The seeping darkness came from him like way his nature came from him now -- without ceremony, without the performance of power that lesser things needed to make their power legible to the room.
It rose from his shadow first. The shadow he cast in the sourceless light -- it had no direction, which was not the shadow of anything physical, which had no business existing in a garden with no point source for light to cast from -- that shadow thickened.
It darkened and writhed as it began to move.
It lurched toward Vothanael and around him.
The darkness of something sovereign. The specific dark that lived in the deep places of the mortal world and the deeper places below it -- not the dark of absence, not the dark of simple light-loss, but the dark that had its own substance, its own weight, its own intention.
The dark that sixty-six legions moved through and turned to ashes.
