The construct was simple once he’d understood Kain’s corrupting aspect. He’d tried for months to make something that could channel energy, but the transparent crystal always spilled over with wasted power. Just the feedback had rotted through tables and clouded the laden waters, rendering it useless to any task he could think of. In the end, though, he hadn’t been the one to find a suitable corruption.

Years earlier, Conten had discovered how to make a glass structure that could withstand heavy blows, that took divine purpose and made it solid. The cube still stood on a high shelf in his office surrounded by later components, a monument to his ingenuity and his failure.

The first time Corinth had sat down at a basin of rockglass fluid, he’d created a simple shard with Kain’s power to see if it would hold. The water darkened beneath his hands, opaque threads spooling into a thin black cylinder of glass, turning clear and sparkling when he withdrew it. He let another pulse run through. Under Conten’s watchful gaze and with Kain’s own presence, the glass darkened and shadows seeped from the other side, unhindered by the intervening crystal. His first success.

And again, the design came to him as a moment of simplicity: the largest school of constructs used guided light to channel Teph’s power, so Kain could be invoked by the corruption of their methods.

Corinth pressed a prism from the crystal, shaking it dry in the air above the basin. He called for a sliver of presence, and shadow suffused the glass until it seemed to be a shard of darkness, of deep-earth stone. He gestured his mentor back, and with a savage grin he twisted the glass in form and nature. It shattered, but the magic refused to let the shards fall, binding them together in a slow spiral. Beneath his feet the earth rung with a terrible blow, as if the bones of the earth had fractured with it.

Undeterred, Corinth held it in a cupped hand, deaf to Conten’s comments even before the mental clamour. He couldn’t look away. Smoke was pouring from it, oily and thick, rolling across the floor and swallowing the rough stone. In moments it’d spread through the room and risen like a ceaseless tide, flowing past his shoulders and drowning him in boiling vapour.

“It works,” he called out. “I think it makes the darkness physical, an airborne element. It’ll probably last much longer than when I channel it directly.”

He waited, but no answer came. He wasn’t expecting excitement from his teacher – Conten was used to light-stealing tests by now – but to receive no response at all was unusual. He turned and looked through the smoke, seeing the man’s eyes closed in the darkness and lips moving soundlessly. He frowned.

“Conten!” He shouted, but saw no reaction to the noise. Corinth put the crystal down and walked over, calling out all the while. Even from a pace away, Conten could neither see nor hear him. Corinth thought the old man was getting antsy, his head twitching despite closed eyes and his mouth opening wider as he spoke. He gently took the researcher’s shaking hand and led him to the door.

The smoke poured out when they stepped into the hallway, dispersing into the unmarred air. Conten was panting heavily. “Was it breathable for you?” Corinth asked, suddenly anxious.

Conten took a few more breaths, visibly steadying himself. “It was… fine. Just reminiscent of some old memories.” He frowned. “Why didn’t you answer?”

“It stole the sound too! I couldn’t hear you, nor you my shouting.” He looked down the hallway at the lingering smoke. “And it seems to last much longer than the raw darkness. Very interesting.” It was hard not to slip away into thought, with voices whispering gleefully in his ears and an entire field of construct design opening before him. He forced himself to focus, feeling that familiar grin slip onto his face.

“What should I try next?”

-

The chorus rose to shrieks, terrified voices clamouring to be heard, to be saved! Corinth held his head in his hands, trying to block out the agony of piercing screams, but nothing would silence the sounds inside him. He felt hands grabbing at him as his muscles stiffened and twitched.

Eventually the voices started to recede, but with them went the seeping presence he’d known for the last years. The hands lowered him to the ground, letting him rest on the smooth stone as his muscles unknotted.

He was empty, bereft of the voices and the presence of Kain, but he realized with a start that he felt whole. Something had been taken from him for all those years, some caution or restraint, some rational piece of himself that had been shouting amidst the chorus all this time.

He sat in the basement, feeling the worry in Conten’s gaze, and smiled without reservation for the first time in years. He was free, he was himself, and he could-

The darkness hit like a hammer blow. The screeching returned in his mind, but this was not the chorus he had known. This was Kain himself, screaming bloody murder in his mind as smoke poured from his hands. His skull cracked against the floor as he twitched, writhing in the devouring maw that sought to take him once and for all.

In a desperate, stumbling prayer he rushed to the basin of rockglass and threw his hands in, pouring the all-consuming energy into the crystal. Twisting wires wound, miles of filigree weaving into glass cords thicker around than his arms, tying into knots and burning even the fluid gaps into solid form. When the screaming finally quieted, when the presence gave up on consuming him and faded into broken weeping behind his eyes, he withdrew his hands from the basin.

This time Conten wasn’t fast enough to catch him, and Corinth landed heavily as shadows clouded his mind.

-

He woke to torchlight.

“Are you finally coming around? It’s about time, your darkness has kept me trapped here for the better part of the afternoon.”

Corinth rolled over blearily, trying to shade his eyes from the stabbing flames. He could hear Conten’s continued complaints, but knew there was no real venom in them. The man was dispassionate by nature, but not uncaring.

Sure enough, he felt a hand under his elbow as his mentor helped him rise. The pounding in his head was distracting, but more than made up for by the absent chorus. He let the old man guide him to a chair, feeling fingers probe his scalp for injury. He couldn’t find it within him to twitch even when pain flared.

“You wouldn’t be so tranquil with a fractured skull, so we’ll count that blessing at least. The barber upstairs will shave and patch the rest.”

Corinth nodded, lurching as the motion threw off his balance, when his gaze latched onto the basin. “The fluid, did you…?”

“I haven’t looked,” Conten said. He walked around the chair and came into view. Corinth noted his paleness, his drawn expression, and it dawned on him how worried the man must have been.

“I’m sorry,” Corinth started. He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for, but had to for the lines creasing the man’s brow. “I don’t know what happened there. It felt like, like I was abandoned, and then run through by Kain’s attention.” Conten only grunted in reply, until Corinth continued. “And the whispers are gone.”

Now the researcher looked up from the basin, and his gaze was piercing as he stared his student down. “Gone? All of them?”

Corinth grinned weakly. “All of them. I don’t even feel Kain right now.” He swayed again in his seat, and his eyes were drawn back to the basin. It seemed to grow blurrier as he stared. “Well, what’s in there? I had to use your braiding wires to absorb enough of the energy. That construct might be the biggest bomb you’ve ever seen.”

Conten frowned, and pulled a stopper from the basin’s side. A thin trickle flowed down into a lower catchment, leaving the glass above.

“Wrong, I’m afraid.” Conten remained expressionless as he looked down, and Corinth tried with shaking hands to lever himself up so he could see. He immediately regretted the decision as the room spun, and slouched back into the chair. Even the outline of the basin was blurring, clouded by tears rolling down his cheeks. His hands trembled, and he was rocking slightly in his chair as the channelling aftershocks made his muscles twitch. The intensity of the experience had numbed him but the shock was fading, and a raw, visceral terror was rising, his throat closing over and his breath coming in gasps as the magnitude of what had happened struck him.

His god was gone. The voices, everything granted and afflicted upon him had been scoured away, but even still he felt corrupted. His body was the charred husk of a lightning-struck tree, still burning within and unknowing of the depths of damage caused. He felt his focus on the construct waver, realizing that he had been hiding his fear through redirected focus.

“Conten,” he said softly, “I- I can’t do this. I need to rest. And think. I don’t know what- I think I might be breaking.”

The old man looked up, and traced the weeping mess that was his pupil. Corinth could see him decide, his expression shifting and his stance turning away from the water; he nodded and left the glass, offering an arm. “It will keep.” Conten answered.

There was no voice, no whisper in his mind as he walked. Yet he could feel an anger building at the questions unanswered, and unanswerable. What was this act of god that had struck him and sought to burn a hole through his body? Why had it happened, and why now? If his voice was one fragment in the chorus, where were the rest?

They only rang louder when he woke in the night, coughing up blood.

-

He woke the next day wracked with thirst, as the morning light crept through his window. He stood. His legs gave out.

Conten came by two hours later to find him lying on the floor, shivering under a sheet. He hadn’t had the strength to get back in bed. In the end he slept for most of the day, waking to eat and drink as friendly faces brought things for him. Even bedridden, he couldn’t help but laugh at them when they refused to turn their backs to his altar.

Even his mother came by, informed through a few proxies and gossipers that he wasn’t well. She stayed until past sunset, sitting at his bedside and reading while he dozed. Later that night, he woke in darkness and she wasn’t there.

Corinth wasn’t upset, really. He wouldn’t want her to stay in the University; it wasn’t a place of comfort for her and his hideous room even less so. He was trying to piece his mind together and make sense of things, and was reaching out for something to steady himself, he thought. He dried his eyes and tried to sleep, feeling his body ache.

His breathing steadied after a while, and he noted how time seemed to lose its consistency in the night. Without an easy way to distinguish the passing seconds, moments seemed to drag on horribly. On the other hand, he could watch the moonbeam drifting through his window under the orb’s procession, and trace its path over seconds to minutes to hours without even noticing the span of time passing. Eventually it sunk enough to shine on his bed, bright in the pre-dawn hush.

Good sense told him to turn away, to roll over and sleep, but questions still demanded answers. And there was one, at least, he could answer now. He breathed deep and reached for Kain’s presence to blot out the light.

Pain was immediate, wracking his muscles and burning his lungs. He wheezed, twitched, spluttered, hands clenching at the sheets as he bit back a scream. He waited for it to recede, but it held steady as he lay in the bed. He had to let most of the power go, until there was only a thin trickle running through him and a mild ache in the back of his skull.

He looked around the room to see if the telltale shade had sprung forth, and grinned at the detailed darkness. His gaze swept the room, then returned to the moon panning through the sky over black treetops behind rising chimneys. He nodded and released the shadows, watching the room snap back into light. Along with the window ledge outside. And the chimneys in the village. And the treetops.