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Dark Lord Rob's DarkForce
Nathan Gets an Awful Eyeful"Wow," he said, and his jaw dropped. "What?" I said, practically jumping up and down with that peculiar sort of intellectual curiosity bred by mortal terror. "The Soul Jars," he replied. "They're glowing." I thought of pointing out the fact that they had been glowing but then I realized that they would have had to be glowing pretty damn bright for Nathan to see them from this far away from the Soul Jar Repository. And then I realized that I had corroborating evidence for this supposition: I could see the light reflecting on Nathan's face. "Let me see," I said. "Just a second," Nathan said, waving me off. "Don't Bogart the freakin' keyhole," I said, shaking his shoulder. "Oh all right," Nathan said, rolling his eyes (I have no doubt). He leaned back away from the keyhole, and I had occasion to see just exactly how bright the light emanating from the Soul Jars was; it cast a beam that streamed right through the keyhole and pierced the tunnel darkness like a laser beam. No, really, I mean it; there was, like a haze or something in the tunnel and that beam through the keyhole just caught on all of it and you could see it projected right through the gloom. "Maybe I don't want to look," I said. "Man, I think I'll burn my eye out or something!" "It's not that bright," Nathan said, though I could see his face pretty clearly, illuminated by the beam, and he seemed to be blinking quite a bit. "It's kind of liking looking at the full moon on a clear night. Bright and white, but cool; not gonna singe your retinas or anything." "Okay," I said. "I'll give it a whirl." I knelt by the keyhole and kind of eased my eye over. Nathan was right; it wasn't anything you wanted to stare at too long, but it wasn't out and out painful. I could see pretty clearly, too. And it was pretty wild. Every single Soul Jar (I assume - I couldn't see all of 'em) was glowing like it was full of megawatt fireflies. If the normal sort of glow we'd seen in those things was a 3, and the glow when we picked up "our" jars was a 6, then they were all now operating at 125. "Wow," I said, a rare moment of agreement with Nathan. "Take a look at this," Nathan said, with a unnerving calm that I didn't like the sound of at all. I lifted my eye from the keyhole. |