Power of the Lost

by Cebelius

  Euryale's comments stuck in his mind. 'I've seen him before ... my sister told me of him.'

  Realization dawned, and he blurted, "Thomas is why Stheno abandoned you. She left with him."

  The gorgon shook him and screamed, "Now is not the time for this!"

  They locked eyes, and he nodded once.

  "Marcus!" Terry called, his gaze never leaving Euryale's. "Tell the Kolenkos and Shy, no matter what, don't look back!"

  As Marcus began to bellow, Terry nodded. "Do what you have to. Give me the mask but, Euryale, understand. I love you. I don't want to lose you. I will watch for you, and if you fall, I'll be coming for you."

  "Stupid hero," she said. "Close your eyes."

  He did, and he felt her press the mask to his face. He accepted it, felt it blend into his flesh. Then Euryale kissed him hard, and as her snakes struck him aimlessly, their tongues flickering over his throat and face as she said, "Do not come for me, Master. I am immortal, and I am in love. No matter what happens, I will find you again. Be safe, and remember, we are here for you. All of us. Share your burdens."

  She put a foot up on the tailgate and launched herself into the sky, black wings spread. Beating the air fiercely, she ascended. Beyond her, Terry could see her sister approaching fast. She had green snakes, embossed green and gold armor, and a glittering sword held aloft as she screamed a primal challenge.

  And she's wearing a mask.

  Euryale answered with her own scream, and an arrow shattered on the other gorgon's breastplate.

  As Terry watched, he noticed that the swarm of fliers had diverted and were now dive-bombing the zone beast army. Arrows flew up from those on the ground and as the two forces closed the distance, fliers began to petrify and tumble from the sky, their stone bodies shattering on the road or embedding themselves in the turf. The slaughter had begun.

  Everywhere I go ...

  The two gorgons spun and flew in a dizzying aerial display, one slashing with her sword, the other dodging and firing arrow after arrow. Many shattered against or glanced off Stheno's armor, but some found chinks, and Euryale's naked curse represented a formidable barrier to both forces.

  The zone beasts formed up, and arrows continued to soar in waves as the fliers, with dark feathered wings and birds' feet, stooped and assaulted with sword, spear, and talon.

  A ray of scintillating red energy lanced out from the top of one of the howdahs and struck the road with a tremendous boom ahead of the wagon, but Marcus neither stopped nor slowed as he expertly handled the horses. The wagon jinked, and a sizable crater passed by on the left as Terry watched, brows furrowed.

  Prada, help me. Is there anything I can do? Some sort of magic maybe?

  'No, Husband. Your magic is not the flashy kind. You do not sling fireballs and lightning bolts. Your powers are mighty, but you need a ritual circle prepared in advance if you want to accomplish anything that would be of use here. I'm sorry, but there is nothing you can do at the moment but trust your companions. It is fortuitous that you are so highly sought after. Were it not for this unknown force from the floating mountain, we would not have already been on the move when the Twilight Zone forces appeared. They would have gated in right on top of us. That the forces sent to capture you chose to assault them instead is almost certainly due to your presence as well.'

  Frowning, his thoughts were drawn back in a different direction.

  How did they know right where we were? How?

  As he thought frantically, the answer came to him in a flash, and he dropped his pack. Spiders scattered out of his way as he plunged his hand in and willed the death seed to come to him.

  As he drew it out, the feeling of dipping his hand in static hit him, this time a thousand times worse than when he'd worn a glove. The instant the feeling engulfed him, he realized he might just have made a terrible mistake.

  Prada's voice, filled with alarm, was cut off as she cried out in his mind, 'Husband! What is—'

  Rage. Murderous intent. Killing instinct. All of it rose in Terry as he held the black seed in his hand, staring at it with narrowed eyes, teeth bared in pain. Another explosion sounded, but he barely noticed. The screams of battle were receding under the roar of wagon wheels, but even that faded into inconsequential background as Terry struggled to breathe.

  The seed was pushing every negative emotion at him. Despair, spite, malice, fear, suicidal longing. All of it. The assault was so much worse than with the Rod of the Heart, and he understood it all.

  The Rod heightened his own emotions. This was different. These feelings, these urges, belonged to someone else. If he gave in now, the seed would consume his life, sprout, and the land and everyone in it, on it, or above it for miles around would die. The seed wanted this, and it desired his power to accomplish the task for which it had been created. It showed him what would happen as it pushed all its desire for death into his head, promising him oblivion if only he would give it what it craved.

  Terry fought with everything he had. He couldn't feel his arm anymore. The static had engulfed it, and now he could see it: a distortion that wavered and sliced at him, twisting in ways physics couldn't account for as it sought to transform and consume him.

  There were no words, no accusations, only an ocean of darkness, and him alone in the middle of it with no light, and no shore to swim to.

  He swam anyway.

  In a storm of stark terror, bottomless despair, and pitiless rage, he strove. His sight went dark. His hearing filled with a high-pitched, keening wail. His body felt as though it were bathed in acid as the seed in his hand sought to dissolve him. Long past any point of return, or any hope, he fought.

  Terry did the one thing that had been given to him to do all his life: he struggled.

  Time lost meaning, the assault on his sanity seemed endless, but eventually Terry realized that he was losing. To simply resist the waves of darkness was not enough. He had to have some way to fight back, to do more than just deny this evil other that invaded him. In the agony of desperation, he could think of only one way.

  Prada had just recently given him the key to his own magic, and he began to painstakingly craft a spell, praying it would work without a circle. It assembled itself piece by piece in his mind, taken from his experiences, his memories, his fondest hopes and deepest desires. The words represented everything he wished he could be. He chanted them first in his mind, then aloud. He spoke the words with conviction, for nothing less would do. If he faltered now, he would die. If the seed took his life here, it would go on to claim everyone else. So Terry spoke from the heart. He poured everything he had, everything he was, into the words.

  "I am Terrence Mack. I bear no malice, and will suffer no evil. My will is absolute. In accord with my nature and by right of my power, I command your service!"

  The assault on his soul seemed to waver, then redouble. Heartened by what he was sure he'd felt, Terry repeated the words, pouring everything he had into them. They represented in that moment everything he wanted, and everything he loved. As he completed the third iteration of his spell, the static, the acid, the feeling of drowning in hateful emotion, all of it, shattered.

  A disembodied voice he did not recognize whispered into his mind, 'What would you have of me?'

  His sight cleared, and he saw that swirling clouds of darkness had gathered overhead. Lightning played across the disk of those clouds, and it was plain that the power of the death seed was made manifest in the skies. A significant portion of the zone beast army still pursued them, and at their head was the lone man on the black centaur. Across the distance, he could see the set expression on Thomas' face, saw the blank hollows where his eyes should be, and knew in that moment that he had to escape. The man couldn't possibly see, but his face was turned in Terry's direction, and he had his centaur running flat out. Something about him radiated threat, and the army howling behind him backed that threat with more than Terry could handle. He had to get himself — and everyone he loved — away from this
place.

  Right now.

  Oh God, what do I ask for, what do I say!?

  In his desperation, he cast about for some command that would save them. As though in answer to his prayer, words he had not spoken since childhood, once graven into his heart yet in recent years all but forgotten, returned to him. In that moment, they flared to life within his soul as though summoned by his need and seemed to fill him, blazing with fire in his mind's eye. He shouted those words with everything he had left.

  "Deliver us from evil!"

  The black walnut in Terry's hand cracked with a sound like thunder.

  A towering column of darkness erupted from the split seed, blasting the canvas off the back half of the wagon as it shot up into the swirling center of the accretion of evil above him.

  The disk of clouds seemed to bow up under the assault of the vortex of darkness hitting it from below, until it curled in upon itself, forming a mushroom of roiling shadows. An instant later, it burst apart with a sound so mighty that complete silence followed. There was no more rumble of wagon wheels. No more voices, no more screams or clash of combat.

  The forces in the distance were variously knocked down or sent tumbling through the sky by a blast wave centered directly over the wagon. Everything beyond thirty feet away was flattened. The trees in the forest were uprooted and tossed uphill. Avalanches of snow and gray stone poured down the faces of distant peaks.

  Terry sagged to his knees as the last of his strength failed. He looked up to the sky in time to see a column of fire and light drop from the center of the heavenly blast, centered on him.

  The world disappeared, annihilated in a blaze of pure white radiance.

  10

  Welcome to the Jungle

  Laina was already struggling to keep a lid on her panic when she noticed the gathering of dark clouds overhead. They raced in from the four cardinal directions to swirl together in a disc of evil black. Lightning played through it, and it lowered toward them as though it were a stalking hunter getting into range to strike.

  The minotress twisted to look behind the careening wagon, and saw that they were still pursued. Zone beasts howled and brandished gleaming weapons as they ran with supernatural speed across the rolling grasslands. Before she could see more, she felt Marcus take a grip on her horn and jerk her head around as he bellowed to be heard over the clatter of hooves and wagon wheels, "Don't look back!"

  Euryale isn't wearing her mask.

  The thought kept Laina facing forward after that, but she kept glancing at the lowering clouds. Fear clutched at her breast and she squeezed the haft of her legendary and — at the moment — completely useless weapon. She held it so tightly that her knuckles popped and her fingers ached.

  Then with a sound like a sudden gust of wind, a column of black power shot up from the back of the wagon, impacted the clouds, and blew them apart. She started to turn on pure reflex before she remembered, blinked hard as she looked up instead.

  The dark, swirling evil above them had been destroyed and its power surged outward in all directions, leveling trees in the forest to their left and flattening the grass to the right. She could even hear distant rumbles on the slopes and saw ice, snow, and rock sliding down the mountains. Then a beam of pure white light slammed into them. It looked like an inversion of the black power that had just left, and its radiance wiped out her vision.

  She heard Marcus calling to the horses, felt the wagon slow to a stop, but her sight had yet to return. The white faded into bright purple that slowly dimmed as the seconds ticked by and Laina listened for anything beyond the sound of her heart thudding in her chest. She heard the sound of an animal shriek unlike anything she'd ever heard before, and the nervous blowing of the horses as they stamped. Shapes appeared, and with them the realization that they were no longer on the road, or on any road for that matter.

  Birdsong and other, stranger sounds surrounded them now. They were in a forest, but a forest like nothing in Laina's experience. The trees were straight and tall but covered in swirls of parasitic vines that drooped from the high canopy. The air was muggy and still, and the loamy ground looked wet as though from a recent rain.

  As she slowly turned in her seat, she saw that to their left was a clearing of sorts. The forest canopy covered the space from on high so there was little direct sunlight, but there were no tree trunks in the open space. Instead, a long stone reflecting pool abutted the rise of an escarpment. Ancient stone pillars that had once been white, yet now were covered in brown stains and clumps of moss, lined the pool. Atop each stone pillar was a hulking stone statue. Each was unique, though they were similar in that each had hideous beaked faces, staring eyes, clawed limbs, and wings in various attitudes from fully spread to resting around the body like a cloak.

  How high the wall of stone rose, Laina couldn't tell. The canopy concealed the face of the cliff beyond, but even then it seemed to rise forever given the glimpses she could catch as she squinted upward.

  "Sound off!" Yuri called.

  Marcus' reply was instant. "Here."

  Shortly following it was Mila, calling out from where she still sat her horse. Shy called out, and Asturial, then Laina said, "Here."

  "My husband and I are here, but he is unconscious," Prada said, though her voice did not carry much past the front of the wagon. Laina called out on their behalf, then turned and stepped through the gap in the tarp to see what was going on.

  Boss was collapsed near the tailgate of the wagon. His eyes were shut, his jaw slack. Prada lay upon him in her usual guise as a sash. Laina straightened him, held a hand over his face, and felt his breath. As she did this, Prada said, "He is completely drained of all his magic. Were it not for me lending him my own reserves, what just happened would have killed him."

  By now the rest of the group had gathered near the back of the wagon, save for Marcus, who had dismounted and was tending the horses.

  "Did he do this?" Laina asked, glancing around.

  "As far as I can tell, yes," Prada replied. "He used the death seed, though precisely how it happened is something of a mystery. When he first touched it, I was paralyzed and it was all I could do to keep from being consumed. My tremor-sense alone cannot decipher spoken magic, and since his mind was being hidden from me I do not know how this happened. All I know is that he cast a spell, and the death seed brought us here, all but killing us both in the process."

  "What can we do for him?" Shy asked. Yuri had let down the tailgate of the wagon and Shy leaned over it to gently touch his face.

  "Let him rest," Prada replied. "As I said, his magic is entirely expended, as is a great deal of my own. I will need to feed soon. It will be ... some time before I can manifest again as a full-sized doppel."

  Laina, hearing the disappointment in Prada's voice, reached down without thinking and patted the knot of the sash around Boss' waist as she said, "Thanks for saving him, again."

  "He does seem to get himself into bad situations fairly regularly," Prada said, sounding both weary and amused. The tail of her sash lifted to stroke Laina's arm as she said, "Protecting my husband is always my first priority. Never fear, Laina. I will keep him safe for you."

  "So the only one missing is Euryale," Yuri said, glancing around. "I do not know where we are, but we do seem to have been delivered to a specific place. I suggest we find out what we can."

  Boss' eyes opened.

  He sat up and spun to put his feet over the edge of the wagon as Prada said, "I will come with you. It is best if I keep him in the center of the group for now."

  Mila said, "I did not know a blood devil could do such a thing."

  "A mere blood devil couldn't," Prada said. "It is only possible for me because my husband and I are in many ways now literally one being. Our souls are merged through the power of our marriage vow. He could do the same with my substance, if he wished. I doubt it will ever occur to him though. He is a very private man."

  "I'm not certain he would approve of this," Shy sai
d, looking uneasily at the knot of Prada's sash as she spoke, rather than at Boss' face. He shrugged as Prada said, "It is to keep him safe. If he is angry about it later, I will bear it."

  "When will he wake up?" Laina asked, following Prada — in the Boss' body — out of the back of the wagon.

  "It could be anytime, but within a day at most," Prada replied, speaking from the sash rather than using his mouth. "I will keep him from sensing anything, so that he sleeps without any disturbances. His power will regenerate on its own given time."

  "But not yours," Shy said. "You need to feed."

  Boss' eyes turned toward the dryad as Prada said, "Yes, what of it?"

  The two stared at each other, and Laina had no idea what was going on between them. Since he was her lover, Laina could see through his mask, but Prada wasn't using his face to make any expressions and it was oddly slack. Shy on the other hand, wore a small frown and seemed dissatisfied.

  The group rounded the wagon and approached the water of the reflecting pool.

  Though the pillars seemed worn, the water was clear of debris and seemed clean, despite having no apparent source.

  "There's a door at the back," Asturial said, pointing with one clawed hand.

  Looking as she bade, Laina saw a wooden door with intricate metalwork and no traces of rust or disuse. It was expertly crafted, and had a round arch at the top. The lintel and frame were of worked stone, though she had the impression that the natural stone of the cliff was growing over it somehow. The lower edge of the door was hidden beneath the water, meaning there was no way to open it without disturbing the pool. Despite this, the wood showed no traces of rot.

  "Mila."

  At Yuri's word, Laina looked at the tiger woman, who was even now holding her staff low with one hand over the emerald. She spoke in a low voice, and her words were completely alien-sounding. After a few seconds, Mila's eyes began to glow, and she looked around and said, "The gargoyles are magical, as is the pool, the door, and there are several illusions in the cliff face about thirty feet up. There is an entrance and other smaller openings, but I cannot see into them from here."