Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

was so much more to her, as though she existed in more than three dimensions, her physical presence radiating off in directions that even Owen’s expanded mind couldn’t follow. A memory of Hazel, plucked at random from memories that no longer meant anything to the Terror, but invested with its power.
    “Hazel,” said Owen. “It’s me. It’s Owen! I’ve found you at last.”
    She kept walking right at him, her face blank and subtly inhuman. His name meant nothing to the Terror now. It reached out with its powerful will, and tried to fix Owen in the corridor, like a bug impaled on a pin, just another ghost in the Terror’s collection. Owen fought it, and quickly discerned that even his new strength was nothing compared to this ancient implacable will. Hazel’s mouth opened, and kept on opening, gaping impossibly wide to eat him up, body and soul, just as it had swallowed planets and populations. Owen fought, concentrating on projecting his identity at the Terror, trying to force it to recognize him, and remember him.
    The impossibly vast mouth howled out the never-ending scream of the herald’s razor-edged spawn, the terrible howl that had maddened whole worlds, the horrid sound reverberating through all the stone corridors at once. It would have destroyed even Owen, if he hadn’t been able to hear the loss and horror and stubborn love at its heart, that still fuelled the Terror after all this time. It was the scream of Hazel, in her ship over Haden, when she heard of Owen’s death. That same scream, still going on after countless centuries. A howl of loss and rage, at what had been taken from her, and at herself, because she’d never told the Deathstalker she loved him.
    And because Owen knew what it was, and embraced it, the scream washed harmlessly over him. He advanced into it, and took the Hazel memory’s hands in his own. He followed the true emotions into the heart of the scream, and from there into the mad mind of the Terror, and deep within it he found the faintest glimpse of another presence, endlessly skewered on the pin of her own creation. A simple, still human presence, endlessly suffering, dreaming an endless nightmare in a sleep from which she could never awaken herself.
    The Terror tried to consume Owen, just as it had Donal Corcoran and his mad ship the Jeremiah , to absorb and subsume Owen’s mind into its own much greater self, but Owen was too sure of his own identity for that, and there was no madness within him to invite the Terror in. But at the same time, he wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. His power still had limits, because he was still sane. Owen and the Terror struggled together, and neither of them knew for how long, before Owen finally realized that the Terror was quite ready to destroy itself, to be sure of destroying him. And he couldn’t allow that.
    So he gave in. He stopped fighting, and allowed the Terror to pull him in. It felt like dying, and yet something more. The Terror absorbed Owen Deathstalker into itself, and his mind headed immediately for the remnants of Hazel d’Ark he’d sensed at the Terror’s core. They came together, and the impact of his presence shocked Hazel awake and sane, for the first time in centuries.
    Hello, Hazel.
    Owen? My God, Owen! They told me you were dead!
    I was, but I got over it. I had to come back, for you.
    For me?
    Not all of space, nor all of time, could keep me from you, Hazel d’Ark.
    You always were a smooth-talking bastard. Oh, Owen, I’ve missed you so much . . .
    I know. I know.
    And two minds held each other, as tightly as any two bodies that ever were. Two souls, as close as two souls could ever be.
    Why did you take so long to find me, Owen?
    I was looking in all the wrong places. And you didn’t exactly make yourself easy to find.
    Where is this, Owen? Where are we now? Are we both dead?
    No. We still have a lot to do yet.
    He held her tightly to him, while Hazel accessed his memories of the Terror, and all that it had done. Horror shuddered through her, at what she and her madness had made possible. Owen showed her the future he had come from, and Hazel reached out and stopped the Terror’s herald in its tracks, well short of its next chosen prey, frozen in a moment of space. Now that she was back, Hazel was in charge again, and the people on the threatened world looked on in awe and wonder as the deadly herald hung in space, apparently dead. Hazel was shocked and appalled at all the lives and