The Dark is the hazy antithesis of Luster. It is the negation of the smokeless liquid-flame. The antithesis to arising. It is the closest thing to Something-That-Is-Nothing. It is the closest thing to the Ultimate. It can be wielded as a tool for Awakening. Of course it can. But it can also be wielded as a tool for Violence. Remember what has been said by the Thrice-Awoken's Code: Commit Violence for Violence's Sake.

Essays On Dark by Mystic Scholar Ganmeng Djotari

High Chief Dark Lord Trasan watched. Stared. Grim.

Saw. Observed the dragon plummet. Paper ripped and let go. Rengka would see this. Rengka would be on the way there.

No escape, now. For the would be heroes. For the heaven dancer.

Unless...

Dark Lord Trasan grimaced. Fell forwards. Gripped the railings of his iron tower's balcony. His chest now had another puncture wound. He did not have much summonings of the Spear of Gleaming Dark left. This had better been worth it.

He stared at the sky. To heaven. You had better grant me a form immortal. Heaven could not hear his thoughts. Not yet.

He turned around and walked back into his refuge. A new set of partners came close. This was how he replenished his Force: through the transgressive liquids, moans, and raptures brought about by lust. A wretched way to power.

It is power without enlightenment.

He closed the blinds.

Rengka leapt up. Straight up. With a flex of her Force.

With her wisdom she subjugated the writhing god within Pestilent Thorn and formed it back into a rapier. What a wicked weapon.

She lost momentum. Spun. Stepped on a falling leaf: just enough. She launched high up again. Diagonally this time. Following the great arc of the river dragon. There will be no escaping now. There will be no safety.

But remember, Rengka. No killing. Easier said than done. Missions to subjugate have always been more difficult than assassination missions. Killing might not grant her good karma, but she is the sword of god. She does what she must. The consequences she can worry about later.

She twisted in the air. Caught a branch. Maneuvered to get her feet on it. Then she combined a succession of Monkey Leap Style technicks to move through the wood beside Imos quickly.

Above her, the dragon.

It did not take long. She knew the High Chief had set this Raxri in particular as a high priority target. There was no way that she was going to let them get away. Even if they stay within the town limits.

The First Shark Knight Rengka leapt and spun and corkscrewed. Acrobat-like. Lemur-like. Monkey-like. The benefit of aerosteel--as tough as steel but as light as feather.

Darkness ripped through the night sky. The Spear of Gleaming Dark, used once again. High Chief Trasan will not have much left in their chest after that one.

It worked, though. It worked all to well. It did not bisect the dragon outright. Unlike the other victims of the magick. But it gashed the dragon all the same. It spiraled out of the sky.

Shot. A bullet to a revolutionary.

And that's where I must go.

Cling.

They fell. How many times have I fallen? thought Raxri. A strange feeling of deja vu welled up in their stomach. How many times must I fall again? O! Sintra Kennin. Are you all right?

Raxri knew no magick to cushion the fall. Akazha was too busy trying to cling onto Sintra Kennin's flailing fins. Parts of his razor lucent scales cut at both of them as they clung.

What protects you will make you hurt the most in the end.

They crashed through the trees.

Raxri only realized the immense size of Sintra Kennin's dragon form after it flattened a good chunk of the trees. After he rolled and rolled.

—No blood seeped from the wounds. Spirits didn't bleed. Raxri knew this to be true.

Instead, lazy tendrils. Dissipating into spirit-haze. The mark of a spirit fraying. The mark of a life's end.

Raxri's fevered, desparate thoughts: Is this real? No. Does the Dark Lord Trasan hold such power? Will we be able to face him if we have no such power? Is it even worth it? Oh, heavens. Oh, Supremely Enlightened Ones! Grant us succor and peace, please...!

Sintra Kennin had ceased to tumble. Akazha and Raxri were cut up, struck, lacerated. By trees. By boulders. By Sintra Kennin's own scales. By the things they loved without condition and hesitation.

Akazha clambered onto her feet. She pulled out a ritual keris—where had she been keeping that?—and cut her palm with it. "We must away. Now!"

Raxri clambered up to Sintra Kennin's face. "Sintra! Sintra Kennin! No. How fare you?!" Raxri lifted their face and saw that pure coagulating darkness, spreading out from the part it had gashed him. Fear seizes him.

Sintra Kennin's eyes darted about. Looking for something. Perhaps thinking. Raxri, desperate: "What can I do... Sintra!"

Sintra Kennin managed to speak. His voice echoed without his need of speaking. "Leave! Now! I will hold off Rengka as I can."

"I cannot leave you—"

"Fool! I will handle her yet. It is Trasan that I stand no chance with. But if, at least, you and Akazha can leave, I can yet subjugate her with the fullness of my strength."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Raxri swallowed. Love and grief. A stone down their throat. "O-Okay. Promise me... Promise me you will be strong. Promise me you will return, and we will cultivate together!"

"I promise. Now go, heaven dancer." Sintra Kennin managed a wheezing laugh. "You keep making our lives complicated!"

Raxri knew Sintra was joking. But this not only stung them. It also gripped them in fear. Anxiety. I bring about danger wheresoever I walk...

All this time, Akazha was performing ritual. Her hand bled. The blood, as it touched her ritual knife, turned black. This was not Dark. It was something else entirely. It looked and felt like painted black ink-flame.

Sintra Kennin growled. "Witch Akazha! You summon Dak Emmara Senje's Hellfires to here?"

"I've no other choice," replied the witch. "You will die if I do not."

"Your ego blinds you," said Sintra Kennin. His draconic form shrunk as he conversed. "I will be able to face the First Shark Knight head on."

"Why did you not do that in the first place?"

"I had no means of gauging the First Shark Knight's power. And, out here in Imos' outskirts, we are a bit further outside of Trasan's mandala of power. And closer yet to mine. The river Wetan."

Now Sintra Kennin had shrunk completely. They stood at seven feet tall. Their body leaner, less-wide, now. His beard and hair and fire-like eyebrows had the quality of his dragon form. He had scales. His skin the color of obsidian. He had a tail. His legs looked like that of an antelopes. His feet like that of a lion's. His arms looked longer than his entire torso. He wielded effortlessly God's Black Brush with a single hand.

"What is this?" asked Raxri, in no small part awed and afeared by this sudden form of strength.

"My War Form," replied Sintra Kennin. "One wherein I cannot control the power of my strikes and of my slashes, and thus I may only use it when within the wilds. Outside of civilization. Where I can unleash my demigod strength."

Akazha cursed. "Fine. Spit on your demigod strength!" She lifted her arm and uttered a backwards snarling mantra. A wheel of sacred writing formed around her arm. Suffused into the ritual knife in her hands.

Her bleeding. Her chanting. The black flame. It all stopped. A small wick of inkfire stayed upon the ritual knife's hilt. "I can continue this magick later."

"Careful, witch Akazha," said Sintra Kennin. "I'm sure ye knoweth well consequences of harnessing the Hell King's Power."

"I am his devotee," said Akazha. She bandaged the open wound on her hand. "I know full well. And this is one of his promises to me. In exchange for my service to him."

"Ah. How quaint. What hath possessed you that you would make a deal with the Eight Hells' Monarch?"

Akazha finished bandaging her wound. She picked up her gun and turned to Raxri. Nodded. It's time to go, she said with her face.

Yet to Sintra Kennin's question she replied: "Love."

***

In Akazha's mind, death is not much of a problem. In fact, it is the sublimation of her being. Should she die, she dies with a certain understanding. Now as someone who now swims in Enlightenment's River, she knew that there was no case to speak of when it came to reincarnation. Her goal was to be free of reincarnation. To achieve Ultimacy and become a Perfectly Liberated One.

Yet as Akazha performed the ritual to summon Dak Emmara Senje's dark fires—her last free favor from him—her mind wandered back to the past.

She had been young, back then. Not much in the way of power. A fledgling witch craving Strength. Anything she could do get away from her father. The Patriarch of Gozon family.

She was the heir. Much to her father's chagrin. "What accursed heavenly god has laid his eyes upon me that my worthless wife bore no man!" He had said this more than once. His eyes had always flared.

There was love there. There was always going to be love. The familial kind. The bamboo-stick-against-your-hands kind. The kind parents always justified. Its other name was abuse.

She was trained to be the greatest businesswoman the world had ever seen.

—Clad in thick jackets even in sweltering Selorong heat. Wear black sunglasses, wear heels. Appear taller and wider than you truly are. Carry a gonne with you at all times. Carry a knife with you at all times. Smoke these cigarettes. Get the thick ones. Don't smoke the thin ones. No, switch to cigars.

When she broke free, a small doubt burgeoned from her heart. This selfsame act—of self-liberation. Was this, itself, a fault of the conditioning? Did this violence arise from what she had become, or did it arise as a consequence of what she was becoming?

When she asked the Ultramystic this same question she had replied: It matters not. It is violence all the same.

To this day, she was not sure what to think of the Ultramystic's view of the matter. But perhaps what she must do is violence even then.

She needed power. When she escaped to Dang's southern shores. The pirate kingdoms and undead tribes tested her might. Her skill. She had nothing but her sword-training. Her father was not amiable to the ways of magick, after all.

After being beaten and bruised. Defeated and destroyed. Hated and violated. The world led her to her final repose. A temple shrine of Dak Emmara Senje.

There are only three temples to the Hell King. One in the utter north limits of Jhonghra. One in the southern limits of Dang. And one in the southeastern borders of Pemi, facing the End of the World. By the Vault of Souls.

This temple—Siso-tso Temple—was similarly abandoned. It was kept up to date by a single devotee. An elderly man. He had one eye and one arm and one leg. He swept anyway. A hatred for injustice powered him.

When Akazha arrived at that temple, beaten bruised and clothes ripped and torn, he took her in. Nursed her. And turned her into a devotee of Dak Emmara Senje.

The man summoned the Hell King, eventually. The Hell King gave her power unbetold, after he made her pledge herself to him. The old man had been a spiritworker, and could knock on hell's door. Hell's door was not too far, you see. In fact, it is the closest subterranean realm. Next to the earth's hollow layers.

Akazha did pledge. Not just for power, but also to set her on the path to ultimacy. The Hell King was far along the path of attainment, you see, though he was not a Supremely Liberated Being. Not yet. She took refuge in the Triple Gems. She became power incarnate.

And then, Dak Emmara Senje told her thus:

—"SHOULD YE FIND THYSELF AT THE ENDS OF THINE OWN POWER. CALL UPON MY SACRED NAME. AND UTTER MY SECRET PRAYER. AND CHANT. AND CHANT. AND CHANT. AND OFFER THE BLOOD OF YOUR HEART TO ME. AND I WILL COME. AND I WILL EXPUNGE ALL HURT. AND ALL HATE.

AND I WILL BRING YOU HOME."

She was ready to do just that, at that point. What a better time than any? Against Rengka, the First Shark Knight, that was indomitable and unbeatable and could only be rivaled by the Dark Lord High Chief Trasan himself?

But then Sintra was smarter than her. She was a girl suicidal. As things spiralled into destruction. Into tragedy. Into calamity. She was ready to end it all.

But then Raxri...

Raxri was not a being she thought she would love and care for. Not even in the sense romantic. Not anymore. Raxri reminded her too much of her younger sister, Rion Gozon. What was happening to her now, she wondered. In the dark.

Akazha and Raxri dashed. Through the woods. Through the dark. Follow the sound of the river, she had said. And so they did. She gripped Raxri's hand and they both ran and ran until they can hear no more of Sintra Kennin's pained final breaths. Don't die, Sintra Kennin, Raxri and Akazha's unified heart said.

Will he?

Akazha looked at herself for the first time when she looked back on Raxri.

This was not a love of another. No. This was a flaring of the fire of the love of self. That is to say: she loved Raxri not because of what they were. She loved Raxri because of what she could potentially become because of who they were. Raxri was her ticket to compassionate practice. To merit. To true liberation from the guilt and harrowings that haunted her every second.

And perhaps from then she can finally cultivate power unobstacled. Perhaps, even, she can forgive her father. And in so doing enter into the unrivaled Essence of Enlightenment.

No, she thought to herself. Raxri must not die. This is my pledge. My heart. It must wrap around Raxri and protect them. The Heaven Dancer. I am ready to die for them. No—

—I am ready to live for them.

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