’t matter, for he would suddenly come face to face with them. As he inspected the house with his immaculate eyes, he noticed something odd. Filling up the walls were various drawings of little boys and girls, and it was obvious they all belonged to many sets of parents, for all of their features were vastly different, appearing of no relation to each other. It was like a great wall of missing children.
And Vohro, acting on a sudden intuition, searched with his big eyes and came upon a certain drawing that tugged at him violently, like two hands stabbing into his body, grabbing his skeleton and shaking it furiously. It was a drawing of the child he sought, and his blood flamed inside his veins. And all at once, as an answer to his torment, the children in the drawings spoke to him. We are all damned! The sound of the booming cry was so fierce that it pushed the Davinian back a few feet.
Fueled with a sense of urgency, Vohro progressed up the first set of stairs, and though he made his way up the stairs, he was overcome with a feeling of descending into an unseen oblivion. As he reached the second story, he was met with an open room and a dining table large enough to sit six adults. And something of a woman sat at the table, naked, with her back turned to him.
He raised his blade to her while approaching and said, “Woman, if you are alive, turn to me.” But nothing happened. He said again, “Woman--,” and he paused, “if you are dead, turn to me.”
And the woman turned.
She stood up and opened her arms to Vohro as if requesting an embrace from the Davinian warrior. Vohro’s eyes screamed in abhorrence, for the woman’s whole front, from head to toe, was made of shadow. Her backside had been completely normal, but when it came to the other half, it was a painting of a sullen suffering. Vohro could not make out any of her features. It was just all shadow, and it was liquefied, that is, the front of her body swayed in its own self as a shadow would do, rippling and contorting with its mass. Every now and then a semblance of what was once an eye or a nostril would surface on her face but then slowly fade away, and Vohro raised his flaring sword to her, but before it reached her neck, she turned away from him and proceeded to head downstairs. Vohro thought nothing of running after her. No need to mettle in dark things unless forced to.
So he continued onward, gliding up the stairs and reaching the other levels. Nothing was out of place; nothing seemed disturbed. He could tell no one had been in a struggle. All things were neatly put in their places. Chairs were neatly pushed in under tables; plates were settled in their respective bookshelves. Everything was perfect, everything--except the people.
On the second and third levels, he ran across what appeared to be several adolescents, sitting quietly and playing games with each other, and when they turned to him, all was shadow on the fronts of the naked, silent beings. Some waved at him. Others ignored him.
Now even more cautious, Vohro moved up the remaining stairs, crouched down like a panther, blending in with the darkness given off by the black images coming from the lit candles. On the next floor, he came upon a shadowed woman making tea while her male friend sat on the couch smoking some type of pipe.
The fifth floor was empty with only a bed adorning the spacious room, tucked in one of the corners with the blankets misused and bothered as if someone had been sleeping there just minutes before.
He felt the boy’s presence next to him, and Vohro turned to the boy, who stood at the edge of the stairs leading up to the last floor. The boy flew into the last room and Vohro followed. As he came upon the entrance to the room, the boy stood next to the door, with a finger pointing inside and his eyes clear as unblemished gems, sparkling of orange-flamed bursts every time the candles’ reflection bounced off his face. The child backed away and gave Vohro some space.
The warrior reached the door and placed his eyes on the darkness enveloping all four corners of the room. The only light shone from a pile of clustered candles barely standing on the wooden floor, inches away from turning the house into a flaming fireball. Across the floor, near the end of room and lying near a large bed, was the body of a woman. As he inspected her, he saw that she held a child. As his eyes quickly adapted to the darkness, he saw that the woman wasn’t shadowed and the child bled a deep red.
Instinctively, he sheathed his long blade and dove to them, helping the woman up to a sitting position. He noticed the baby had a mortal wound on its chest and had bled out dead in her arms, but she could not let go of him; her embrace was a vice-like grip. She bled from the corner of her mouth, and her eyes were hemorrhaging. She had but a few minutes left in this world, and she took that time to speak to the man who held her in his arms.
The woman’s lips had been cut in an “x” fashion and were split apart, so whenever she tried to speak, Vohro could not make out her words, struggling with every effort to read her lips.
“The boy,” she said. “The boy, watch--” But he couldn’t understand her, though he saw her eyes move to the child behind them, and he knew she spoke of him. “Watch--the boy,” she said again.
And trying to make sense of her words, he could tell that she was worried about the boy who was left alive and not taken by shadow. He came upon an idea, and he reached for her lips and grabbed them, squeezing his hands together and pushing them back into position in order for her to make sense to him.
“Speak,” the warrior said.
“Watch--the boy,” said the woman with blood running down her porcelain cheeks and covering Vohro’s fingers like syrup over a morning’s breakfast.
“The boy?” said Vohro. “You want me to watch over him? I’ll watch him. He’ll be looked after. I promise you this.”
“No,” she said while spewing out more blood. “Watch out for the boy. It was--him. He took my child. Promise to--kill him.” And she drew her last breath.
On the heels of her death, the room began vibrating ferociously, with the windows humming and clanging and the floor popping up and down. It only took
Vohro a second to realize the noise was a product of a number of feet pounding on all of the house’s many floors, all converging in a mass that was heading his way. It was the sound of an oncoming attack, and he was more than ready. The shadows had come for him.
He turned to the door and saw the first one coming at him, the man with the pipe in his mouth, lunging straight at the Davinian warrior. Vohro twitched his arm like a small, nervous tick, and suddenly a blade shot from his hip and straight through the mouth of the shadowed man, knocking the pipe into the hands of the tall warrior and sending the corpse flying a few feet back, sticking sharply into the hardened wall of stone. The corpse deflated as all the black blood emptied onto the cold floor.
Taking back his short blade from the wall, Vohro exited the room and approached the second creature coming his way; it was the woman, the pipe-smoker’s better half, and behind her was one of the adolescents from the third floor. Vohro quickly darted to the edge of the stairs, and as the woman reached for his throat, Vohro sidestepped her by jumping onto the railing to his left, which was not impeded by any wall, and twirled in a circle with his knees to his chest. While spinning, he took out one of the medium blades strapped to his chest and rhythmically beheaded the woman